Dev Diary #46 - Political Parties

[neondt]

Do party names change at all in-game (i.e. will the Whigs ever become the Liberal Party)? Can we rename parties?

Also, can we influence IGs to switch party?

It's possible for parties to change their names throughout the game, if the conditions for enabling a different name are met.

You'll have some degree of influence over this - we plan on exposing exactly why each IG has chosen their party, so you'll know what you need to do to get them to leave.

Ok but I do have a question, what happens when a particular issue has split support among a party in government. Let's take your example of The Liberal Party with both the Intelligentsia and the Industrialists whom are divergent on the issue of child labour. If you begin to pass a law outlawing child labour, what happens to the party? Does it split?

Your laws will be more likely to stall or be debated rather than advance when you reach an enactment checkpoint. Conflict within the government over the currently enacting law makes it a lot harder to pass that law.

I'm quite surprised there's no Labour Party on the list, since the birth of labour movements was rather a big deal in the period. Or is labour lumped in with one of the others, so if there's a strong enough labour IG it'll effectively take over one of the political parties and make that the de-facto Labour Party?

Labour parties are essentially Social Democratic parties. I believe that some countries will use "Labour Party" as their dynamic name for the Social Democratic Party.

How moddable is all of this?

Extremely. You can define new political parties, change the attraction and repulsion factors, add or change dynamic names, etc. You can mod every aspect of the party system.

So if the Conservative Party receives a majority of votes in a UK general election, can I, as the player, ignore the result of the election and put a Liberal-Anarchist-Social Democratic government in power?

You absolutely can, but your government will not likely be very legitimate!

Will the government of an AI country affect its AI ambitions? I hope so, since a Fascist France ought to be more prone to conquer e.g. Belgium compared to if ti's agrarian

AI countries are strongly influenced by the IG's they have in power.