China: Mao’s legacy
I would definitely recommend this game probably the best Kremlin Games has out insofar as the whole political dynamics are concerned (you are able to fully shape your country' s policies and the factions are much more ‘real’). The economy however could have been dealt with better and have a proper blend between it and Ostaglie (placing individual buildings alongside the investment).
Alike Ostaglie, relations with individual western European Countries are generalised as NATO and it would be better to not have done it in this way so we can see how the worldwide socialist movement is doing at the time, which in turn, could affect individual countries rather than having it all generalised as ‘NATO’. This would have been much better as China often had more interaction with Western Europe (with the initial funding of left-wing guerrilla groups then to investments) as the WPO did (which mainly tilted towards its own bloc, which China interreacted less with whereas the game sometimes focuses too much on Chinese-Soviet or Chinese-Middle Eastern Relations, whilst relevant it mises opportunities with Western Europe) as well as making the international playing field (which takes up a large bulk of the game) more active, especially seeing how the Years of Lead, the Spanish Transition, the German RAF and the French Maoists pan out with China still being a beacon of Maoism. Or it could show how China has been integrating more with the west and encouraging the growth of the EEC or NATO (if not becoming a member then associating maybe if you take a hard anti-Soviet line).
– Real player with 131.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Indie Games.
I write this as a gamer who has played Kremlingames previous simulations, Crisis in the Kremlin, and Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall. As such, I can’t write this from the perspective of a person who will be exposed to this type of gameplay and Kremlingames' unique idiosyncrasies for the first time. I can only write subjectively from the viewpoint of someone who has played both games already.
First impression: it uses the same map as Ostalgie, with some haphazard modification to add Malaysia, Indonesia, Rhodesia, and the USA to the nations you can interact with. It’s better than the huge scrolling map of Crisis in the Kremlin, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. Go with what works.
– Real player with 76.8 hrs in game
SuperPower 2 Steam Edition
The Year is 2015.
I am the new Prince of Monaco.
Little do they know that I am a semi-GOD who has the gift of Immortality.
From day one I start my rule by granting all rights like Poligamy, Same Sex Marriage and Legalising Drugs; soon, hedonistic parties and drug filled orgies would be a common thing to find in the streets of Larvotto and in the high-rises of Fontvieille.
I banned all the heretic foreign languages and forced everyone to speak the divine Monegasque.
But it wasn’t enough, I needed to expand my faith despite having only 30000 loyal servants to my cause.
– Real player with 935.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Politics Games.
This game is fun. HOWEVER it’s got issues that become hard to ignore the more you play. Especailly if you know anything about developmental economics.
1. The vanilla game doesn’t handle population very well. The population of any country will continue to grow untill the game crashes. Some mods (Human develoment for example) try to address this issue but end up with the opposite problem where countries will decrease in population untill their economy breaks down and they fall into anarchy. There’s basically nothing you can do to prevent either of these fates.
– Real player with 866.8 hrs in game
Fate of the World: Tipping Point
Written on May 16th, 2019
This has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I’ve played it on and off, and since it’s turn based sometimes I can even play it while working on projects. You take control of the GEO and do your best to fix the world from an impending environmental disaster. It has so many factors that it’s insane to juggle them all, but that’s what makes the game fun. It’s one of those games where it’s good to watch guides or read a guide to get the most out of it, and if you’re okay with that you’ll have a great time. You can still mess around with it yourself and see what works, but there are many little sub factors to the game that have to be just ‘tried out’ sometimes. We don’t all have the time for that so guides are a godsend here.
– Real player with 260.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Indie Games.
Fate of the World is a one-of-a-kind educational game that asks the question: what would you do if you were an immortal, all-powerful dictator whose primary mission is to stop global warming?
Your resources are limited. Do you focus on reducing emissions as quickly as possible, or do you start by building infrastructure to adapt the world for a changing climate? Which technologies will you invest in? Do you horde the world’s resources for the developed world, or do you impose extra taxes on the developed world while investing heavily in education, infrastructure, and medicine for the developing world? The game even allows you to consider the darkest of options to deal with overpopulation, such as poisoning people to make them infertile, or introducing a man-made virus to kill off the population directly. It’s not a one-dimensional game – there are a number of different strategies and technologies you can apply to win.
– Real player with 78.4 hrs in game
Fate of the World
Written on May 16th, 2019
This has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. I’ve played it on and off, and since it’s turn based sometimes I can even play it while working on projects. You take control of the GEO and do your best to fix the world from an impending environmental disaster. It has so many factors that it’s insane to juggle them all, but that’s what makes the game fun. It’s one of those games where it’s good to watch guides or read a guide to get the most out of it, and if you’re okay with that you’ll have a great time. You can still mess around with it yourself and see what works, but there are many little sub factors to the game that have to be just ‘tried out’ sometimes. We don’t all have the time for that so guides are a godsend here.
– Real player with 260.5 hrs in game
Fate of the World is a one-of-a-kind educational game that asks the question: what would you do if you were an immortal, all-powerful dictator whose primary mission is to stop global warming?
Your resources are limited. Do you focus on reducing emissions as quickly as possible, or do you start by building infrastructure to adapt the world for a changing climate? Which technologies will you invest in? Do you horde the world’s resources for the developed world, or do you impose extra taxes on the developed world while investing heavily in education, infrastructure, and medicine for the developing world? The game even allows you to consider the darkest of options to deal with overpopulation, such as poisoning people to make them infertile, or introducing a man-made virus to kill off the population directly. It’s not a one-dimensional game – there are a number of different strategies and technologies you can apply to win.
– Real player with 78.4 hrs in game
Supreme Ruler 2020 Gold
I know it says I’ve played 250+ hours of this game, and I’ve certainly played quite a few, but probably half of that is letting the game run on its own while I was asleep, or having fallen asleep playing it.
The concept behind the game is really great, and I wish it had been implemented in a way that made it fun to play, but it wasn’t.
I did play the original (SR2010) and it is certainly an improvement over that version - less buggy, better controls. But the core problems with the franchise remain.
– Real player with 827.1 hrs in game
Absolute gold, one of a kind game that was arguably the peak of what Supreme Ruler or any strategy games to date ought to be. If you want a more arcady experience or more historical titles buy the Ultimate edition and play the 2020 or Global Crisis scenario instead. But for me, there’s just something about this cruder original version of the game that is lost on the new ones.
Key changes between this and Ultimate:
Positive
-World Markets make sense, prices go from 10-1000% the baseline and are independent of your production cost. And trade MUST happen between players, resources do not materialize out of the blue.
– Real player with 680.9 hrs in game
Crisis in the Kremlin
Well I’m a Chinese and it’s my first time to write a comment on steam, so if I say something wrong or something you don’t like please forgive me.
For me I want to recommend you to use Romanov or Gromyko. Actually all 4 characters in 1985 have chance to win including Gorbachev, yesterday I play as him and it’s not impossible to save the country but use him will have two problems. One is reformer look like too strong to resist in the CPSU, other one is you cannot extract resources in Africa because you need to make conservative and Stalinism majority to open the mutual-aid in foreign policy part, but you can’t legalize Stalinism when you play as Gorbachev. For Grishin, a conservative, well I think is no problem to use him but I’m Deng supporter. And maybe it’s not a good news that Gromyko died in 1988 though he is really, really good man. So personally I choose Romanov. Year 1985 or 1986 is a better choice because you can change the country more easier.
– Real player with 266.2 hrs in game
It’s incredible really for a game to be so vague in how the mechanics work, so rough in design, so lacking in proper translation (seriously, the translation is a real problem here), and yet, I’d still definitely recommend it to any modern history buff or, of course, any aspiring Red with a taste for revisionism, and what Red doesn’t like a bit of Revisionism? I know I do.
Graphics: Nothing too much to mention here, they’re largely functional, and while many of the event pictures are nice Soviet posters or photographs, beyond that it’s very much just a text adventure with a red border. Not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, but don’t expect a 3D sprite of Yeltsin to go stumbling across the top of the screen in his signature drunken fashion. (Hm, suddenly I feel a real sense of loss)
– Real player with 264.5 hrs in game
Power & Revolution
I wanted to and tried to like this game and I found much to like. Firstly it is probably my favourite genre (modern geo-politics) and there is alot unique and cool about it. That said there is just too many things that are either tedious, too ill-explained (even with the GodsNspy addon) or just don’t work like they should either by design or not. Lastly there are some things that just should be available to everyone and not as DLC. The modding tool paid DLC is inadequete considering it cost money. Furthermore, given the inept explanitions of game mechanics, the GodNspy addon should also be part of the package, aswell as offer more information.
– Real player with 243.6 hrs in game
This is a very difficult game to evaluate. First - it’s very deep and complex. They aren’t kidding when they say “Geo-Political Simulator”. It goes much deeper into politics and economic simulation than even paradox games. This game will only be of interest to you if you’re interested in politics, and know at least a little bit about macroeconomics. This isn’t Tropico, Democracy or Hearts of Iron. All of those games are great, but they simply don’t compare to this by sheer depth.
This game doesn’t pussy-foot around, it treats you like an adult. There are hundreds of different laws and taxes you can change, thosuands of characters you can interact with, and enough graphs to satisfy even the stingiest statistics professor. You can play as any nation in the world (besides a handful of micronations like the Vatican), as opposition political parties, or even as an illegal groupр, such as the Kurds in Syria or the rebels in Donbass (although the meat of the game is when you play as a head of state). Your actions affect not just your popularity and budget, but also many macroeconomic factors. Factors such as inflation, unemployment and crime are all inter-related, and you’ll often times find yourself trying to reach a happy compromise. There really isn’t any other game like this. This is due to the fact that Eversim is a company that creates simulation games for intl' organizations and their mindset is very clear with even their consumer-level products, such as P&R.
– Real player with 167.8 hrs in game
Arms Race - TCWE
Arms Race - The Cold War Era is pretty promising with the way game mechanics work and the AI is good. The recommended strategy in the guide section doesn’t work reliably for me and I ended up using a different strategy. The AI is also pretty good at adapting to what you are doing. The limited 3 budget changes ends up meaning every decision has long term implications.
Most games turn out slightly differently due to the AI choosing different tactics and the randomness of global crisis events.
The game isn’t as full fleshed as say Hearts of Iron but I feel like the mechanics are well thought out and the AI provides a challenge even on easy. It does a good job of abtracting the cold war and reducing decisions to the macro level (‘meaningful decisions’) compared to HoI3/4 which features considerable micromanagement. I personally prefer macro level games (less micromanagement) but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer to play M&T in EU4 vs base EU4 or if you prefer to play Darkest Hour/HoI2 vs HoI4 then this is the game for you.
– Real player with 17.2 hrs in game
This is a fun little game which plays a complete run in about 2-3 hours.
It runs through the whole of the cold war and includes extensive historical detail and research - history geerks will enjoy looking through the tech trees and space race just reading some of the interesting commentary.
The game itself is primarily about resource allocation - the resources being influence (generated by diplomats) spies, and military. These three resources allow you to control the board through a variety of diplomatic coups and military intervention.
– Real player with 14.9 hrs in game
Rulers of Nations
I actually DO recommend this game. I’ve been playing since 2010. It’s enormous fun, especially if you’re into politics. Sadly it also plays so very badly on anything that isn’t a good gaming PC - even though it’s now five years old. In a nutshell, the company that made this game had a fantastic idea but apparently outsourced the coding to a team of below-average intelligence monkeys. It is a MASSIVE drain on resources despite being an almost completely menu-based game; many of the bugs people report aren’t bugs at all, but serious memory problems that hit lower-end machines. I have a brand new gaming PC that runs this thing like a charm - it can get through a term (4 -5 years) of gameplay in an hour, rarely crashes and handles reasonably smoothly. My older PC, which was good at the time this was released, takes an hour to get through one year, crashes completely at random (anywhere from 12 times in 20 minutes to once in 2 hours) due to memory problems and is unbearably laggy. Furthermore, the game is still incredibly buggy - EverSim opted to release new editions of the game rather than seriously fix old ones, with each new installment being more messed up than the last.
– Real player with 323.0 hrs in game
Too difficult to play even for veteren geo-political players like me. Too easy to be overthrown, unweilding political systems and unrealistic amounts of protests and resistance to changes in government policy. It made great efforts schedule meetings and convince politicans and cilivans to supoort you publically. This severally cripples the fun and potential reform of countries, making it totally unenjoyable. And to add realism to the weekly events of a nation’s leader and well as great systems of government policy avaiablilty, (ie taxes, media, power of parliaments, condemning or avocating for people/organizations, etc).
– Real player with 180.7 hrs in game
Sim Junta
This is a very fun and easy to play game, but is very difficult to win. Previous reviews have explained what this game is about, so I will try to share some things I have found out the hard way. Please note that all my suggestions are for Normal Level.
New Game:
After creating a new game check Army Chief and Police Chief Ambition. If it is too high better start another game and don’t waste your time. Is already hard enough as it is to avoid a revolution from the various parties, the Guerillas or the Prisoners. The most common way to get overthrown and lost this game is if your Police or Army Chief betray you and try to seize the power.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
This game is great for the bargin I’ve gotten it for! It’s a game set during the Cold War in which you are “Mr.President”, the current military president of Risuena, a backwater, third-world country. This game is sorta like if Tropico had an orgy with Papers, Please, add a dash of Haiti, and this would be it’s love child. It’s also somewhat like that game Dictator on the ZX Spectrum (look it up, it’s an old school game).
Anyways, this game is a management economy game without building shit and instead just passing out edicts and stuff. What you then do is balence the economy by raising taxes and creating bills to pass, however, don’t think that you can just fuck around and not get away with it (believe me, it happened to me a couple times). If you do decide to diddlydick around, the different factions will try to plot against you by either trying to form a revolution or to try to kill your ass.
– Real player with 8.1 hrs in game