Completed Let's Kill Commies in Hidden Agenda

Oi cibai new update lah

 

So Yea, no matter what you do, your country remains a shithole. Very realistic.

 

Great game. Had successful left and right-wing playthroughs back in the day. Pissing off the USA also can have some very very nasty consequences (from CIA shenanigans to outright invasion, while the USSR shrugs their shoulders and fucks off if you tell them to take a hike).

Also reminded me of how I used to be a smug free-market worshipping libertarian back in the day. Game is surprisingly even-handed in its political portrayals. The grittier and more personal tone is also very unique (and refreshing after zany Tropico).

 

My highest achievement in this game was getting the % of people going hungry over 100, literally off the charts

 

Damn I forgot how much the weepy liberal moderates in this game suck. Fuck price controls, uhh wait no they're bad for the economy, uh time to beg for IMF money and spread out government resources so thinly we fail to change anything.

 

Yeah that fits.

it's fun to play though, short and sweet but with a surprising amount of choices and different outcomes.

Moderate run is definitely the hardest, is there even a way to avoid coups and bloodshed?

Every time I try the kumbayah let's all come together approach I end up dead or exiled.

 

Fun game, does anything come close to it in loose terms of gameplay and the amount of reactivity? King of Dragon Pass comes to mind but I've played that one to hell and back already.

 

Fun game. The number of "Shithole Politics Tycoon" games continue to be few and far between aside from the Tropico series, and even that has been repeating and parodying itself for most of the time.

Congrats on finishing a rightwing game. I never realised that calling the elections while still reasonably popular was the way to get the leftists out of the picture. Usually I want to go too fast and I get couped by Gloria (or Dilma, LMAO). And in any case you always end up going bankrupt fighting the war against the commies, who can't actually be beaten despite all the efforts of the Blowtorch bro.

Playing the moderate is hard as fuck too. You can appease the leftists with some limited land reform, but then the death squads will just ride in and fuck them up, and if you don't do anything about it, the left will coup you anyway. I have tried to focus on the economic base early on with infra investments, redistributing Farsante's estates to small landowners, empowering the coffee growers, getting cotton exports going, solliciting EU aid besides the US, basically all the goody-two-shoes bourgeois stuff. Note that you can't actually secure EU aid but it seems to go up as you pursue moderate policies. But someone always gets impatient and you get couped by the left, because you don't yet have the popular base to resist it successfully since none of this stuff puts beans in the peasants' bowls.

Maybe I will have another stab at it later and post the playthrough here, if OP doesn't mind. I'm in quarantine after a foreign trip, so I'm pretty bored this week.

BTW, here is a thread in which someone even more masochistic than me has basically exhausted all the different options in the game. There are many options apparently, including keeping the leftist military while still getting US aid. He also posts the text of the manual that came with the game back in 1988. The thread itself is still live on the web, but the screenshots have disappeared, whereas the Wayback Machine archive seems to have them still.

 

Sure thing, be my guest. This was just a quick and dirty LP on my part to get back into the LPing business after months of cruel and unjust punishment. And yes I suffered a lot of coups before figuring it out. The early election approach probably works the other way around as well for anyone doing a pro-commie run.

Speaking of the manual, Abandonia has a PDF version available for download if anyone is interested.

 

I've been having some decent achievements following the centrist path. Although maybe more centre-left. I should have made some screenshots or documented the exact steps I took. Anyway, I started with leftist Agri and Internal ministers, a right-wing Foreign minister, and a centrist Defence minister.

I used to know this but I had forgotten about it: the most important thing to do is avoid elections, while still keeping everyone happy. It's a difficult balancing act. The moment you call elections, the two wings of the military will go apeshit on each other no matter what else you do to balance them, and the wing you've supported the most will win out. Useful if you want to follow a left-wing or right-wing path, but not if you want to maintain a balancing act. Besides, if you get involved in a civil war, your military expenses will go up hugely.

To keep everyone happy, you MUST go through with the leftist land reform, price controls and food subsidies all the way, with a commie agriculture minister so that you don't get fucked by emergency events where the centrists will cuck out on it or the right will destroy it. At first the food subsidies will cost money, but if you follow the event chain, eventually you'll bring in ration cards and technical support for cooperatives, so the money spent on food subsidies will stabilise. Otherwise the leftists will always coup you I think. I was able to get the leftist commander Correa to pacify the countryside and outlaw the death squads (although some commies still got helicopter rides before that), while also still keeping the right-wing commander on board, with massive US military aid no less. I think this was more thanks to not having elections and can be considered a bug or omission perhaps.

To keep the middle class happy (although they can't coup you), you can follow their path for splitting up the dictator's estates and generally being nice to the small- to mid-sized coffee planters. This (along with the technical support to land reform) will give you some hard currency to finance health and education (but don't increase spending again afterwards). Although the game started complaining about mounting debt in the end, in fact the reserve currency went higher than the debt in the relevant graph, which I normally don't achieve.

Counter-intuitively, increasing spending on infrastructure doesn't seem to help much. I kept doing this in previous games, but this set of ministers never have it on their agenda, and I couldn't get any encounters to do something about this issue. It doesn't seem to matter as much as other stimulus for coffee growers. Cotton always seems to disappoint, not sure what's up with that or if the developers ever worked it out. Or if it's supposed to be some anti-capitalist statement by the developers.

To appease the right-wing, I kept national bank loans firmly aimed at producers of export crops, which is also good for your budget. The leftists will whine but they don't take action as long as you go through with land reform. I also kept a pro-US diplomatic line, including letting them deal with the military directly to avoid that whole stupid back-and-forth, so they will take care of your military expenditure. At the same time, I kept limited economic aid from the USSR/Cuba by going behind the foreign minster's back. There is a kind of glitch/omission here: even though the US will funnel endless money into your military, they will only ever give limited economic aid because you have leftist land reform and are doing business with the commie countries. You'll never get more than "apologies" from the US ambassador after that. But they still take care of your military bill, so it's all good. The lack of a civil war means no cuts in subsidies from the Eurofags and loads of that sweet IMF debt slavery. In the final year, most domestic events simply repeat themselves, so I used the opportunity to take some anti-communist positions in the UN.

The final verdict of this game acknowledged that I successfully held the centre ground and empowered small-size land owners. It also credits me for giving technical support to the farmers' cooperatives, so that the land reform did not harm exports. It claims that "the peasants were unable to grow enough food", but the graph in the game itself showed malnutrition going way down so I don't know what's up with that. Probably another limitation (it's a game from 1988, after all!). The final verdict also credited the health and literacy achievements and maintaining a minimum wage and allowing unions to organise (although I didn't indulge them further than that). It also mentioned the growing debt and lack of infra investments.

Given the deliberate difficulty of the game and there not being a real win state, I consider this one of the best results possible. Guess land reform really does kinda matter in a shithole banana republic where the webbed-toed incestuous land owners ran everything first.

 

The graphs mostly don't matter that much. You mostly want to avoid bankruptcy, riots, and getting ousted. And bankruptcy and riots are only temporary obstacles. The infra, land distribution, education, trade policy, etc mostly are too long-term things to really affect you during the game outside of keeping the various factions happy. Beyond that it's just deciding what flavor text you want to go for at the end. The game never gives you exact numbers either, it's all about seeing the graphs bend by some fuzzy pixels, I'm not so sure the actual variables the game tracks for outcomes are directly linked to the graphs at all.

Simplest way to get money is from development aid, you want to keep getting money from both sides as long as possible to maximize profits. I'm not exactly sure how the military/coup stuff works - if I get military aid from USA, and then later Col. Ehrlich goes guerilla, did that military aid make me have more forces, make the guerillas have more forces (and higher chance of coup) or does it matter at all? Is avoiding coup just about keeping everyone moderately happy, or also about limiting their power?

I did play a few rounds now, it seems that it's clearly better to go lefty on the agricultural things, since going cotton capitalist doesn't give you shit for money no matter what, but land reform or cooperative farms seems to actually help with food production. How you deal with the city laborers rights, doesn't seem to really matter, so restricting their rights in turn to keep the money men and USA happy seems to make sense. And everybody's on board with corruption reduction initiatives (at least part of them are non-partisan), though who knows if they effect anything at all except the ending slide you get.

 

I think I had found an another way to survive and perhaps even thrive while pursuing what you could call a middle path:

- Starting appointments are popular stability for agricultural ministry, national liberation for internal and defense and oberon as foreign minister
- Get gibs from IMF, Kwa and economic only aid from USSR to start
- Encounter the rights activist and the bishop to start the civil war ASAP - it pleases Khorne (and presumably the two coup-capable commies)
- Override the libertardian agricultural minister to distribute state farms to coffee farmers
- Establish food rationing
- Leave export producers as sole credit receivers
- Let PS minister put peasants demanding land reform in prison
- Make food rationing more efficient by visiting the NL-controlled Defense and Internal ministries, I think overriding the PS minister too much can trigger a coup
- Go through corruption chain with Agricultural minister, for the same reason
- The Defense minister has to be replaced with a CR guy when Correa starts pestering you to establish draft in order to avoid it
- Steer clear of Nationalism topic, I think you can get elections by visiting the Kwa embassy anyway
- In general just kill time by encountering irrelevant people like the rights activists

I actually didn't get even coup attempts while pursuing this strategy. Economy does ok, I think I managed to get the currency reserves higher than debt once. I guess it could be made more efficient by cracking down on labour rights to get more yankee gibs.

 

How does securing the election integrity work? It seems whatever order you give, the goons interpret it to fuck up the opposition. Not that that matters if you win.

 

Very topical question! I think it's all bullshit. Even if you're the Christian Reform candidate, your Christian Reform ministers will suggest asking for campaign funds from the US. I don't know if it's even possible to have an election without the opposition withdrawing due to "intimidation".

 

You can do a more-or-less fair election but everyone (except a few European/UN officials) will accuse you of fraud and intimidation anyway