Exciting times! Not only does today mark the first Presidential election debate in the US, its just a week away from the launch into early access of our political strategy game Democracy 4.

If you want to try your hand at implementing Universal Basic Income, or maybe you want to ban teaching evolution in schools, perhaps build a border wall, or legalize heroin, or go crazy with the money printer with some helicopter money or quantitative easing... these are all options available to you in Democracy 4.

Currently the game features the USA, UK, Germany and France, and we expect to add Canada before Early Access starts, with a list of other countries coming after that as we continue to work on the game in response to player feedback.
Here is the official trailer:

https://youtu.be/kuJGiYC4cyg

I also just added a new steam guide that explains how people can create mods for the game, which we support through steam workshop:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2242250360

...and we will add a steam guide for basic gameplay soon too (although this is also built in to the game just by hitting F1...). I'm also doing developer videos on youtube every other week to go over whats been added to the game where you can see how it plays, and you will already find some youtube lets play videos of early builds of the game.


If you are thinking of getting the game (its $26.99 BTW), then please add to your wishlist now and help us get more visibility on the store :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710

Great news fellow citizens! The latest installment in the geeky-but-popular political strategy game 'Democracy' series is coming to steam very soon, in a US election year no less. Just imagine how calm and peaceful our forums will be :D

Its been 7, yes SEVEN years since the release of Democracy 3, and global politics has changed a lot. Democracy 4 takes the series into the modern age with new features like coalition governments, media reports, Quantitative Easing & Helicopter money, Fake news and Social Media. Here is the trailer:

https://youtu.be/kuJGiYC4cyg

Democracy 4 will be released soon on steam, so please check out the store page and add it to your wishlist to keep up to date with developments. We will be coming to early access, so will have plenty of opportunity to get feedback from players on how to best balance the game, and what cool new policies to add.

Before you start typing, YES, Universal Basic Income is a policy in the game :D And yes, we are modelling cryptocurrencies too :D

As well as updating what the game covers, D4 has a revamped user-interface using slick vector graphics to dynamically resize the main screen icons based on a number of factors, and allow for infinite modding potential. We also have a palletized color system so you can play in dark mode (and soon...colorblind modes).
Without a doubt D4 is the very best version of the game, and we are very excited to share it with steam players soon.

By the way, most of the features and policies from all the Democracy 3 expansions are rolled into Democracy 4 base game, so we have all the electioneering features, and policies from extremism (plus some new policies that go further, like border walls), social engineering and clones & drones.

Plus there are some new screens and visualisations that are completely new for this game, like the voter distribution screens and the disposable income breakdown.

Anyway... we are very excited about releasing this game, and if you are interested in playing, go ahead and bash that wishlist button :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1410710/Democracy_4/?beta=0

Hi there! We are releasing our second expansion to Production Line: Car Factory simulation on the 23rd October! This expansion is a cosmetic-only change to double (yes DOUBLE) the variety of car design styles in the game! You can now pick from 2 different looks for every car design in the base game (Sedan,SUV,Sports,Compact,Offroad,Pickup & Small van).

Mini trailer showing the new designs:
https://youtu.be/LkRcorWhNcc

Here is the store page so you can add the DLC to your wishlist :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174730/Production_Line__Design_Variety_Pack/

Plus if you have not checked out the game for a while, please do as we have released a whole bunch of updates over the last few months that massively improve the playability, performance and stability of the game, mostly in response to player feedback, which has been excellent.
Oh and if you enjoy the game but have not got around to reviewing it, leaving a positive review is REALLY appreciated :D

Oh and if you bought the game way, way back when it first entered early access...you will not be aware that we already released one expansion for the game, which added both a supercar design and the silly doors on the cars of millionaires and billionaires, appropriately titled 'doors that go like this', which you will find here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067630/Doors_that_go_like_this/

How can you run a sprawling car factory without gull wing doors? :D

BTW we keep this forum thread up to date to tell people what changes we make to the game, so you can see if an idea you have for the game is already being worked on:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/591370/discussions/0/1290690926863304299/

Thanks for all your support. production Line has over 100,000 happy steam players and that makes us very very proud (and pays for food for 3, yes THREE cats). :D
🚗🚗🚗🚗🚗🚗

Hi, we have finally updated the windows build of the game to include an assorted bunch of fixes, optimizations and improvements related to the Unicode translation of the game which we undertook to allow support for Chinese and Russian languages.

As far as we know, this should fix all issues regarding startup crashes or missing / corrupted text.

We are now working on implementing those same fixes into the linux and OSX builds of the game.

Sorry this has taken so long, Unicode is hell...

For anyone who still prefers the build before we changed the text engine, there is a 'classic' beta still on steam, with no passwords. Just right click the games name or icon in steam, select properties, then the betas tab, then the drop down box for the betas.

Hi, we know some users have problems with the game not starting, and others (often with low spec laptops) cannot see text. We just uploaded a patch to the windows version today which should fix these issues. As usual, please let us know (with as much detail about the problem and your setup) if the issues are not fixed.
Thankyou for your patience, its really hard for us to track down stuff like this because we cannot reproduce it on any of our machines.

Hi, as I'm sure some of you know already, we recently released an update to the game to support Unicode text, allowing us to support some new languages such as Russian and Chinese. As a result of the new code, some players experienced problems with text rendering and fonts, making the game unplayable. We are deeply sorry for this.

We set up the original (pre-Unicode) build under a beta called 'classic' which you can still access, but obviously this was no help to those of you who bought the game in the new languages such as Russian, Portuguese or Chinese.

We have now (we are 95% sure) fixed this issue for everyone and uploaded a new build today which should work on all PCs, all languages. if you have in the past switched to the 'classic' beta, you might want to leave that now and re-join the main build of the game.

Hue apologies to everyone who was inconvenienced by this. This has been a code nightmare, but hopefully its fixed now and allows much wider language support. We would really appreciate it if people could let us know either here, the forums or directly at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk, if this new build fixes font problems for you. The new build is 1.32 and you can see the build at the top right of the main menu screen.

Thanks for your patience! we are a very small team and had not encountered this issue before (most developers never deal with Unicode support but we wanted to support Chinese and Russian players).

Hi everyone! We just updated the windows build of the game so that its now the new unicode build, which means it supports a lot more languages. The new language list is...

• English
  
• German
  
• Spanish
  
• French
  
• Italian
  
• Polish
  
• Portuguese
  
• Russian
  
• Chinese

Soon we will have the Linux & OSX versions translated over, at which point we will simplify everything into one build, and you wont have to care what language steam is set to. Please note we do not *yet* have French translations for the DLC, but everything else is in every language!

MAKE SURE you have the language pack for windows installed for the language you want to use, as the system uses the system fonts, and if they are not installed you wont see anything!

Hi all. As we did last year, we are commemorating remembrance day (veterans day in the US) and donating 100% of the developer revenue from this game to War Child for the next week.
Democracy 3 is currently 20% off during the sale, and all our revenue goes to help children who have been affected by war. You read more about the work this charity does here:

https://www.warchildarmistice.org/

This is cross-posted from our website dev blog at:
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2017/09/18/the-democracy-3-unicode-post-oh-yes/

Right then…here goes…

A while ago, we decided that what we really needed to do was translate our biggest selling game (Democracy 3) into Chinese and Russian, and also probably some other languages too. This probably sounds easy but its not, because Chinese and Russian and other fancy languages use non-ASCII characters, so we had to translate the games engine to use unicode instead of ASCII. In theory this is easy, in practice not, especially because there are a LOT of Chinese characters, and you cant just whack em all in a phat bitmap like you do with western characters. This means a lot of assing-around which was all done by jeff from stargazy studios (of Democracy 3 Africa fame) who is my able assistant in such matters.

Anyway, the ups and downs of this process are enough to write a major opera over, but suffice it to say, we think its actually done now. As a test, we are dipping our toe in the water by releasing just now (OMG!) a new beta build of Democracy 3 on steam. (Windows only, steam only right now). If you right click the games icon/name and select betas there is a no-password beta to opt in to this version. This version will only be served to you if your steam language is set to English (we will be changing this…), but it now gives you the ability to change language in the game and select from:

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.

You can do this under the options screen in a new drop down box. You can then enjoy wonderful screens like this:

And this:

Which excite me more than they should.

In practice what this means is we will be able to simultaneously support a bunch of new languages AND get rid of the silliness of separate builds for German French and Polish (WTF were we thinking…?). It also means we have some cool new rendering etch built into the engine which we have secret plans for…

ANYWAY… If you are an English speaker who also happens to be fluent in one or more (or even none!) of the above languages, and have Democracy 3 on steam, and feel like opting in to the beta and giving it a spin, we would really like to know what you think. Ideally you cannot tell ANY DIFFERENCE to how the game used to be (although perhaps the text is crisper). All we are really worried about is if it just fails or bugs-out on certain video cards. Any feedback is welcome!

Its so shocking that I’m posting about Democracy 3 again isn’t it? Next thing you know I’ll be telling you we have a release date for shadowhand :D