its great, i like all their games but this is def the most cohesive and polished
relatively, ofc, theyre all janky>>43412>>43410its a game in the model of old PC geo/politics games. like Balance of Power, Hidden Agenda, and yeah the original Crisis in the Kremlin lol. i know theres a lot of younger people posting on here but you dont need to be so dismissive of it. its like saying Risk looks like shit because it doesnt look like WH40k. just because it doesnt have all the bells & whistles youre used to doesnt mean its bad, a lot of fun stuff has been sidelined & lost by constantly being "streamlined" out or trying to make bigger and bigger games when a smaller scope has its own benefits
>>43433part of that is almost definitely that the various indicators & moving parts the game has under the hood are getting tied up in a way that isnt supposed to happen. but if you havent played these devs games before, the cause/effect of decisions and budgets is meant to be opaque, its part of the simulation aspect of being a manager of a complex system that doesnt provide instant or intuitive feedback. some of that is just jank but in this case it works well into the theme.
some tips tho:
–"forgery" is about lying on quotas, cooking the books, etc, and the game will actually show you the wrong numbers with a higher margin of error if your forgery is too high
–corruption is one of the main drains on your budget, and its a huge balancing act because to get to the point where you can reliably eliminate corruption, you need to juggle corruption across at least a few categories to get the economy and state machinery stable and flexible enough
not sure if its the case in this game, but in their previous games if you increased the budget in any category more than a couple degrees at once it would always increase corruption, e.g. if you dump 50 million into education all at once youll get a chunk of corruption to simulate a bureaucrat seeing all that money and thinking surely they wont miss if i divert some of this…–in this game, civic participation seems to be a double edged metric. im not sure what exactly the benefits are, but i think when things are going well it acts as a passive buff to many different metrics, and when things are going poorly it acts as a passive malus to many different metrics
–politician traits, skills, loyalty, power, & (if applicable) office are all tied into the various metrics & multipliers. some of those are transparent & the UI will tell you, but many of the persistent and stacking ones are hidden. not entirely sure how faction influence works but i believe that the efficacy of all those character traits may be weighted around faction influence. either that, or it just more directly effects the overall influence of all characters of that faction
–CHECK THE ACTIVE SITUATIONS. go to the "decisions" panel and see the various active effects listed, for example "Empty Shelves" under "special". those are dynamic effects that various decisions/budgeting/production/policies actively effect. Empty Shelves, e.g., is a major malus that will actively get worse and cripple your entire economy if you dont find a more efficient way to allocate goods thru either market reforms or some combination of cybernetic planning and/or elaborate combinations of production policies. that or you can just do draconian restrictions that stop people from leaving their local factory/grocery store and taking good from other ones, but thats the kind of scotch tape & elmers glue solution that leads to a house of cards thatll blow over as soon as some careerist conspires to oust your maximally thrifty director of production
–make sure youre researching new tech, gradually increasing industrial sliders, & making trade deals whenever you can afford it. be careful with recklessly getting involved in foreign policy, its easy to go "oh neat i can try to undermine frances government" and then forget youre pouring a ton of resources into that
these devs games are more like puzzleboxes than most other PC strategy games around, you want to go in with a plan & commit to it, BUT at the same time be cautious and roll out your plan slowly by way of careful tweaking