I would like to lodge a complaint/ask for help. I have no issue with balanced game play, that is to say pros and cons to things the rest of us would find deplorable in real life. Why would you have the option to adopt a capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, liberal, or libertarian policy in a game if it would score no benefits? The only reason would be aesthetics, which isn’t terribly convincing if you want to win. Ergo I have no issue with there being benefits to running a- say- a fascist regime.
I am however taking particular exception to the games overall difficulty. Perhaps I am missing something, or have an out of date copy, but the following occurs every time there is a terrorist attack.
Everyone ever becomes Patriotic (very accurate). Your sway with Patriots goes immediately down 25% (or more) and almost nothing you do regains their support.
I had to turn the difficulty to almost zero for it to work and even still I had to turn military and intelligence spending up from 25% to 75% just to get my standing with the patriots back where it was in the first place.
The request for assistance should be obvious. The terrorists are environmental. I have 25% or less approval with them and that’s from trying to satiate their desires, but usually the time I spend doing this alienates or otherwise allows my standing with other social groups to atrophy. This usually ends up costing me the election.
The complaint is this, however. After the September 11th attacks in 2001 George Walker Bush gained the highest approval rating of any president in US history. After the Murrah Bombing Bill Clinton went from near certain defeat in 1996 to what was a relatively easy victory (in fairness, Dole’s aggressive cheap shots were to blame in part as well as they defamed his own character).
What I am saying is, these things have a way to make people blindly trust in government, so long as that government makes some sort of response to the attack. I became frustrated enough to make this post when after satiating their desires for one attack a second occurred right before the election and shot any chance I had. That makes more sense, as it could be taken that my measures weren’t enough by the electorate, but the reaction to initial incidences of terrorism is inaccurate to real world political drama.