Earlier this month Cliff Harris of Positech, creator of the Democracy series of politics simulators, wrote a blog post about porting Democracy 3 to Unicode. And now, with that final change made to the previous game five years after its release, it's apparently time to announce Democracy 4.
According to the Positech website work has already started on it: "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." Jeff Sheen, designer of the standalone Democracy 3: Africa, is lead designer and lead programmer on the new game while series creator Harris will be producer and "will help with design & testing".
Features from Democracy 3: Africa as well as the Extremism, Social Engineering, Clones & Drones and Electioneering expansions will be rolled over into Democracy 4. They also say, "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."
Democracy 4 will be available in 2019, though Positech "expect to offer an early-access / playable alpha version" before the final release.
