Positech Games has revealed that development has started on the latest iteration of the political strategy game, Democracy 4.

Democracy 3 was released in 2013 and...quite a lot has happened in global politics since then, which we hope to reflect in the new version. We are still very early in the development of the game, so are not ready to show anything yet, but here are the answers to some expected questions:

• Lead programmer and Lead Designer on Democracy 4 will be Jeff Sheen from Stargazy Studios, who also designed Democracy 3:Africa and worked on the Unicode port of Democracy 3 recently to allow support for Russian & Chinese translations. Cliff will help with design & testing and will be producer.
• The game will be completely updated to reflect modern issues, so no more worrying about the 'V' chip and other long forgotten issues, and more worrying about fake-news, social media, and other social phenomena driving politics in 2018 onwards.
• We expect to offer an early-access / playable alpha version to players before the games final release. Target platforms are PC, OSX and Linux.
• The plan is to roll content from the existing 4 expansion packs (Extremism, Social Engineering, Clones & Drones and Electioneering) into Democracy 4 where appropriate and relevant to provide a single version of the game.

Democracy 4 is scheduled for some time in 2019.