How do I deal with an disloyal cabinet?

I got hooked on Democracy 3 today and have developed a quite successful country during my short reign, but for some reason my ministers seem to be working against me.

Lately their loyalty seems to drop rapidly whatever I do. This is in turn limiting my political capital and prevents me from pushing through some major changes in the country.

So I regularly have to fire some of them and replace them with loyal candidates, but this is not a viable long-term solution. It seems to me that the firing of ministers leads to a drop in the loyalty of all the others, which keeps me stuck in a vicious circle.

I could of course fire them all, but I don't think I have enough good candidates and I would lose all of their experience.

• Does firing a minister really lead to lower loyalty with the others?
• What can I do to raise the loyalty of my existing ministers? (or at least keep it from falling)
• What happens when you shuffle the whole cabinet?

Solution 1:

If you fire the other ministers one by one, it does indeed lead to the loyalty of those you replace falling. This is why you use the "Reorganize cabinet" mechanic, which fires all of them simultaneously and causes a much smaller drop in loyalty. Then you can replace them all and reinstate the ones that are appropriate. You also need to be willing to put ministers with very low xp but very high loyalty into positions when they have good sympathies for your current ideals.

Solution 2:

I had a look at data\simulation\scripts, where you can find the files fire_minister.txt, minister_resigns.txt and reshuffle.txt with contents

CreateGrudge(Minister Sacked,fire_minister,_All_,-0.07,0.75);
CreateGrudge(Ministerial Resignation,minister_resigns,_All_,-0.10,0.7);
CreateGrudge(Reshuffle,reshuffle,_All_,-0.07,0.75);

respectively. The first number indicates the drop in loyalty directly after the event, the second one is multiplied to this drop every turn in order to decrease the drop down towards zero (I hope there is some cutoff, otherwise regularly firing ministers sums up to some small but non-negligibly grudge forever, plus the calculations will take more and more time...). So,

• each fired minister reduces the others' loyalty by the same amount a reshuffle would reduce in total. Thus, as Lawton answered, you're much better off not firing the ministers individually
• a minister resigning on their own is even worse. Note however, recovery is slightly faster there, and in fact after six turns has overtaken the grudge held from firing, though by then is already only about -.012 anyway.