Transcription
Hello guys, and welcome to Real Politics. Today, I've put together a list of my top 10 tips that I would tell any new player to help them get ahead in as few words as possible.
Number one: Score is the most important factor in everything in this game. Not only is score required to win the game, but it also comes with a plethora of benefits. If you are in the top five, four score in total, separate to this, if you go sort by provinces, end score, the places with the highest score also pump out the most action points, and action points are your most important expendable resource. So generally, in most instances, if you see a higher score number, that is better, no matter where you're looking.
Number two is for research, also called projects in this game, where projects need to be maintained and thus it could be expensive to activate and keep any and all of these projects. As a result, number two is: do not take projects that you cannot afford. You may really, really want the Mark 3 tanks. Can you afford the Mark II tanks and all of its requirements? Can you afford to get there? Can you afford to maintain it? Do you have enough action points? Do you have enough money? It's going to add up more, more, and more the more things that you start unlocking, so be very cautious about that. Do not take projects that you cannot afford to maintain. It's better to be cautious, cuz this game has plenty of time.
Number three: Around the side of your screen, you'll eventually have popup events that will happen, and I generally suggest participating in just about every time-based event, specifically you can afford to participate in. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is, if you're in this scenario right here, the Grand Campaign 2020, The World is Not Enough, then you will get time-based events that involve colonizing the Antarctic. You could actually see one of the colonies right here, which has a funny popup if you click on it early, and there are also ones that will pop up eventually in the sea, for example, one here off the coast of Portugal. There is even space; these unlock via time, and I would suggest you participate in all of them. However, not all of the events unlock based on time; for example, some of them unlock because somebody in the UN voted to have one, such as a foreign aid program, an R&D cooperation, or micro loans. These ones are not as worth participating in; however, if you do see one of the time-based ones, one of the story-based ones, I would recommend participating in them because the rewards are huge. You get locations with high score, low population, and great potential GDP, usually also a lot of Natural Resources. You will need the score to get action points; you will need the resources to get a lot of things: Economic Development, nuclear missiles, military units, even projects which we just went over, you needing to be able to afford to maintain. The low population is good because it stops scaling costs, so yeah, do all of those events.
Number four: For the love of God, if you can help it, do not build social housing. Population seems good, but in this game it's not, because it comes with cost. It has benefits, but five natural resources plus all this other stuff to produce social housing over 2,000 days when you could be building something else or spending this somewhere else for population that's just going to cost you more resources down the line due to scaling cost of projects. Look at that population: 330 million population is only netting me 89 action points, but my project scaling with my population and GDP is costing 21, and that ratio is only going to get worse. So, for the love of God, do not build social housing, potentially ever. It's not necessarily worth building, and this leads me into number five.
Number five: Build tourist infrastructure. This is the most important building to build. There are ones that you have to unlock, like NextG City, which give a plethora of benefits, and they are both heavily worth it. It should be obvious since you have to unlock them, but tourist infrastructure is one of those ones that doesn't necessarily immediately seem useful. Tourism that doesn't sound particularly useful to the average country and Province score. Well, if you didn't listen to my explanation earlier, you wouldn't even know what this means, but this generates action points, and as your population increases, you need more action points to keep doing things, and so getting tourist infrastructure and everything you own is of vital importance. Also, acquiring a bunch of space colonies, space stations, ocean territories, and Antarctic things that have no population in them whatsoever but give you additional slots to build tourist infrastructure and have high score to begin with; this is a miracle for balancing your resources in the game. So, whereas you should be building tourist infrastructure in every Province you have, it compounds with these earlier tips where if you get the empty locations from the events, definitely build tourist infrastructure there. This should be the first thing you build; it is so important.
Number six: And this one's economy focused. There is GDP growth, and I suggest you use it, specifically, especially to balance out your unemployment. The unemployment can have a negative growth; it can go down to zero, and it can keep going down, but it's never going to go under zero. However, the moment it turns a positive unemployment growth, it's going to start going up, and all of that negative, that decrease, didn't really matter for much. So what you really want to do is balance this as much as possible. There's projects and things you could use to balance it; for example, if we go into trade, your Outsourcing can give you more action points by raising your unemployment. This is useful if you have good unemployment rates and you're decreasing it steadily, but generally, when figuring out your taxes and everything, projects that affect your GDP base it around probably your unemployment. If your unemployment is not growing, then you should probably raise your taxes, get more money, why not? However, if your unemployment is growing, then maybe you should lower your taxes; maybe you should go for projects that give that GDP growth; maybe the world economy is doing bad; you're going to need to adapt to this stuff quite frequently. Generally, I would balance it around your unemployment. As a side note, you could also balance it around your Economic Development because you need GDP per capita. If you're having trouble maintaining High Economic Development, then you want more GDP growth at the cost of other things; however, if you are in high Economic Development safely, which can be be kind of compounding because it's percentage based, definitely focus on fighting unemployment, keeping it as low as possible, but don't keep the unemployment growth as negative as possible because you're probably giving up some benefits to keep it like that, for example, money from taxes which affects your GDP growth.
Number seven: And now this goes into how you pick a nation to play as. Nations that have a high GDP size but a low population but also a high Province amount, generally these are going to be the easiest Nations to play in the long run. I'd say like in most games, right, maybe overwhelming, harder to learn the game with, but Real Politics is a very simple game, so I wouldn't even necessarily say that that's true here. Therefore, when picking a nation, I suggest you focus, as I said, starting with Nations that have a lot of GDP, as many provinces as possible. Focus that GDP though with as little population as possible, so that makes America probably one of the easiest nations in the game to play, if not the easiest in terms of winning the game and doing well. China, you think might come next, looking at the GDP in provinces, you're wrong because they have so much population; this actually makes them very, very difficult, whereas Japan's great, honestly Russia's pretty good too, Germany, the UK, France; these are all great options, Italy, but definitely America's going to have it the easiest. Don't worry about the money; don't worry about debt; you can get out of debt no problem, even with America's debt, it doesn't matter, just pay off the money.
Number eight has to do with those events and also if you do any conquests, if you go to war, you ask for territory from a country. I'll give you a brief glimpse up there; you see space; space colonization is a lot harder than ocean and Antarctic colonization. So if you're going to focus on any of those events that let you colonize things, focus every opportunity for ocean and Antarctic that you can. The reason being is that the space colonies eventually have a kind of Independence Movement that's part of the events; as a result, they will change culture and civilization from you, which will cost a lot of money, action points, and time to swap back; it's very costly, and if you're not careful, they can Rebel from you and become independent. So just keep that in mind if you're going for all of them, especially if you build up, you miss the ocean and Antarctic stuff, and you're finally in time to start doing these events, in time to go for space, just note that that is harder than the other ones cuz you will have to deal with Stellar Interstellar Independence movements.
And now for number nine: Tasks. Tasks help you get ahead; don't ignore them. It's very easy to just play the game and ignore these stupid random generated missions that give you these random resources, which who knows how important it really is. It is really important; it is really, really important. I've only had the game on pause long enough for two to spawn in, but more than two will spawn in. Some of them will inevitably happen no matter what, like score; you get a bunch of action points for this; look at is that's like five months worth of action point income for something that will inevitably happen no matter what, and some of them give stuff like, look, 100 score right now; I have an income of 13; that's huge. Forget about the rest, and the rest is awesome, so it just wants me to go for a very easy project that has like no maintenance cost attached; why would I not do this? So if you're lacking direction, or even if you have it, definitely look at your task because these rewards, especially if you're not already number one in terms of the score ranking, can really help put you ahead, and if you are number one, can help you retain your lead. Definitely, definitely, definitely do your tasks. Don't do all of them, cuz some of them will be unfeasible or just something you don't want; for example, maybe you'll get a task to enact a socialist Heaven; maybe you don't want socialist Heaven, well then it's not worth implementing; it would cost more than it would give; just resign that one; you will lose some score, but you could resign 10 of these for every one of these ones that you do right here, not to mention the score; these other rewards will help you accomplish it. It's definitely worth also resigning any tasks that seem really, really inconvenient. Interact with this system; you won't regret it; it is worth it.
Number 10: The UN exists to be used, so use it. This is not like real life where theoretically if everyone just started leaving the UN it would become useless, dismantle, and nobody would care about it. The top 12 highest GDP countries in the world will have the power here, equal Power by the way, and thus since the most powerful stand to benefit from all these things, they can just freely do here: sanction a government type that's not mine, yes please; anti-war Monger to get free war justification for no debuff, yes please; Tobin tax to sabotage stock exchanges when I'm not using one but all my enemies are, of course, things that affect GDP growth, nukes, etc. Someone will be using this if you are not, and usually it will be determined by whoever controls it, not one nation, usually by government type. If democracies are the top 12 countries, they'll probably be going after warmongers; they'll be going after authoritarians and totalitarians. If authoritarians or totalitarians, especially, control this, you could go after the democracies instead. The UN exists to be used, so use it. Even better if you were a lonely un-authoritarian totalitarian. Remember that when declaring Wars, when fighting Wars, especially when you're not a democracy, which I have loaded up as a democracy by the way, so I can't display it too well, but when you do go to war and you go to end the war, there's a lot of things that you can go for at the end that can affect other nations. You could try to mix war and spying together, for example, to try to influence or change entirely the political system of other nations. This is very common; the AI does it, so I could invade China and turn them into a legitimate democracy instead of, you know, one in name only. This would help solidify that democracies own the UN because China would then start acting in the best interest of democracies. If you're a totalitarian, it works the other way; maybe you're playing Russia or China, then you want to go potentially, for example, invade say Australia or Canada and turn them into your type of government, and then that would allow you to eventually get the majority and control this. Now, the AI will be doing this to each other and having their own events happening in the background anyway, but there's a lot of things you can do to utilize the UN and turn it into your favor, and it is all-powerful; it really is; you can't really leave it, so you need to use it.
And those are my top 10 tips that I wanted to share with you guys on Real Politics and how I suggest making this game a lot easier on yourself. Hopefully you found this helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. I have a playlist in the description below where I have other guides that you could see if you need more help with the game. If you have any suggestions for guides that I haven't already covered, feel free to leave those in the comments below as well. For now though, thank you guys very much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. [Music]