Policy toggles

Owns a catalog of policies, each with an active flag or a choice among mutually exclusive options in a group, prerequisites, an enactment cost (money, political capital, influence, or time), upkeep, and a cooldown. Enacting a policy applies modifiers or changes rules: it unlocks an action, alters a rate, or changes how agents behave, with a stated benefit and a stated cost. Frostpunk (2018) has a Book of Laws in which similar laws are sequenced so later ones are harsher, and accepting early compromises makes later ones likelier. Victoria 3 groups laws into mutually exclusive sets and, since update 1.3, requires each law to pass three enactment phases whose success chances depend on interest-group support, with up to three setbacks before failure. SimCity 2000 introduced city ordinances, and Civilization civics and Cities: Skylines district policies are other forms.

Choosing which tradeoff to live with. The player browses a menu of laws, weighs their benefits against costs and side effects, and commits. In Frostpunk each signature feels like a moral line crossed; in grand strategy, passing a law is a political campaign.

• number of policies and how many can be active at once (slots, groups, budget)
• enactment cost, delay, and cooldown
• size and visibility of side effects
• reversibility: free to revoke, costly, or permanent
• prerequisites and sequencing (escalating law chains)

• Policies with no real downside become always-on, leaving a menu of mandatory picks.
• Too many small modifiers make each choice unnoticeable.
• Free revocation lets players toggle policies around events, undermining the tradeoff.

• Escalating law chains pull players toward harsher policies one reasonable step at a time.
• Policies that change agent behavior ripple into economic and social systems in ways their tooltips do not state.
• Mutually exclusive groups create identity: a society defined by its chosen laws.

• Could players draft bespoke policies in language and have an LLM translate them into balanced, consistent rule changes?
• Which explanations of second-order policy effects keep surprises interesting rather than unfair?