Evaluation of my first 3 and a half hours

[medic911]

picked up the game at my only local purveyor of consumer electronic goods (walmart) and got to playing yesterday. (screw work, there will be other days to edit that documentary!)

decided i'd have a little homegrown fun while learning the controls and chose Arizona s my nation.

i spent a little money on a few hydro plants, farms, coal mines, and timber things to become self sufficient or a larger exporter of those items, and at first it didnt seem to be paying off, but eventually something my economic advisor mustve done fixed it (plus when my coal mines opened up all the free coal the un had been providing for free i could now sell and i started making some money off that too.

my problem was i could never figure out if i was making more than i was loosing. i kept bouncing between -9mil and 199mil in treasury.

also, getting the ai to accept a fair trade (by monetary value) was something i did not accomplish once when it came to natural resources. (i only had one the whole game, and it was selling military tech to a sieged South Korea.)

diplomatically California was an eager ally, but after that few people wanted to touch my country in diplomatic deals further than passage and free trade agreements.

my domestic approval dropped like a rock to about 11% but climbed back to 25 by the near end of 2020, during the wars with mexico and alberta.

so far things with the game a good, i just need to better learn military controls (despite aggressive ROE and full suply my units seem to not want to fight outside my borders)

also, i cant seem to find any place within my borders to produce consumer goods or military goods, and seeing as those things are not natural resources (like uranium or oil, two other things arizona cant make, but for good reason) i cant fathom why that is the case, why cant i build facilities to produce those goods? (correction, i can build them, but the production capacity on every space of my land for those goods are zero, its its expense without income and i didnt build them.)

other than those few things, i seem to have figured out most of the other normal day to day gameplay things in the three hours. (took an hour just looking at the map, there's lots of stuff on it! too bad my hometown wasnt included (stupid Glendale ate my home! oh well, at least we still have the cardinals in 2020!))

well thanks battlegoat for making such a cool game, and thanks all y'all for steering me into buying it!

[Opthalamia]

"also, i cant seem to find any place within my borders to produce consumer goods or military goods, and seeing as those things are not natural resources (like uranium or oil, two other things arizona cant make, but for good reason) i cant fathom why that is the case, why cant i build facilities to produce those goods? (correction, i can build them, but the production capacity on every space of my land for those goods are zero, its its expense without income and i didnt build them.)"

You can build them anywhere. The best place have a high supplylevel.

[Legend]

raw materials, the first 7 industries have filters that turn on if you need resources... the other ones do not turn on if you don't need to worry about terrain. I see that "bio fuels" as a sub set of petroleum can be built anywhere. electricity generation by hydro dams require certain areas to build. I'll take a look at this and maybe come up with a way to represent this to the player. none of the finished good required a certain raw material.

Maybe an icon in the list when building could show that even if we don't put a filter on the map that you can build anywhere. I'll think about it and mark it down for a future title.