As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
[Fate of the World] The outlook is anything but good
Demiurge
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Do you like disease, crippling famine and natural disasters? Economic crisis, oil depletion and mass deforestation? Well then this is the game for you! This is a game about averting disasters and instituting reforms in order to save our planet. Is oil about to run out? Ban conventional oil and watch the world reel while it reapplies itself to gas and nuclear and know you averted a humanitarian crisis by freeing up that oil to fuel the worlds agriculture.
Fate of the World uses a card based system, wherein you place agents in a region to unlock card slots you can then use to deploy your policies. There are five classes of cards you can play.
Projects: Ambitious and expensive, these seek to completely change the outlook of a region. From committing to renewable energy, fighting deforestation or a campaign to convince people to go vegetarian, these all have a huge impact.
Science: This tree allows you to import advanced technologies into a region or begin research into fields of energy generation, materials and more. They also allow you to deploy high tech projects such as aerosol deployment to cool the planet, but at what cost?
Enviromental: This handles such things as water conservation, flood and drought defences and agriculture subsidies. Allows you to fund GM crops to a region or subsidize industries.
Energy: This tree allows you to ban or increase the share of an energy sector in a region. From turning China's energy sector coal free or increasing the use of biofuels, this is an important policy section to curb emissions.
Society and welfare: Education and health. This allows you to increase the power of an economic sector such as agriculture, industry or commerce. It also lets you fund public health programs or run a green campaign to change a regions outlook.
Political: This lets you fund security apparatus in a region to increase stability, or you can deploy BlackOps and control a population through fear, covert sterilization or disinformation campaigns.
Gameplay:
Basicly you deploy your policy cards in an efficient manner and try to stave off disaster in the way you feel best. You have to keep a close eye on each regions resources and potential as well as sickness, unemployment and human development index. If you fail to curb emissions by 2060 you will see sea levels rise as the polar caps disappear. But are aerosol deployments to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight just another way of destroying the enviroment?
The first scenario: Rise of Africa.
This is a short scenario running over 5 turns. Key areas are public health and education.
Welcome to my tutorial, this is my introduction to the game and it covers the first scenario in the game.
Our goal is simple, raise the HDI for north and south africa. This is easier than it looks but the game gives us the proper tools. In this scenario we only have control of africa, in the others you will have control of the whole world!
Africa has many problems.
North Africa
South Africa
As we can see both north and south africa have huge problems with sickness and unemployment. Their biggest industries are also agriculture and north africa has problems with water stress that will have to be adressed. First though, we'll have to solve the issue of stability as both are unstable and the north has a high millitancy rate.
First we're going to deploy our agents.
Next we'll deploy two offices in north africa.
In south africa I have placed a regional welfare office. This is all we can afford for turn 1.
Turn 2: News tell of storms in south africa and peaceful protests as well as health issues. Conversly in the north our agents were harassed by protesters.
In the north I have begun a public health scheme, funded security measures and created an enviromental office to tackle the growing water crisis. The south has also gained the health scheme and a job sharing initiative to bring unemployment down.
Turn 3: In the south the health program is underway, the job sharing initiative was a resounding success and has brought unemployment down to just 0.4% this initiative has now been brought to the north. We are now increasing the amount of policies we can enact.
Turn 4: With unemployment eliminated in north africa, water stress has increased to 44% due to the increased agricultural output despite the water conservation efforts. In response we are trying to further enchance the water infrastructure in the north.
In the south, droughts have hit and so we are creating drought and flood defences in both regions on top of our other policies.
Turn 5: Things are steadily improving in both regions, stability is up, literacy is up, unemployment has been eliminated and sickness is going down. Because of the increasing impact that agriculture is having we are switching both regions to organic farming and subsidising biochar which absorbs CO2 and increases farm yields to offset organic farming. We have also begun conservation efforts.
And thats it for this scenario. In this case I actually lost, the HDI for noth africa was .03 short the target and I suspect this is becaues I started the public health program a turn later. At any rate, we vastly improved both regions.
North Africa:
South Africa:
Our goal is simple, raise the HDI for north and south africa. This is easier than it looks but the game gives us the proper tools. In this scenario we only have control of africa, in the others you will have control of the whole world!
Africa has many problems.
North Africa
South Africa
As we can see both north and south africa have huge problems with sickness and unemployment. Their biggest industries are also agriculture and north africa has problems with water stress that will have to be adressed. First though, we'll have to solve the issue of stability as both are unstable and the north has a high millitancy rate.
First we're going to deploy our agents.
Next we'll deploy two offices in north africa.
In south africa I have placed a regional welfare office. This is all we can afford for turn 1.
Turn 2: News tell of storms in south africa and peaceful protests as well as health issues. Conversly in the north our agents were harassed by protesters.
In the north I have begun a public health scheme, funded security measures and created an enviromental office to tackle the growing water crisis. The south has also gained the health scheme and a job sharing initiative to bring unemployment down.
Turn 3: In the south the health program is underway, the job sharing initiative was a resounding success and has brought unemployment down to just 0.4% this initiative has now been brought to the north. We are now increasing the amount of policies we can enact.
Turn 4: With unemployment eliminated in north africa, water stress has increased to 44% due to the increased agricultural output despite the water conservation efforts. In response we are trying to further enchance the water infrastructure in the north.
In the south, droughts have hit and so we are creating drought and flood defences in both regions on top of our other policies.
Turn 5: Things are steadily improving in both regions, stability is up, literacy is up, unemployment has been eliminated and sickness is going down. Because of the increasing impact that agriculture is having we are switching both regions to organic farming and subsidising biochar which absorbs CO2 and increases farm yields to offset organic farming. We have also begun conservation efforts.
And thats it for this scenario. In this case I actually lost, the HDI for noth africa was .03 short the target and I suspect this is becaues I started the public health program a turn later. At any rate, we vastly improved both regions.
North Africa:
South Africa:
Where to get the game:
This game is available on Steam for 10$ and is well worth the price. Its already given me hours of fun even if it took several tries to beat the first two scenarios.
Demiurge on
0
Posts
My board games -->http://www.boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/cpugeek13
My BGG wishlist --> http://www.boardgamegeek.com/wishlist/cpugeek13
Whats really killing me late game though is india, I'm seriously considering going deep black ops and deploying the beta plague to kill off 60% of the population there and avoid world famine that way. China is also a must for the CSS deployment, it reduces emissions by 80% over 50 years.
My main issue at the moment is stability, I have a hard time juggling it but I may just have to go restrictive everywhere, funding increased police when they're stable because thats cheaper in the long run. But once oil peaks agriculture starts tanking because they don't get fuel and then the economic crisis hits and Japan starves to death.
I did manage to beat the second scenario after like 8 tries but its tough, you really need to cap those emissions even at the loss of global GDP.
My board games -->http://www.boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/cpugeek13
My BGG wishlist --> http://www.boardgamegeek.com/wishlist/cpugeek13
The way to get around this, is apparently to ban conventional oil early on, this will tank the economy for a while but it makes everyone switch to gas and other energy sources and unconventional oil will be freed up for the agri industry.
A good way to limit commercial sectors is to institute the tobin tax in all of the major areas, europe, north america, japan and oceania. This also gives you a ton of money to work with and all you really have to do to keep people happy is build flood and drought defences and other policies they agree with.
Also, I just plunged the world into a financial crisis due to oil shortage, there's a new civil war in North America and water sources in China are probably more poison than water. I feel this game should merge with DEFCON if you fuck things up sufficiently.
edit: Aha! A (poorly, horribly scripted) wiki page
Its not designed well enough to be a fantastic game, but still definitely worth it for the price.
Commercial collapse is ridiculously annoying though and actually it leads to doing some pretty odd things to survive from 2060 onwards... like sterilising the populace, instituting wars and banning whole sectors of energy production.
... You can make a deal with Skynet!?
33% I like it. Downloading now!
3DSFF: 5026-4429-6577
3DSFF: 5026-4429-6577
The best I've reasoned so far is that places are what you think they are. For example:
China has a massive dependance on coal, so you should probably sort that out.
North America is highly developed commercially and agriculturally, but don't let either one get out of hand. They've also got a fuck-ton of natural resources to exploit.
Africa isn't developed well at all and have serious environmental and economic woes
And so on.
From what I can see Africa, India and to a lesser extent South-East Asia are just moochers on the global economy. They require vast sums of $ to stop them from killing each other or having the environment do the dirty work for them. So the rest of the world has to be good enough to improve themselves AND off-set these lousy nations.
That's what I can surmise after a few hours of losing terribly, anyway.
3DSFF: 5026-4429-6577
I've been playing this quite a bit. I've managed to beat the tutorial, oil crisis, and three degrees. Oil crisis I beat by the skin of my teeth, three degrees I apparently stumbled onto a perfect strategy and had warming under control, the entire world run off 100% renewable energy and clean fusion, a tripled world GDP, and a thriving space program (including orbital solar power arrays) by 2200.
Was actually considering this for an LP at some point. It seems like a great game for that.
You know what would be really awesome? Pick one of the harder long term challenges, and do a democratic game. Like, every agent you hire in the game is represented by a player, and they decide which cards to play for their slot every day, with the turn being progressed at the end of the day. The host could choose to play any cards not manually selected by the player-agents who didn't participate that day.
2070ish means it's probably the oil crisis, since that's about when the oil production starts to fall precipitously. This is a major stumbling block for new players, since if you just concentrate on reducing emissions 2020-2070 you tend to trip and land on your face at this point.
Some tips for getting through the oil crisis:
1) Oil isn't just for energy. Energy, transportation, agriculture, and industry are all major oil users, and this also means they all suffer when there's not enough oil to meet demand. Keep an eye on the news for "resource shortages hinder x" reports.
2) You can't have an oil free economy until you have at least 1st gen nanotech, and it's not very efficient even then. You can convert energy to other sources and switch 80% of transport requirements to electricity to cut down on oil use and make the most of what's available though.
3) Since you're still going to need some oil, the easiest way is to sustain production as long as possible. There's a resource production screen in the data area, and clicking on conventional oil will show you what percentages are unrecoverable, recoverable, and extracted. Once half of the recoverable oil is extracted, production starts to fall. Playing the expand oil production card, while not very green, will both increase production rate and move some of the unrecoverable oil to recoverable; this can buy you more time before the crisis messes you up (The "Oil handle it" mission or whatever it's called focuses on this). The best regions for this are North America and the Middle East, but the resource production screen can give you all the information.
4) Long term, the oil is just going to eventually run out. This is where biofuels come in; regions producing biofuels convert some of their food into oil. This is the best permanent solution to the oil problem. Playing expand biofuels increases biofuel production in a region, but some are better than others (IIRC, China and South Asia are the best, Japan and Oceania the worst). Be careful with the card; you can send a region into famine if they don't have enough food. Tech helps here as well; 2nd gen biofuels disrupt food production less, and 3rd gen the least.
I prefer to think of it as a deal with Durandal or GLaDOS.
Durandal can be reasoned with.
Why I fear the ocean.
As a realistic world model, probably not. But it's definitely a fun and playable (if extremely complicated) game. I managed to beat the hardest scenario (after many, many tries) while avoiding any massive disasters, and ended up with 3x the current world GDP and good standards of living in all regions except India. So the game is not unwinnable, just difficult.