Crisis in the Kremlin: The Cold War

It's a very nice game in many aspects but it's ruined by the "mathcracy" and punishment philosophy this company has. 1. For example events are incredibly extreme, sometimes they just tank 20 variables while mildly improving 1 and that's it. In early game if you have a certain cabinet or starting leader even saying "Ignore" to the americans is enough to make them lower the DEFCON value because the game doesn't even try to read the context and rigidly reads mathematical values and apply random numbers on top of that, it's schizophrenic. There are also an obscene amount of modifiers for every minuscule choice when a "more is less" approach would vastly improve pacing and readability. 2. Your run, without reading guides, will probably randomly end when the game decides you were having too much fun and let your budget explode creating apparently unmotivated death spirals. If you want to make a difficult game, that is based on replayability but isn't annoying or number heavy, and in which you can immediately know why you entered in a death spiral, check Social Democracy by Autumn Chen. Runs here take way too much time to punish the player with a death spiral this big and quick. 3. Eng…

Majority of the gameplay is you being stun-locked. Spam events every 2-3 days where you have to drop Political Power (PP) to get off the event, but you're at -100, so you stay stuck with no PP to spend on any of the "good" event options. Or fix the economy. Or combat the radicals. Or even sign a damn trade agreement. Best part of this is that you'll be going through a fantastic run until September 1986 and all it takes is 3 or 4 conspiracies ripening up together and you end up trapped in a death spiral with no PP watching everyone rip the country apart in 1987. All because they have to be UNGODLY STINGY with Political Power. I get what they're trying to do. You're supposed to be frugal with your PP and make hard decisions. But that DOESN'T WORK when you're spammed with PP-leeching events day after day after day and have absolutely NO agency in budgeting it. Seems like a good concept for a game, but frustrating and tiring to actually engage with. Only good point I have is the music and the art. Otherwise, just another steaming pile of unrealistic and unreasonable crap.

Great game. The UI keeps getting better and better, more and more transparent. That was the biggest criticism I had before, and the devs are clearly aware of that and are working on it.

An excellent political sim. Like a Paradox game without all the nonsense

Red Alert

Real Communism is when 70 hour work week