… thru my first game. I gave myself 10 elections to get the hang of it and also dropped the difficulty slightly because I kept going broke or getting voted out the first couple of times I played.
It’s cool - but some of the interrelationships are a bit hard to follow. During the course of the game I got quite a few achievements (green and pleasant land, economic miracle, socialist paradise, technological superiority, crime-free utopia, one-party state…) - there was room for eight though, so what were the others?
I found that once I got established I hit a kind of sweet spot, and that I could do a kind of switcharoo with the various forms of taxation to meet election commitments - one election i’ll promise to abolish property tax, and keep that promise, but jack up income tax to cover the shortfall in revenue. Next election I’ll promise to cut income tax, which I will - but I’ll reintroduce property tax to fund it.
It probably shouldn’t be possible to maintain 90+% approval for long - everything you do will upset somebody.
Oh, and the rail strike problem is really counterintuitive. It says the ‘cure’ is higher subsidies, stricter labor laws and higher average incomes but I maxed the subsidy, tightened the labor laws to extreme pro-employer and upped average incomes as much as I could (indirectly), to no avail. Eventually I just scrapped rail subsidies altogether - it wasn’t clear whether that meant the workers just dutifully went back to driving their trains when I’d just scrapped their subsidy, or whether I just shut down the national rail network. Either way, commuters seemed to get happier.
