I've actually considered this for a mod, but didn't implement it in the end because there were certain things that can't be modded.
Generally speaking, the biggest problem with such a slider is that war is the central focus of DH, and if one end of the slider is optimized for war while the other is optimized for peace, everyone will be moving the slider in the same direction.
In my opinion, what we need is a peace/war economy slider where war economy is
good in the short run, but bad in the long run. One solution I came up with involved IC costing money, and costing more money in a war economy, while simultaneously money from CG is drastically lowered to the point that it's absolutely impossible to sustain any kind of mass production over a long time. As a result, players would need to stockpile money in peace and then try and win wars as quickly as possible. You can also add some minor annoyances such as worse relations on top of that.
Another option would be to solve it without a policy slider, and have the CG production slider be the peace/war economy slider. For this it would first be necessary to remove the wartime CG demand modifier and add a flat dissent malus. The function for dissent reduction in DH has a bend at the neutral slider position, so if you allocate less then you will drastically get dissent while if you allocate more the reduction will be much smaller in comparison. (This can also be reversed, but that only leads to exploits.) What we'd have to change is that this bend needs to be to the left of the optimal slider position, for example like this:
- +1.0 dissent at 0% CG allocation
- +0.7 dissent at 10% CG allocation
- +0.4 dissent at 20% CG allocation (bend)
- +0.3 dissent at 30% CG allocation
- +0.2 dissent at 40% CG allocation
- +0.1 dissent at 50% CG allocation
- 0.0 dissent at 60% CG allocation (neutral)
- -0.1 dissent at 70% CG allocation
- -0.2 dissent at 80% CG allocation
- -0.3 dissent at 90% CG allocation
- -0.4 dissent at 100% CG allocation
This way, you would typically have around 60% CG allocation, but in times of need you might lower it as low as 20%, and after the war you would then need to invest in CG for a while to get rid of dissent.
However, it might be difficult to get the AI to make proper use of this system. It's also not a good approximation of Keynesianism which is what the US war machine was mostly based on. In the US, the government massively increased military spending in WW2 and this led to full employment which actually
lowered dissent.
The most realistic system would be a combination of both: The CG production slider works as shown above, while the peace/war economy policy slider essentially governs military spending. The combination of both sliders would then determine available IC, cost for IC, and dissent, and the player could in times of need increase output at the cost of either money or dissent. In fact it might be a better idea to swap the sliders around since military spending can be quickly adjusted while the conversion of non-military industries takes much longer and would be better represented by a policy slider.
Since this is the suggestions/improvements forum, here's a list of stuff required to make such a system possible, some of which I've already suggested elsewhere.
- Money required for IC moddable in misc.txt and policy_effects.csv.
- Flat dissent rate moddable in misc.txt and policy_effects.csv.
- Wartime CG demand moddable in misc.txt and policy_effects.csv.
- Min and max CG allocation moddable in policy_effects.csv.
The option to have negative money (and pay interest) might also be nice for this. Costing dissent maybe, or something else that is bad.
