Changelog
Experimental UI optimizations
Graphical improvements
2025: Political changes, culture trait changes, religion changes
2025 Changes
I have been slowly changing the 2025 start date to be more in line with reality. The pre existing date had many issues which primarily came from the fact that it was ported with few changes from 2092 and that I was busy working on interstellar when I was making it. I also didn't think anyone really cared about the 2025 scenario since I almost never play it myself.
Political Changes
NATO
NATO is more uniformly blue/purple/teal, with the US remaining unchanged (Republic/Liberal/Interventionist) and many US allies being moved more in line with their leader. The exception to the rule here is France, which I liked as a potential NATO renegade and so left them more purple-ish.
EAST ASIA
China is unchanged, but some of its neighbors have had their reforms altered to make them more erratic.
AFRICA
Africa, with the exception of communist countries like Eritrea and a few others, are uniformly agrarian oligarchies, autocracies, or faulty republics with neutral or restricted civil liberties. This should hopefully make the Green ideology stronger.
LATIN AMERICA
South America has been made more divided between socialist aligned bureaucratic republics like Brazil/Colombia (recent election hasn't happened yet) and NATO-aligned countries like Argentina. My intention here is that China will have inroads for expansion into Latin America while NATO will need to play defensively here.
Mexico's cartel countries have been replaced by a cartel situation, which also applies to other countries that have drug trafficking issues like Colombia and Venezuela. You can either embrace the drug trade for easy money or crack down on it for a big eventual reward.
MIDDLE EAST
Most of the middle east is unchanged, with some reforms slightly altered for the sake of creating some potential conflict between the Islamic countries there.
EUROPE
Europe's religion/culture traits were not supposed to be the same as their 2092 variants but I forgot to change them. They have been altered to their current values.
Population Changes
All countries' populations have been made to within 5% tolerance accurately represent their real life values.
SOURCES
Population: World Bank 2024
Religion: Pew Research
Political Alignent/Government Form
This was more complex as different sources disagreed with each other on various points. As I understand it, the "Better 2025" mod used primarily the freedomhouse.org source for "Freedom in the World" to determine political alignment, however I found some of the ratings a bit suspect, so I have included 3 sources, one with a known right-bias and one with a known left-bias in order to balance it out:
Ideally, at least 2 of these sources will agree with each other, and I implemented the results of that (with my own spin on things for the purposes of balance and fun)
ORGANIZATIONS
I did not add any more organizations because they are annoying enough in the existing 2025 scenario. When I get around to adding organizations that don't function like military alliances (i.e, they don't call all their allies into war with them), there will be more but for now I kept it to NATO, Belt and Road, and CSTO.
TECHNOLOGY
I did not modify technology levels either. This is because I would like the colonization gameplay to begin immediately, however unrealistic that may appear to be. In reality, since this game is fast paced anyway, it would either happen too soon or too late, and the AI would be so far behind on colony tech due to randomized research choices that it is functionally much better to encourage AI colonization by giving the world's most advanced space powers the ability to do it from the get-go.
Ultimately, fun is more important than realism. Realism is only good insofar as it enables fun, not otherwise.