I think this game could host a great deal more gameplay and player engagement if its gameplay were integrated with a toolkit for inventing and adjusting the effects of policies. I think that could be a very distinctive mode of gameplay offering unusually heavy mod-tool integration, and it would be like another layer of player-directed input on the neural network. People could be encouraged to tune their own neural network in the causal representation space presented by the game.

I know a lot of people would "just cheat" if given that tool, so clearly marking it as "mod tools mode" (and disabling achievements while its in use) might be best for user-experience reasons. If people still do it and are less happy for "cheating", that's a self-inflicted crime and only so much should be done to save people from it.

I think many players given that tool (a mod tools gameplay mode) would invent and publish very different assertions about the relative impacts of policies. They would also fill in the blanks between policies with the that they long to see. The game's potential to promote crowdsourced insight would increase with the proliferation of its workshop, and that would happen with great transparency with the affection of a player-base enjoying the process.

Gamification of the game's modding process is a potential for this game. Integrating the mod tools with the gameplay would really distinguish Democracy 4 from the previous incarnations in the series! It would be a new gameplay feature built naturally upon the strengths of the brand, and it would populate the workshop with a lot of... really bad mods, admittedly! Yet there'd be more of the really good ones, too. Imagine if someone used the mod tools to steadily rework every policy in the game, until they'd converted the entire setting of the game; want to see a political simulator in an urban fantasy setting? That's a mod more likely to happen if the mod creation process is made into its own kind of fun.