Does anyone really like this game?

[HL3 when?]

I got it for free during the Winter gift thing, and all I can say is it looks like a crappy indie game.
Please make a case for the game being good, and i'll think about playing through it.

Edit: "The answer is no, it is not worth playing."

[zephyr-02]

I enjoyed it, but its an acquired taste. If you don't enjoy playing it don't bother.

[Warlordnipple]

I enjoy it. It is very hard and not a sit down and play for 3 hours game. I just load it up every once in awhile and see if I can beat a scenario. The graphics looks nice and everything works well together. It is really really hard to figure out what everything does though and takes a lot of trial and error

[mrose1506]

iT'S DEFINITELY FOR THE type of person that feels if they were just given all the power in the world, they could fix it. Are you a jack*** like that?

[Absinthe]

It's kind of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game to be honest. I've tried playing this game for 20 hours and I could NOT beat any other scenario no matter what strategy I tried. This game tells you NOTHING on the dynamics or how things will work out, it's blind trial and error. You're gonna waste a lot of time trying to figure out what the MANY bar graphs you are looking through represent.

Don't buy it.

[proudlarry]

It is not a very accessable game but it is a very well made and fantasticly executed game. The crushing feeling of dissappointment felt by butt hurt dwellers (such as yourself) who cant beat the tutorial only reinforces my opinion. Saving the world isn't an easy task. If this game was easy it would be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I found the game became considerably easier at around 10 hours. Just read the data. If you don't know what you are looking at read the game's built in wiki.

[h4]

It is definitely an acquired taste. Don't force yourself to play if you don't enjoy it. With respect to the mechanics, you can open the file "100_base.lua" and search for the card name to see its actual effects. Or just trial and error. Or wiki,

[silverionmox]

It's not a well made but a disappointingly crappily executed game. The interface is worthless: it's like you ask someone a serious question, eg. "what is the current share of renewables and what will the estimated impact of my renewables program be in the nex five years?", and all they do is throw a bunch of reports in your general direction that may or may not be relevant, while cooing to you: "Look at the pretty pictures! Look at the pretty pictures!"
- The turning earth in the background contributes absolutely no useful information and is just eye candy. It doesn't provide an overview, it's not prciese and it's not visible anyway when you do make decisions.
- Every turn I'm forced to sit through a bunch of news flashes that I either can't influence or am already working on.
- In contrast, when I do need that information it's nowhere to be found, for example the support map. There's no overview that allows me to compare different regions for all but a few variables.
- When I find that I need extra personnel, I need to exit the regional view, go to a world map to add personnel regionally, then return to the regional view. This is pointless clicking, as the only restraining factor is money and the other regions don't matter.
- The policies are presented as a randomly mixed row... seriously? At the very least make different rows for each category
- You can't see which policies you already have implemented, not regionally and not globally, for example you can't see how widely vegetarianism is spread.
- The cards don't inform the player about what they do: which variables they will influence, to which extent, when they will be finished, etc. This is essential information in long-term planning.

And don't give me the "acquired taste" and "you don't have to play" crap, criticism is useful. Trial and error doesn't work in this game because you get no feedback. Recommending that the player opens some of the internal files (basically uninterrupted text in wordpad) to help them out, just illustrates what a complete failure the interface is.

I really liked Chris Crawford's Balance of the Planet, which most likely inspired this game. The problem is that Balance of the Planet is 20 years old, and its blocky interface with "matrix printer" style font is STILL ten times clearer and more responsive than Fate of the World's. With Balance of the Planet, you can actually notice the different effects of decisions you make.

[[TLK] Esparko]

I think the UI is quite intuitive.

There are news reports that give you immediate feedback on any policy you use. Stat Telemetry doesn't give you anything on vegetarianism, the news section does.

After each turn there is an annual emission summary and you can see which countries are of concern.

The rest of it is in the Stat Telemetry section, everything you need is like, right there.

There's some clicking to deal with for some pieces of information (maybe 3 clicks) but it's all there in one area or another. Stuff like how the GDP is split (which is important in trying to avoid a financial crash), emissions history (to see whether or not your policies are working), etc.

As for some policies not giving you an estimate of their completion, yeah I'd understand your point, it'd be nice to have an estimate on when it'd finish but it's not a big issue for me at least.

The only thing is it's not a game designed to always let the player win, it deals with the real life issues of how there's resistance to climate change and other things. It is a trial and error game and a game for someone with the attention span and interest in this type of thing.

[Sabn1]

Very nicely put [TLK] Esparko! I agree 100% with what you wrote!
If I weren't interested in connecting the 'mising' links - what's happening in the world vs what actions I decide on - and because this game is about the future of the environment and the people, at the same time; If I weren't to enjoy these things, I would not have invested my time in it :)

I'm glad this game exists! Even after I finish all scenaios (which I'm doing fairly slowly) and get the achievments, I will sill continue playing it just to fiddle around with new policies and new courses of action to take :D

[silverionmox]

Originally posted by TLK Esparko:

There are news reports that give you immediate feedback on any policy you use. Stat Telemetry doesn't give you anything on vegetarianism, the news section does.

The news reports don't give feedback, they give canned messages that announce the completion of a policy, not much more. If you're lucky you get a hint what they exactly did, but in general you have to guess which stats of the region changed, and how much they changed.

After each turn there is an annual emission summary and you can see which countries are of concern.

Emissions fluctuate from turn to turn, and typically there are several events and policies going on in a region, you can't base 5-turn policies on the feedback you get there. Still, why not add a simple map mode instead of forcing us to watch the news again?

The rest of it is in the Stat Telemetry section, everything you need is like, right there.

No, I can't see how the policies affect the stats, neither the projected nor the accomplished changes.

it's all there in one area or another.

That's not an intutive interface.

Stuff like how the GDP is split (which is important in trying to avoid a financial crash), emissions history (to see whether or not your policies are working), etc.

A simple table comparison between regions is impossible.

The only thing is it's not a game designed to always let the player win, it deals with the real life issues of how there's resistance to climate change and other things. It is a trial and error game and a game for someone with the attention span and interest in this type of thing.

Don't confuse disappointment with the interface for a short attention span. This game has excessive eye candy and a lack of policy options. Half the cards could be replaced by a tax-and-subsidize system that let's you either tax or subsidize specific energy sources or economic sectors: that would declutter the card pool and give a much finer control (and more potential revenue sources) to the player instead of artificially limiting you to the quantity as defined in the card. Arguably reality doesn't allow such totalitarian control, but I would be fine with a inefficiency penalty when trying to make changes that are too large or in too many areas at once.

As I said, Balance of the Planet was better in crucial aspects. In particular the ability to change the assumptions behind the screen was very educational (different biases: eg. fossil fuels are abundant/scarce, nuclear is safe/dangerous, etc.).

[Sabn1]

Such a sad panda...

[silverionmox]

A missed opportunity warrants vigorous criticism. It's not coincidental either, for example the resources used to produce energy usually add up to more than 100%. That's not just a detail anymore.

[[GWJ] Yonder]

I agree with must of silver's comments. I still enjoy the game a lot, but there is a lot of fighting against the interface that happens. (Although note that you can hire a new agent right from the region screen, a little section of the empty agent panels, I missed that for awhile too).

For his example of Vegetarianism, it's a pretty big problem. Even if you wanted to obscure the fact that Vegetarianism had a fixed 15 or 20 year or whatever implementation duration, you could still show the data in other ways to give the player an indication of what was going on. If the Agriculture screen exposed the breakdown between "Ranch" workers and "Farm" workers that would be great. If you could access that information specifically by right clicking a card in play or in your deck that would be even better. That sort of information would make it obvious to a player that "Vegetarianism" in this game isn't defined as "eating vegetables" it is defined as "growing vegetables". If you have the ability to play it in one place you would think that you would want to play it in the highest populated region, so that they start eating vegetables they grow locally and import. Instead you play it on your highest agricultural producers because apparently people just buy opaque boxes of "food" and don't care whether it is meat or not.

Cap and Trade is another example of a long-running card that is pretty much completely opaque as to what it's doing while it runs, and the same with the two cards they directly unlock. Although in that case it's worse because those cards last longer and are more expensive. The fact that the information is available in the news is fine, but that only helps that year. The news archive isn't available anywhere (for example, by right clicking on the cards) so if you stop playing a card and then come back to it later it's impossible to know whether that region has had 15 years of implementing Cap and Trade or 40.

Another example that came up for me just today, I was going through all my regions to see whether they had transitioned to electrical transportation. All of those cards were either in play or missing from the deck, so we're golden! Until I noticed that several regions were still using fuel oil. After quite a bit of graph and card searching it became apparent that any region with low infrastructure (ie where you can still play the Transportation Improvement card) doesn't have the Electric Car card available. If you could look at all of the cards that had been completed in that region (sort of like how you can look at the tech tree) then you couldn't make mistakes like that.

I still really like the game, don't get me wrong, otherwise I wouldn't be spending time writing about it's flaws, I would just uninstall it and move on. I can't find the date for their last update, so I don't know if they are still supporting it, I kind of wish that it was open source so that I could polish it up myself.

[Bazaa]

Any improvement made in the Tipping point version?

[silverionmox]

I just got it very recently, so no. Tipping point just added a few scenarios AFAI can see - with a tacked on mechanic for climate refugees. The basic flaw - lack of adequate feedback and clarity about what the different policy options are really meant to do - remains.