Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
It's interesting that despite us making fun of Paradox map nerds for frequently being nazis, we don't have that much Paradox (admittedly, we (as in Hexbear) like Victoria 3) in this thread.
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism, but more egregiously both games fail to represent the causes of the war except maybe as flavour text in some events. The economic foundation of Fascism being the same as settler colonialism (which Capitalism is partly rooted in) is entirely unaddressed. It is very addressed in Victoria 3, which still has some brainworms (especially to do with the "social" tab of the tech tree).
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default and enforce it mechanically (often public transport is a mid-late game upgrade from your previous car owning suburbanites).
Rimworld has random raids that don't seem to be at all related to what you're doing. Its just assumed there are vicious tribes out there in this virgin-but-extremely-arable land that send randos to you. Its very much the most naive form of "settler experience" (i.e. what USAmerican kids are taught about Settlers). Its a shame because I like a lot of the mechanics, layout, and modability.
Tropico has a lot of weird little ones, some of them deliberately funny and some of them just insulting, but that's kinda the nature of the game. I kinda wish there was a slightly less toony more free-form Tropico but whatever. Unfortunately, Workers and Resources often feels like work.
Rimworld really not beating the Gamer gate allegations lmao
My partner looked over my shoulder while i was playing rimworld and asked “are they called ‘colonists’?”
Yes
Rimworld fumbles at something better with the pollution mechanic, where other societies get mad for you destroying the land.
Unfortunately in typical rimworld fashion the game heavily incentivised dumping all your pollution on native tribes via drop pods who retaliate by walking at machinegun emplacements so uh mixed execution.
Yeah, I'd prefer something like that. Local negotiations etc. Maybe someone's made a mod for something like that, but everytime I think about rimworld modding it eventually winds up being a whole new game.
HOI4 doesn't have the triangle, instead measuring country alignment based off of whichever party has the largest share of the "ideology pie chart", but it does keep the democracy/fascist/communist definitions. It also says that Democracies can't declare wars unless certain restrictions are met to represent "public anti-war intersts", but Fascists and Communists can declare whatever wars they want. This is of course ignoring that, IIRC, the USSR didn't actually declare any offensive wars during the period.
This is a funny one because there's an anecdote out there somewhere of Will Wright working on Sim City 1 (or maybe even Sim Town?) and designing it around cars but not being able to figure out parking lots because they'd just wreck the city. The "solution" they came up with was to just not have parking. Genius!
If my car disappeared when I wasn't using it... In workers and resources I wind up having a few cars here and there, but my parking lots are tiny and infrequent. In Tropico I just forget about them until the Capitalists ask for them.
I think a lot of brainworms in HoI4 comes in the little niche fascist nation mechanics, which I avoid playing so I'm not familiar with them. It does wind up sorta justifying Stalin's "paranoia" though by having a Trotskyist (I think) rebellion if you don't engage with it. I think conceptually I prefer HoI3's more fluid mechanics (rather than HoI4's event based ones), but they are less accessible and do come with a lot of assumptions about ideology and production baked in.
HOI4 literally added a "Stalin's Paranoia-ometer" in one of the most recent DLCs lol.
Yeah, and it justifies the paranoia because if you don't, trotskyists show up
I never thought about rimworld like that
It's come up a few times before. There's a bunch of assumptions baked in. That said, I've found it more accessible than dwarf fortress just from an interface perspective.
it's a colony simulator, u can assume