Malaganga - A guide for new leaders

Democracy 1 & 2 Democracy 2
1

I havent seen any strategy type/AAR (after action reports) posts on this forum, so I thought I’d flex my rookie muscles and make one. Ive ony been playing this game for a few days, but Im big on games like these, and Im starting to get a good feel for it. Some of you guys can whip this game sideways, others can’t. Heres some suggestions for the second group:

Malaganga is a debt ridden stinkhole riddled with problems. What a perfect target for a grand social experiment!

      [img]http://www.ctwarriors.net/demo2/problems.jpg[/img]

Heres the situation going in:

Lotsa crime. Lotsa health problems. Wasteful, backwards economy. Homelessness.

Im the liberal party, and the conservatives represent the opposition. Notice the population of drinkers in the picture below (or above, for that matter). A lousy 34%. The first thing I do in office is sign a law repealing all liquor laws. Im looking to create an entire demographic which I can both tax and use to influence the overall vote.

There isn’t enough capital to do much else, so I just end the turn.

Hmm. 20 billion dollar deficit huh? We’ll deal with that in a way that only a liberal can: Spend like crazy!

Spending for state schools: increased by approximately 2 billion dollars
Spending on College Grants: Increased by 2 notches
Spending for Community policing: Increased to the maximum value
Spending for Police Services: Increased by appoximately 1 billion dollars
Spending for Science Funding: Increased to the maximum value
Introduction of Small Business Grants
Introduction of Rural Grants
Introduction of Technology Grants

Its taken several turns to build up the political capital necessary to do all of this. However, a few things are starting to kick in, namely:

  • Overall popularity is increasing because of the lowered crime + increased schooling

  • The homelessness problem has resolved itself because of all the jobs, presumably brought about by the business grants. This is further reducing the crime problem, and all of it taken care of without increasing spending at all directly on wellfare. Gang Warfare disappears along with the homeless. Funny how that works.

  • The increased spending on education is having the dual inpact of both reducing the technology backwater problem AND crime.

All of this, however, comes at a cost. Im starting to get debt warnings now. My economy is such however that the extra jobs are starting to pay for the investment, and im running under 10billion deficiet per month.

Now, lets have a look again at those drunks. Everyone in Malaganga can drink, which has had quite the effect over time:

75% of the country drinks, and they arent pissed at me. Woot! Time to milk this herd!

Notice that I dropped the actual amount from its default. Why? because hidden under my mouse cursor in the screenshot is a thin sliver of green that forms when you drop it, encouraging the cattle er…drinkers to increase in numbers, even if they dont like me as much anymore.

The extra income helps, and that combined with a property tax allowed me to generate a surplus. Of course it helps if the planet is doing well on that front as well. :slight_smile:

By this time the first election is due. I pick the two things that are easiest to deal with once I start the new term, namely to repeal the tobacco tax and to increase lifespan by 10%. They sound contradictory I know, but one of the very cool things about this game is the effect caused by indirect actions, as demonstrated earlier when I increased spending on education to clean up the homeless. Anyway…

Heres how it looks just before the election. ~45% of the vote is mine, according to the start turn report:

Time to buy some votes. Just enough to keep my job. The debt ceiling is almost reached, but its meaningless if I can’t get back into office…Here goes nothin’

The result of which was this:

Huzzah! Now that Ive stabilized the economy and have ‘political capital’, I have to work on my debt… Oh well, so much for being popular over the next election cycle… I’d better start spending money on intelligence services now to prevent an assination attempt once extremest groups start popping up everywhere in responce to my policies…

SheepRock

2

That’s an excellent post, great for people who seem stuck! Cheers.

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We need more of these. :smiley:

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Glad you guys like it!

Ask and ye shall recieve… stay tuned

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do people think this should be stickied? or otherwise highlighted somewhere?

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Ok, so what happened in your second term? Did they hold a presidential shooting (and I don’t mean the one where the press takes your picture) in your honour? :smiley: Or did you manage to avoid that?

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I didnt save the game after I won the election, I just shut it off then wrote the post… in retrospect I should have played it out though.

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I’ve used this post as a resource to knowing what increases income. Basically my budgets been unstable in the second term however it seems to be working out alright. (between surpluses and deficits I think it’s about equal). I’ve managed to increase quite a few different things such as schools, universities, science, reduce crime, etc. One thing that’s made my budget so bad I think, is when jobs go up and down and various random factors occur. Like I think one turn my budget had a surplus of 10 billion and then dropped to a deficit of 10 billion all in one turn! So I’m not sure this is “exact” but increasing schooling and such helps when used properly. :slight_smile:

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Once again, a very impressive AAR. Perhaps Cliff could gather them up in a single sticky. Or maybe we should have a stickied sub-forum for AARs.

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What I do is introduce the carbon tax to maximum, that usually takes care of deficits. The get to work on becoming popular. Making the entire population farmers with rural development grants, organic farming, farming subsidies, and biofuel incentive puts nearly 100% farmers and max support. You need to please a lot less people that way. Also I’ve found one of the best ways to increase GDP is to max out foreign aid (I know it doesn’t make much sense does it?) and appoint the liberal UN representative. This greatly increases foreign relations, which increases international trade, which decently increases GDP.

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Why are the images not visible in this post?

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oop… I took down the domain that held the images… lemme work on that a sec…

EDIT: The images should be up now!

EDIT AGAIN: Seeing this forum again after so long on hiatus has me itching to make another one of these…

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I followed sheepRock’s initial decisions.
I won the first election.

Hurrah!

next session I couldn’t fail. introduced several new taxes. reduced existing taxes. won next election!! lowest group - capitalists - 97%

un fortunately, I can’t explain my success. I didn’t keep track of my decisions.

introduced all sorts of environmental taxes plus subsidies.

worst part, running at less than 1billion deficit!

regardless - I won the next election!!! running at 100%!!!

I’ve since run twice - both times same result! get past first election and I’m almost invincible! By the second election, running an 18£ billion surplus.

If I could remember how, I would be invincible!!!

14

Thanks sheeprock, That’ll help me I think. I just got the game yesterday, and go voted out twice, killed once and I think I was ran out of the country once. Of course the first two games I played, I didn’t drop the difficulty. But I dropped it and I’m now starting to get a feel for it, wasn’t having any assasination attempts or anything haha. I only got 20% of the vote though, my party didn’t really come to back me at all.

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Ha! Glad the article helped… Probably the hardest part of this game is getting the vote out. Approval is easy, getting them to get off their duffs to actually vote for you is hard.

What do you think of the game so far?

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I got re-elected twice with 87% of the vote. One must spend on a priority basis on rural grants, small business grants, national monorail system, trial by jury, alchohol tax, tabbaco tax, Airline tax, carbon tax(although in a very limited measure), toll tax, actually, it is very complicated. suffice to say, that I am a political legend, with 87% of the vote, over two elections.
When must one be cautious? That is when the global economy is in a downturn. I had a surplus accruing to the nation, of 70 Billion Euros, which got wiped out.