I agree with Masada. And this conversation brings us to another aspect of game rules.
Policies
Policies in the December World are essentially modifiers applied to nations after all of their Regional Influence is calculated and added into a single pool. When accepted, each policy will provide at least some positive modifiers to one or more resource types (in percentage to annual income), but at the cost of a negative modifier to some other resource.
Policies are created to never be simplistically bad (i.e., they never provide ONLY negative modifiers). Any policy may have some use in-game, although I’m sure players will find some policies that are much less useful than others.
Policies also have a Reform Cost in each resource. It indicates just how much you’d have to pay to introduce or remove that particular policy (so, removal and introduction of Serfdom, for example, cost the same). Reform Cost is also calculated as a percentage of the nation’s annual income, so the bigger you are, the more you pay. It also means that a player is unlikely to be able to reform many aspects of their state at the same time. Even revolutionary regimes in our history usually had to go through several years of transitional period, rebuilding the state in accordance with their ideology.
Mobilization
Are there policies without any Reform Cost? Why, yes there are. However, you will not be able to initiate them at your whim. I’m talking about Military and Economic Mobilization. They get automatically activated when your country goes at war or enters a period of extreme internal instability. In fact, you’re never directly in charge of when to mobilize. Is it realistic? Yes and no. No, because, of course, in real life country leadership can mobilize at any point, given a reasonable excuse. Yes, because the length of an in-game turn is going to be long enough to make prolonged mobilization sustainable and justified only if the nation is actually dealing with a prolonged crisis of significant urgency. So, let’s just agree to that rule as an in-game formality and try to roll with it.
In the stats, you’ll see that there’s more than one stage of Military and Economic Mobilization. It is designed to reflect how a nation gradually spends its first accumulated potential and burns through its economic and demographic reserves, suffering from war weariness and depopulation. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t be declaring wars left and right just in order to benefit from those sweet bonuses Mobilizations provide.
After the war (or a similar conflict) is over, your Mobilization bonuses will disappear right away, but war weariness will remain, tracked by me on the background and not impacting your resource production. War weariness will help me determine what happens if you again go to war too early. Chances are, you won’t start with the juicy bonuses of the first stage of Mobilization, but instead will get hit by the third stage (that models how exhausted nations may be hit by strings of badly timed conflicts). Gradually, war weariness will roll back and disappear completely.
Debt
To reform a policy, a player may choose to spread the reform over a few years. In that case, I’ll be re-calculating the reform progress every turn (so, if your income grows significantly during the reform, so will your total reform amount). In some cases, a single-turn reform is going to be nigh impossible, due to how much it would cost you, so prepare to be patient and pick and choose the changes that you want to make. But what if you want to speed up your reforms? In that case, you can borrow/trade resources from other nations, or convert them at fixed rate (not the most optimal, but always available choice). But what if that’s not enough? Then you should consider debt.
Right now, I’m not talking about the debt to another player - this will be handled as a personal issues between you two. Instead, I'd like to talk about debt to your own country.
If you spend/lose more than a combination of your annual income and the amount of resources you’ve banked/converted/received from trade, you’re considered going into the debt in that resource. At first, this will manifest itself in some in-game events, but gradually it will cause elimination of some units and rollback of some technologies. In completely desperate situations, a revolution, collapse of central authority, or a similar event may occur, depending on a resource. I’ll determine it based on a situation.
For now, I’m not calculating any interest on debt. Just reminding everyone that in-game resources are abstractions, so I’m limited by how much math I can do per turn. Hopefully, the mechanisms I already gave you will give you a lot of strategic decisions to make already. Have fun!
