Transcription
What is Real Politics? Real Politics is a game that takes real-life geopolitics as we know it in modern day—a very rare thing to do for grand strategy games, might I say—and that's exactly what it does with it. It turns it into a big grand strategy game, gamifying just about everything we know.
Starting us in the year 2020, released some years ago now, and proceeding onwards towards the end of the century with different scenarios, including a grand campaign which I've booted up right here to show you guys. That has a bit of a storyline to it, with events that push nations to doing certain things—for example, America and China vying over the Pacific. For example, you can play as any of these nations that you see here. You can go through event paths that are not immediately defined to form bigger nations—for example, a massive African Union of a nation to try to compete with, you know, the rest of the world.
This game takes real-life geopolitics and it very much generalizes it. You won't be playing as Spain and then feeling like you're really controlling Spain. Every nation controls somewhat similarly through a bunch of different systems—for example, the political systems that we have over here, based on certain actions that you take and certain policies and projects that you enact. You will move towards democracy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism; each of these have different variables to them. When you can use nukes, which are very common to use in this game, when you have elections, for example, and this can change the status of your political system. Primarily, it won't like lose you the game generally. When you can declare wars, even as well, how the rest of the world views you—for example, low negative relations modifier with democracies for authoritarianism, and then totalitarianisms high negative relation modifiers with democracies, as an example. How much money you can take out in deficit before going bankrupt is another thing.
And then that exact kind of system extends to the economy—with what kind of economy are you running? For example, if you pick America at the start, you'll have an interventionist thing, and you can see all these change factors here. And this is kind of the thing that I meant when I said projects—all these different things decided by projects that you enable. Like everything we're looking at here, all these different variables: human development index, population, militarism, personal control, these ratings of your internal politics. If we take a look at projects here, this I don't want you to confuse this for a tech tree because it's not. Now you might keep some of these things, for example, as if it's a tech tree—for example, spy networks into spy rings, for example. Uh, if we look at military, we have a long list of paths here. You could get the universal air unit that actually just gives you a bonus to air units; there's no difference in air units between countries except the modifiers on top of them. That goes for all military units, like I said, it very much generalizes real geopolitics. There are planes, and then every nation has different prices for these planes and different modifiers for these planes, but other than that, there's nothing that makes them especially unique. And what determines those small differences is what we see here in front of us, for example.
So going down into tanks, I can activate, for some money and action points, let's say Universal tanks when I get to it. This will actually make my tanks more expensive as well as making them attack better. However, if I ever don't want that anymore, because whenever I enact something there is a maintenance of money in action points, I can simply deactivate it. And I wouldn't only just deactivate it because, let's say, I don't want to pay the extra bit to the cost of my armor or get any maintenance costs on these projects back, but because these things have other effects—for example, the power of military groups adds plus two to militarism. Maybe you don't want militarism—those ratings we just looked at in the internal politics, they all have a bunch of different effects on your country. This game is full of modifiers, and sometimes the 23 gold might be fine, but you just don't want the militarism, so what do you do? You deactivate it. And this goes into other internal politics, for example, here and there. There's some paths that are just definitively good to have, and there's some paths that can be risky to have—for example, having an import or export infrastructure is really dependent on what you needed in the trade projects. And ad hoc actions are things you generally turn on and off temporarily rather than leaving on entirely. But it's these projects and the different combinations of them that is going to determine what makes your country unique on the grand stage. It's not really who you start as, except for any events that might spawn.
There is a United Nations system where you can propose, for similar costs of money and action points, these different things you want to pass through the UN—such as sanctions, such as even interventions against other countries, as well as things that just start beneficial events and projects that different nations in the world can invest into to get benefits. The top 12 GDPs, the top top everything in this game, also has a lot of special bonuses—just being number one in score grants you a bunch of benefits as well. So if you're playing as someone like America, Russia, China, you're going to be rushing for score, and score is generated by a lot of things, such as investing in those events, those projects—as I just worded, maybe projects wasn't the correct thing—but like these proposals, for example, that make events pop up that different nations can go into. And there's some that just come in by time—for example, you can get an event to settle the Antarctic; you can get events to make little underwater civilizations that you invest into—the one who invests the most gets the most out of it, including score, which then grants them other bonuses. And to win at the end, you must be number one. Later, there's even ones who invest into outer space colonies and things like that. We can't see space right now because we're not far enough into the game yet, but actually I bet I could just load something here. Yeah, this is when I did a live stream of this game forever ago as Russia. If we load in here and zoom out, yeah, there you go, we can see outer space. And look at this—all of these different planets, all of these different moons, all of these different space stations can be controlled by different countries, usually decided by who won those events by investing things. You see, I control some of them; other nations control other ones, and then you can fight for wars over them. And you better bet there's independence movements later in the game over these sorts of things as well. And if we go look at the Antarctic, you could see some of those Antarctic things you can settle, and here's some of those like underwater, like ocean colonies as well—all of which have access to more resources; they have access to benefits really in general, some of them more than others. The space ones tend to be pretty minimal because they're so far away; they're hard to keep track of. But expanding and getting access to more resources is a very important part of this game. There's especially some that kind of become more important the later you go—for example, uh, you can just like right-click into your own territory and invest into things like mining infrastructures, next-gen cities, and these give you bonuses: GDP, your score, the population that you can keep somewhere. There's tourist infrastructure, social housing—all of these things are here to give you bonuses, and their names are mostly just cosmetic. You can also, while we're I guess looking at this one, have your own stock exchange. The biggest GDPs with the best relations, the wealthiest economies, can have stock markets where they invite others into their stock markets and then benefit from the combined GDPs, relations, and distance that they have with these other nations. Being in charge of one is always better than being in one otherwise, but this is what it looks like to be in charge of one, and you can get quite a lot out of it for very little cost in terms of money income, for example, as well as score income. There's a lot of things that modify this as well, and you better bet you know how you get these modifiers from projects, and you see the world can be very variable. Like I, as Russia, had taken over a bunch of China in this time; I had absolutely steamrolled through Europe as well. And I may not control everything because you can't—even with the events, there's no way to immediately take everything, but you can go to war for just about anything on the map that you see. You can have allies, but it's in the form primarily of blocks, so there's no simple alliances with other countries. Instead, there are leaders of blocks and those that join them. So as you can see here in mine, I have Czechia, Netherlands, Portugal, and Ireland. It may sound unrealistic for Russia, but remember these nations are all pretty generalized. And through these blocks and through other things, you can either centralize power and use this as a way to diplomatically absorb other nations and their holdings without war, or use it as more of a benefit to your economy, use it as a benefit to your score, use it as a benefit to just having allies in general that will then add to your military power. You see, I have, for example, 283 infantry here, plus 24 coming from my block members, and it kind of goes like that for everything. Once someone's in your block, you gain access to their military; they're essentially your direct, always supportive ally. It's actually pretty nice. And there are reasons to take some things on the map more than other things—for example, strategic provinces like this that provide just special bonuses of money and action points every few years, which can be very, very useful, especially action points in the long run. And you better bet there is debt—not only can you make money and have a monthly balance, all the good stuff of maintaining like an economy and stuff, you can have debt. So you see, I have like 98,000 right here and 40,000 in debt. If I wanted to, I could pay all this off right now, and it comes out of my money, and I have no more debt. Debt is useful for building stuff and accomplishing your goals in general. There's different ranges to tax, but there's uh limits based on—you bet you remember those projects—maintaining your GDP growth, GDP size, and balancing yourself with the world economy, which you have no control over but can absolutely tank or bolster your capabilities and the capabilities of just about everybody depending on what kind of economy you have. As we saw earlier in internal politics, can very much affect how your next decade in this game will go. You see, in this game, I'm up to like 2078 on this save file. I think this is the last time I saved the game before reaching 2100 and actually ending the playthrough, and I don't think I saved it at the end. But this has just about everything that you would want in a modern grand strategy game, except depth. If you're looking for another geopolitical simulator game, another world warfare and economics, another maybe even superpower, this isn't exactly it. This is a grand strategy game, and it is a simpler one; it is one of the simpler ones I have played for sure. It does have a lot of features that you can interact with, such as nukes and all these other things that definitely seem very unique when you haven't played a lot of modern-day grand strategy games, cuz you know there aren't many. But even here with separatists, as you see, there are separatists—for example, the moon has a different civilization than me, and so I have to try to convert it. And what does it cost? Money and action points. Everything in this game is cosmetic; it is a way to spend money and action points to get modifiers and benefits. Everything is generalized, and that's what you get. This is an indie grand strategy game, and you know what? This is a very fun indie grand strategy game where I can see the United States of Central America become a country, where I can see the African Union front becoming a nation as well and taking over half of Africa, where I can see all sorts of cool future potentially probably ahistorical situations that just end up being a lot of fun, where no matter who you play as there's something cool you can do, and every playthrough is different. If you go in with the right expectations, this is definitely another pretty cool grand strategy game to add to your list. If you're going in expecting the depth and development polish of Paradox Studios making like a modern grand strategy game, you will be disappointed.
So what is Real Politics? It's an indie grand strategy game. It's a lot of fun. It's one of the only ones really in modern day at this point, and this is only game one of now three actually in a series. I know this is not a review, but this is definitely a game I would recommend, and I plan to make a couple of guides on it to help you guys learn how to play it. For now, though, I hope this short little video has been informative to help you know what kind of game this is and what you can expect to do in it. Thank you guys very much for watching, and I hope I'll see you on the next one. [Music]