Okay, I found the "90s slowdown" effect. For me, it's solved by unifying Soviet bloc economy, it gives 2x money from trade compared to previous level, but the decision is locked behind 250 price Brezhnev policy. Also, decreasing 40 hours week to 48 is pretty good, but you need to offset it by something like UBIncome.
Attachment to factories gives a decision to force +5% income and +3 powers monthly at the cost of healthcare for a year and 100 political power. Lowest level immigration policy gives a decision to import workforce, where you can choose either +3 powers +competitiveness and something else, OR -3 corruption and -3 forgery monthly, or quick fix to radical opposition -3 monthly. These two decisions can save your run easily
Filling Aral sea with Russian rivers gives NOTHING. Very sad, you just get a malus forever, no transformation of nature ot make the land green, no decision to dig channel to the Caspian sea to connect Siberia to the Soviet navigable river network, no nothing. Very ahistorical realization of the 1948 idea!
And early game forgery + corruption solution is Soviet democracy law (opposite of personal dictatorship). It flatly gives 3 and 3 reduction to both
I have no fucking clue how to speed up the wars, though. Iran war is just stuck at 87% in favor of Iran, and that's it. Afghanistan has miraculously ended in 1991, despite me putting every decision on
Oh, and also, for the next run, I'll try to move breznev policy up once to unify SEZ for maximum profits, then two policies down by 1989 (or what was it when you can sign friendship treaty?) to befriend China and drag them into SEZ by the ear. And then hopefully force them to switch sides in all wars
And also France. Man, diplomacy in this game is stupid because it's event driven
>>43453First game had disaster tied to ecology level, IIRC. In this one, it's probably either money getting put into research (160 accoridng to the guide) or modernizing reactors through science? In any case, reactor science is pretty great for speeding up other research