Store Page
Democracy 4
All Discussions Screenshots Artwork Broadcasts Videos Workshop News Guides Reviews

Democracy 4

Store Page
Democracy 4 > Guides > Kattenelvis's Guides
46 ratings
How to break the game and win every time
By Kattenelvis
I discovered this exploit in democracy 3 and I'm surprised that not only does it remain, it got even more powerful.

In the setup menu, select 200% difficulty and max out debt. This will make the game easier I promise.

Once you've started the game:
Step 1: Get rid of income tax. All it does is piss off middle class people and that ain't good.

Step 2: Get rid of Corporate tax, Inheritence tax, Sales tax and other non-sin taxes. The goal is to almost only borrow.

Step 3: Spend spend spend. Get rid of problems and spend all you want on any policy you want, as long as you have the political capital to do so. Make sure the policies you implement are sound, just don't care about the cost.

Step 4: Trigger the Debt Crisis, followed by Emergency Powers problem. These are actually GOOD. The negatives that the debt crisis gives you can be very easily suppressed with the right policies. The negative feelings middle income people have for it is actually less than for income tax, so it more than evens out.

Step 5: Win the election. The game becomes super easy after this, as the extra political power given by the emergency powers will grant you alot of political capital.
2
3
   
Award
Favorite
Favorited
Unfavorite
Created by
Kattenelvis
Offline
Category: Secrets, Walkthroughs
Languages: English
Posted
31 Dec, 2020 @ 6:51am
8,243 Unique Visitors
44 Current Favorites
Guide Index
Overview
The exploit 
Comments
The exploit
25 Comments
< >
EntropicChaos 14 Nov, 2024 @ 5:03pm 
The mods arnt even realistic where are all the messed up options, not even the site that should not be names have any, well they did but dont, something about "finding god"
EntropicChaos 14 Nov, 2024 @ 5:02pm 
its a redacted single player game why do you even care.
Matrix30815 1 Jan, 2024 @ 9:28am 
I agree, the devs didn't care about the bias and put that in game. It shows a lot by how its played and exploits like this. Where the game has no concept o inflation or debt it just make Joe Biden's economy all that more real. TDS is in the comments.
Kraevin Moorblud 1 May, 2023 @ 8:46am 
You have found the truth of the American Political system. You can do a Donald trump, make the country worse off long term and make your supporters happy to win. If your goal is to win the game yeah you. If your goal is to build a strong and robust country well you lost.
captain dashell 25 Mar, 2023 @ 5:09am 
I followed this guide and i got assassinated before the first elections
Kattenelvis  [author] 24 Jul, 2022 @ 3:05pm 
Very interesting analysis @imaginewugs. The main reason that population or GDP or really any of the "blue bubbles" should't grow exponentially is because the simulation would rapidly end up with exponential graphs spiraling up rapidly as they all affect eachother. Right now, the bubbles are computed at every turn by multiplying by a number between 0 and 1 which prevents exponential growth. So I think the second option you proposed is much better. Could be a good idea to ask the developer if they could implement it.
ClutchMuffin 20 Jul, 2022 @ 5:47pm 
Yup this game has no concept of inflation or debt problems.
imaginewugs 15 Jul, 2022 @ 10:25am 
Continued:
If all this is true, the only true fix to the exploit you've found would be to either make population and GDP grow exponentially like debt does, or make debt not grow exponentially and instead approach a constant fraction of your GDP based off your interest rate and deficit to GDP ratio (to replicate how debt-to-GDP should approach a constant ratio without actually having to program in exponential population and GDP growth). Without that fix, there's always going to be an unavoidable choice between "The debt crisis is unavoidable and crippling" and "The debt crisis is unavoidable and exploitable because it's not crippling enough".

... if all of the above is true, anyways. Is there any way to get in contact with the developers (Positech Games) and ask them if this is true?
imaginewugs 15 Jul, 2022 @ 10:25am 
Continued:
In past games, this crippled you and seemed unavoidable, so the developer nerfed the effects of the debt crisis into the ground as a quick-fix. But that was too big a nerf, now you can completely ignore the effects of overwhelming debt by taking out even more debt to spend even more money on more policies. But the developer probably isn't going to change things back (make having a debt crisis actually hurt) because people complained about the unavoidable debt crisis for a reason, it was dragging down their enjoyment of the game.

(Continued in next comment)
imaginewugs 15 Jul, 2022 @ 10:24am 
After thinking about this for a bit, I think I've finally figured it out. It all has to do with the fact that in every game in this series (as far as I can tell), your nation's population is fixed and GDP per capita is also limited to a certain bound (base value +/- effects from policies). There's no automatic growth year on year even though that's what occurs in reality. But debt meanwhile *does* exponentially grow via accumulating interest. That means GDP can't grow past a certain point (fixed population, and you eventually run out of GDP per capita increasing policies), while debt can grow to infinity. Eventually, you always run into a debt crisis as the debt-to-GDP ratio grows without bound.

(Continued in next comment)