Fate of the World

[CeeKay]

be a tree hugging hippy or destroy the world in this upcoming pc card game.  The people working on the game have an interesting pedigree, this is not the type of game I'd expect from them.

[Zekester]

looks interesting

[MaxSteele]

While it does look like a fascinating game, I'm not sure I want to play a card game that is single player only.....

[CeeKay]

LOL. when I saw Red Redemption I instinctively put 'Dead' in between 

[CeeKay]

this is due out next Tuesday.

[Huw the Poo]

This is on sale at the moment so, inevitably, I bought it.  The recent positive review by Alec Meer (of RPS) on Eurogamer tipped me over the edge.

After having played only the first four-turn introductory mission my intial impressions are pretty positive.  Calling it a card game does it a disservice; the cards are just a way of allocating resources, or more accurately taking actions that affect the regions you have influence in.  At the start of each five-year turn you hire agents in your regions.  Each agent allows you to play one card, and they all (agents and cards) cost money.  Some cards remain in play until cancelled, others are one-shot.  An example of a one-shot card is one that unlocks cards further up its respective tree - cards are split into five or so decks.  Cards that remain in play do things like placing emphasis on commerce or industry in that region.

Each mission has win and lose conditions.  The win condition for the first is to get some population happiness index above 0.7 in Northern Africa and Southern Africa, and to lose you have to fail to do this within four turns.  Certain cards have a direct affect on the index, but each turn stuff happens in your regions that will require your attention and force you to spend resources dealing with it.  Ignore a civil uprising, for example, and the region descends into chaos and war, and your popularity there plummets.  Lose too much influence in a region and you will be banned from taking any further action there and will lose funding, thus impacting your ability to continue your work elsewhere.

So basically, as far as I've seen, the whole game becomes a balancing act.  You can't just go around playing all the "good" cards (not that there are many cards that do wholly good stuff with no side-effects) because you'll run out of cash or won't be able to deal with crises that will inevitably lead to a loss of popularity.  From an educational point of view, Fate of the World seems to be designed at least partially to demonstrate the difficulty that real-life nations face in balancing environmental concern with more immediate concerns such as famine, drought, war etc.

It's a very interesting little game, more fun than I'd expected it to be and I'm looking forward to playing the next mission.  Oh, and later on you apparently get to play missions that involve destroying the world in fun ways.

[Huw the Poo]

A little more info; here's how a couple of turns play out.

Starting the second mission which "unlocks" the whole world rather than just the two regions from the first mission, your first priority is to recruit agents for each region.  You need at least one agent in a region to read its reports, and depending on how involved you want to be, there are plenty of charts and things for you to pore over as well as an extensive in-game wiki.  After recruiting your agents and noting any hotspots, it's time to start dealing cards.  For each deck in each region you need to play the top card in order to unlock the rest of the deck.  For example, if you want to be able to start welfare programs and influence which sectors a region's population focuses on, you need to play the top-level card, "regional welfare office."  These cards take five years - one turn - to complete, and from there on you will be able to play the rest of the cards in the deck.

So the first turn of a game is spent recruiting agents and unlocking those decks.  You don't begin with a great deal of money - enough to hire at least one agent for each region and play a few cards - but as the turns tick by and the funding comes rolling in you get a lot more cash to play with.  After the first turn is over and the news reports start coming in, you can start focusing your attention on the regions that need it most.  Before you start a new turn you're advised of the global change in emissions and temperature followed by any regional crises and whether your support has increased or decreased in any regions.

Starting a new turn you can look at individual news reports for regions, which are broken down by category and will handily show you at a glance why your support is increasing or decreasing.  For example, an item coloured red (for bad, obviously) will mention severe storms in the region, with a darkened heart in the corner showing that the region is blaming you for not taking pre-emptive action against freak weather.  Or maybe you played a card in the previous turn to improve health in the region; in the next turn you will get a green news item mentioning health is improving in the region, accompanied by a bright heart in the corner showing that your action led to increased support for your office.

As I said last night, it becomes a balancing act.  You just can't afford to recruit loads of agents and play loads of cards in every region, so the trick is to achieve the winning conditions without losing too much support - and therefore funding - and in most scenarios without letting the world melt or something.  It's fun but it's very involved; there are something like nine or ten regions and going through all of their reports and taking appropriate actions each turn, along with always trying to achieve your long-term goals, is very time-consuming.  It's not really a game you can play for half an hour at a time.

At the current sale price I think it's a steal.

[CeeKay]

I think the sale ends today.

anywyas, picked this up and only played through the first mission so far.  it's not bad, but it seems like unless you click on random buttons you won't get the full idea of what you can do.  ym first time out I didn't even realize there were separate buttons that brought up different cards, so I lost ym first game by running out of time (whcih I didn't realize I only had so many turns to get stuff done, I must have clicked through that info box).

my main draw was the bad guy mission, which is currently locked out.

[Blackadar]

I almost bought this last night.  It sounds really interesting, even though "card games" aren't my forte.  It actually sounds a little bit like a somewhat modern version of Balance of Power, which I loved playing back in the 80s - really digging into the data, making your best guesses and then watching to see whether the world ends. 

And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.

Good times.

But between getting CM11 and War in the East lately, I don't have time to learn another deep game.  I figure I'll wait until it's polished and catch it on the next sale.

[Huw the Poo]

CeeKay if you just click through tutorials as fast as you can and not read anything, you're not going to get anywhere with games like this.  Noob!

Blackadar, if it helps the game takes about ten minutes to learn how to play...but yeah, it's very deep and learning how to play it well does take a while from what I've seen.

[Blackadar]

CeeKay if you just click through tutorials as fast as you can and not read anything, you're not going to get anywhere with games like this.  Noob!

Blackadar, if it helps the game takes about ten minutes to learn how to play...but yeah, it's very deep and learning how to play it well does take a while from what I've seen.

Was my impression correct...kind of like a new version of BoP?  That is, if you're old enough to have played that...which wouldn't be an insult if you weren't, since that game came out in '85. 

[Huw the Poo]

I never played it mate.  However it does remind me of Armageddon Man (a.k.a. Global Commander), did you play that?  Awesome game.

[CeeKay]

saw this on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/901776/

Fate of the World: Tipping Point

Revised, rebalanced and expanded, Tipping Point is Fate of the World as it's meant to be played.

well why the fuck didn't they release this version in the first place? 

[baelthazar]

saw this on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/901776/

Fate of the World: Tipping Point

Revised, rebalanced and expanded, Tipping Point is Fate of the World as it's meant to be played.

well why the fuck didn't they release this version in the first place? 

It appears they understand the liberal ideology on climate change but also the conservative ideology of profit.