Debt in Trump's World

[lorddrakenwode]

I recently started SRUltimate, and found to my surprise there were a couple new starting points added surrounding the rise of Trump. I immediately set about investigating them, of course.

Now, it must be understood that it has always been one of my pet fantasies to try to see if I could unbury the United States from its current massive debt burden, and how quickly, without going through the process of modding the game files. For this reason, I was most excited - Surely, Trump's America would be saddled with $20 trillion in debt standing between him and Making America Great Again, right?

But, of course, a surface investigation suggests that the debt levels seem to have been simply copied from the 2020 start conditions.

I must ask, is this a case of the developers tacitly admitting that the Obama administration has placed the United States under such a crippling debt load that it would not be feasible for the country to function within game parameters? Was it simply expediency? I think that less likely, considering it would not seem TOO tall a task to copy-paste updated debt figures from the CIA World Factbook, or some other such source.

Or was it the fact that the bond system has been so mangled as to be essentially unusable, and the retention of the old numbers a statement of understanding that, in the absence of a functioning debt interface, any effort in this area is wasted effort? If so, is there any hope that the debt interface may be rendered usable in the future?

[way2co0l]

I think the reality is that they're just a super small development team at the moment, and they have projects in the works that are higher priority. They only have so many things they can get to in any specific amount of time, and so have to prioritize what is most important to work on first, and what can get pushed down the list and maybe gotten to eventually. It's unfortunate, but understandable.

[lorddrakenwode]

I get the small dev team, and I do greatly appreciate their efforts, but it's tremendously disappointing when they had such a functional debt system in SR2020, and now it's completely broken. New engine, adaptation issues, I get it, and there are other interface problems that I'm sure have been hashed out in the past, but still, at least the changes to the numbers seem simple enough.

[GIJoe597]

I am curious, what do you think is broken with bonds? They work fine as far as I can tell.

[lorddrakenwode]

Well, perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but how does one choose to repay a bond?

[GIJoe597]

I click on the "repay bond" icon in the Finance Tab, Cabinet window. It does not appear until you have enough money to repay one, just select/click on the bond.

[way2co0l]

I can confirm that repaying bonds works just fine. To expand on GIJoes answer, you have to first click on the actual bond amount you want to repay first. Maybe obvious, but just throwing it out there just in case.

[lorddrakenwode]

Ha! You're right! It works now! My fault for not checking it thoroughly enough before posting. Excellent, and I take it back about the brokenness of the debt system.

However, that further perplexes me about why the global debt numbers weren't updated. This seems an almost trivially simple edit to make.

[Balthagor]

But, of course, a surface investigation suggests that the debt levels seem to have been simply copied from the 2020 start conditions...

...This seems an almost trivially simple edit to make.

There are hundreds of small data points that in themselves trivial to make, but added together they take a lot of time to update. And with such a small team on a short deadline, all the trivial stuff gets skipped. Only the critical elements get addressed. If the sales of the game justify it we can always do additional development later.

To the debt levels, if you'd like to start a Google Documents shared spreadsheet with a list of the countries and what you fill in projected 2020 debt levels for the Trump scenario, I'm willing to take a look at them. Consider though, it is very possible that currently they all use the exact same files, not just the same values. That is often done so that when an error is found, it can be fixed once for all campaigns. This would mean we'd need to have updated values usable for all 2020 era maps. That though might be a better choice anyway.

[lorddrakenwode]

Having made a foray into the modding portion of the forums, I think I'll try my hand at editing my own files first. The most recent readily available data on government debt around the world seems to be from 2014, and I consider simply lifting those figures as-is to be at least an improvement. I may try projecting the numbers forward once I have a proof of concept.