Hello everybody. Happy 2018!
After a little while without news, I’m gonna show you today some of the stuff that we’ll be throwing you during the game in order to make it a little less predictable (ok, much less predictable): News and Events.
During your game, you’ll see a news bar on the bottom of your screen with info of something that is happening somewhere in the world (you know….news). These will be mostly random political news or reports on some interesting thing that someone did somewhere. But, every now and then, some piece of really important news will pop up, something that directly affects that country and the way you should play him. Like if a country goes to war or go through an epidemic.
When that happens, that country will gain an “Event” icon on its Country Info screen which will signify that that particular event is going on. So don’t worry if you missed a piece of important news because you weren’t looking at the news bar, you can always check the country you wish to know more about it.
So here are some examples. Not all news will directly impact a country (some are just us having fun creating ridiculous scenarios and making stuff up):
But watch out for when the bar displays some piece of news in a different color. Those are the ones you need to look out for since they will (at least temporarily) activate an event. So maybe you are in the middle of a major strategic effort trying to convert african countries through wealth-specific powers and all of the sudden a country’s economy starts to thrive, rendering your attempts ineffective. Or maybe that country has even more economic issues and your powers are magnified. The thing is, once those events show up, you’ll need to revisit your strategy.
Ok, so how do we come up with those? Well, for some countries it’s easy. They are either going through a political turmoil that we can try to predict how will end or have glaring issues that we can predict how it could be fixed. So there was a major effort in research to create true-to-life news (it wouldn’t make sense, for instance, to claim that Bolivia,a landlocked country, is making billions in fish exports). So don’t get too comfortable thinking you have a particular game down, one of those can pop up and change everything.
At its core, an event is a simple “bonus” for up to 3 attributes. Here’s an example of how an event will affect a country’s attributes (values will definitely change):
Also, some countries will start the game with an active event (for instance, North Korea will start with a “Authoritarian State” event and Syria will start with a “War” event) representing their current real life scenario. And of course, a country may go through 2 or more events at the same time (War and Epidemic, for instance).
So basically what we’re saying is that you can come up with a brilliant piece of strategy just to see a major curveball being thrown at you and alien invaders rendering your effort useless. Or maybe they’ll help, who knows what would happen if aliens actually invaded.
Well, that’s all I have for now, folks! Stay tuned for next time!
