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[Donners]

Has anyone else had a situation where the game wrongly accuses you of launching a nuclear attack?

Just after Iraq defeated Kuwait (I withdrew my troops due to plunging popularity), my Press Secretary walked out and I was getting condemnation left, right and centre for nuking Kuwait. Then China nuked the US!

It's not possible to accidently do this - it takes three clicks to launch a nuclear attack, and I know I didn't do that. Some sort of bug?

It's a definite bug, I've found it a few times.

[digitCruncher]

Great game!! I love it already. There are a couple of issues / questions I have however...

#1: During peace-time my ambition heads downwards. HARD. In fact global ambition is often between 1 and 2 (I am 2.3, making America one of the most ambitious countries in the world), EXCEPT for the Middle East, which has ambition, quite often, maxed out. How do I increase my ambition, or is the only way to declare war, or have a terrible economy? [Edit] I know WHY my ambition is slumping: Its all the trade / cultural / diplomatic missions I am doing... [/Edit]

#2: I want to strengthen ties with the economic hotspots of the world... how do I find out who has a strong economy??

#3: Is it possible to find out Police State Level / Peace Level WITHOUT doing a mission?

#4: Is it just me, or is the Great Britian <-> American alliance VERY weak??

#5: I want more Humantitarian Aid, and less Nuclear aid (and preferrably less Military Aid). I note that the total Economic and Humanitarian Aid is less than either of the Military, or Nuclear Aid. How do I change the aid rates?? Other than NZ, I don't want any new nuclear super-powers.

Otherwise its a great game. I would have thought that Iraq losing a war would crush their ambition totally, but it didn't, so I wasted ALOT of time and effort defending Kuwait. Otherwise, there hasn't been much action ATM... China / Soviets seemed to nearly invade Japan, but they have shyed away. I am currently trying to get China to love America, by spreading tons of cultural trade deals, as well as giving them TONS of aid :P I am building up for a massive military strike on Iraq in '92, and it seems as if no-one has noticed that 800,000 troops have been deployed. As is, I will NOT declare war before the election, as there is nothing I could do to get re-elected (last time, I went down to 8% popularity in the polls... I think the only reason I didn't get assasinated was due to the fact I was cowering in the War Room :P)

Anyway, could someone answer my questions? Cheers.

[Fubb]

Shadow President is awesome..

My quality of life tanked in August 2001. I first noticed it on the second, and by the 30th it had, (by my calculations) gone down by a head numbing 2%. To quell this, I lowered the personaly tax per dollar an entire cent, hoping My people wouldn't impeach me.

I lasted until December 2nd, and when this happend, I was really mad at china, and meracusously, got CAUGHT trying to perform a coup...

I was sucked into war almost immiediatly. By this time, however, Russia came to save me And we managed to win the war, and destroy N.Korea, and Cuba..

Only to have France and Brazil launch nukes at us.

In no time at all, after numerous deaths all over the world with the never ending Nuclear war that was just started, My people tore me away from my conosle and I lost...all because I tried to fix QoL...

..Anyone know if CyberJudas (sequel to shadow) Is free?

[Fubb]

I wish in Shadow president:

1) You could be any country you like, from Qatar to the Soviet Union

2) It was multyplayer!

I'd expect someone would have made like a mod or remake of it already. Hmph

[Deavile]

OK, this is the next best thing to a fansite I've ever found, so a bit of posting seems in order.

A friend of mine and I used to play this quite a bit when we were in the West Indies. I was pretty young at the time and absolutely apeshit horrified of nuclear war, so I wasn't *quite* as bellicose as he was - but I picked up a few interesting things.

To wit: war is REALLY hard to manage properly, but it CAN be done. There are a few rules that can be exploited pretty heavily, although they're not universally true.

1) Quantity is a quality all its own. Call this Rule #1 of Shadow President. Whether intentionally or as an accidental quirk of the engine, it is almost always a better idea to do whatever it is you want to do repeatedly instead of just once. Negative consequences for any action either stop working long before the 'positives', or are so drastic that a single action isn't going to do anything near enough to justify them. Take surgical strikes, my favorite military tool. (This game, made in the wake of Stormin' Norman's absurd military campaign in Iraq - which killed a lot of innocents, but nowhere near as much as the current campaign, and had the fourth-strongest army on the planet surrendering to camera crews - clearly understands JUST how important air power is to a global superpower like the US, although a lack of any other air/sea options is disappointing.)
Surgical strikes do a number of different things: they kill what seems to be a more or less fixed number of military personnel (grumble: if only they could be programmed differently, because using air power to sweep and destroy the enemy military would be really nice), destroy a certain amount of military spending, dramatically affect social numbers in the US and wherever you hit, immediately flattens their nuclear program, etc. (More on surgical strikes in relation to society later.) The social effects are such that a single strike WILL top out military/nuclear/etc. anxieties in the target country, and likely the US. The problem is that the military effects are pretty minor.

The best solution is to press zero and launch surgical strikes until your clicking finger gets tired, then resume time and authorize every last one as they come. There's probably an ideal number - there's a certain granularity of time in Shadow President, and so many actions of a certain type in a day/week/month/whatever stop doing much, but start again after a time.

I've never had an Iraq war last longer than December.

This WILL bottom/top a lot of seriously important things: your LER is going to be in the stratosphere, but so is your ambition and anxiety. Your ethic level is going to be at rock bottom before the first week. But it's a very efficient way of getting things done.

Nukes are best used in a similar fashion - if you choose to use them at all. I've never encountered nuclear winter, but the post-nuclear world is a violent place suited only for violent men. World conquest REQUIRES nukes. There's no way to get around it, and usually the only way to create a favorable climate for conquest is through nuclear attacks.

The more peaceable options might pose more of a problem this way: rejections seem to have a bigger effect on LER than acceptance, so only do this with actions in the 80%+ range of success, or your LER is going to plummet.

There are a few options for which this obviously doesn't work - econ settings, for instance.

2) Your National Security Advisor is more important than he looks. If he dies, waging war and remaining popular will become effectively impossible. Why? Simple: country attitude.

You may have noticed that taking an action towards some countries raises your popularity (and LER, but we won't tackle that now), while doing the same with others will lower it. While there's a range of reasons for this, the one that seems dominant in the calculus to me is the country interaction attitude, or whatever the game calls it. Select country, select NSA, first or so paragraph.

It might be wise to try and compile a list of attitudes and their effects on various actions, but this much I know: surgical strikes improve popularity if and only if the target's attitude towards you is Rivalry. This is why repeated surgical strikes on Iraq can put you in the 80s-90s for approval, yet a single nuclear strike on, say, Iran (enmity) or Nigeria (competition) will pretty much shitcan you immediately (I've had drops of better than 8%, something difficult to exceed without a nuke strike).

This is actually a fairly good way to get really popular and stay really popular, as well as shooting your LER into the clouds. Bomb the bejesus out of a country who hates you, but only a lot instead of a whole bunch - Iraq, Syria, and Libya are initially good ones, although there are probably others, and I'm fairly sure others crop up over time as well. Libya is actually a pretty much ideal punching bag, they've got an extremely weak military and nobody likes them. Chad did it, and so can you! (IIRC, they have a military size >50,000, so they're a walkover after softening with military strikes anyway) Be warned that this is NOT going to work with Rivalry countries who are aligned with the USSR. Gorbachev will nuke you and you will cry. Or nuke back, but either which way you're out of office within the month.

3) The War Room has a bizarre significance that takes a little while to get used to. It's a lot easier to observe trends within it - there's a pause every 24 hours no matter what, and events happen a lot faster (no animation/sound for every international event). You are immediately apprised of any drops in popularity (I've had deaths of a thousand cuts outside of the War Room, where my popularity went down by degrees to 35% by signing too many trade agreements, without anyone saying a word about it), and obviously it's where you want to be in a war.

Additionally, and this is REALLY important: YOU ARE IMMORTAL IN THE WAR ROOM. You know how people were claiming it's impossible to essentially declare martial law/civil war in response to popularity being low enough to cause impeachment? That's how you avoid it. It's also the only way I've ever been able to see an assassination carried out by domestic agents; you can stay in the war room during an unpopular war and have your popularity plummet to 1-2%, and the moment you emerge, blam! Someone shoots you. Or, if you're really lucky, you get impeached.

I'm not 100% sure if the immortality is true of a paused simulation outside of the war room, but I'd go with no to be safe. It *might* be possible to leave the war room, perform actions, then return to your subterranean lair; I dunno. Beneath 25% or so, if you step out of the war room you're essentially a dead POTUS walking.

4) Miscellaneous observations:
*The scenarios are pretty fun, although the setup is a little different: initial 50% global LER, stuff like. And every country has different attitudes towards YOU in each one. And there's a Somali-Ethiopian war going on in each and every one, oddly enough.
*Free trade is good, but unpopular. (In the game. In real life, it sucks ass but is easy to pull off politically - but we won't get into that.) There should be a way to predict how changing trade levels will affect your LER; as far as I can tell, for popularity, more trade is always worse, and there seems to be a 1x inverse correspondance between trade levels and popularity. It took me MFNing every little country in South America to realize that; by that point, I was in the low 30s. Then I had to deal with Iraq.
*Play it as a game. The ideological/professional slant is paleocon/wonk, something that can be summed up pretty well with 60% of the budget being devoted to 'social' and social reducing GNP growth. (Ay yi yi.) Pressure for social/education reforms *reduces* spending instead of increasing it; one of the scenarios proposes a spending orgy 1981-1996 as a cause for massive US decline, Iraq as a nuclear superpower is treated as a serious option, and then there's the cute terror of Japan/Germany growing into hyperpowers and extinguishing the poor US. (Remember that? Back when Michael Crichton was writing about the menace posed by the Japanese - for him, generally evil, racist cyborgs bent on the destruction of the innocent West - instead of anybody who thinks global warming is real - i.e. ecologo-islamofascists bent on the destruction of the innocent West? Ah, good times; how innocent we were before South Africa fell to communism.) A few of the country setups are basically politically inflammatory, and the enemies of the US policy establishment at the time are all Evil Bad Ambitious Unethical Police States(TM), with few US allies getting the same treatment. As an ardent leftist I take issue with a lot of it, but I don't write it, folks - I just play it.
* It's a LOT easier to exploit a warlike world than a peaceable one. The real challenge might just be in creating Global Peace - and in this regard, SP simulates reality admirably.

5) Search through the game files. You can find a lot of stuff in there you wouldn't normally encounter. For instance, here's a list of ideologies, with a representative scenario/country for each:

Democratic Capitalism - 1990, US
Communism - 1990, USSR
Democratic Socialism - Resource Wars, Sweden (?)
Fascism - Never encountered
Democratic Islam - 1990, Egypt (?)
Fundamental Islam - 1990, Iran
Zionism - 1990, Israel {NOTE: Only seems to occur in Israel/colonies}
Imperialism - 1990, South Africa
-- index 8
Developing Capitalism - 1990, Mexico (?)
Democratic Nationalism - Resource Wars, Vietnam
Developing Centralism - Never encountered (? - might be wrong)
Centralized Islam - ? Resource Wars, Sudan?
index 13
Capitalism
Communism
Socialism
Fascism
Demo Islam
Fund Islam
Zionism
Imperialism
Environment {Seems to have been cut out; never encountered it}
Dev.Capital
Nationalism
Centralism
Cent. Islam

[Deavile]

Huh. The forum keeps on calling me Deavile. Strange.

*mutter*

[The Fifth Horseman]

You probably registered through the forum rather than the site. Go to www.abandonia.com/user and register there.

[SadisticLycan]

The first timeI played, I was assassinated. I've been hooked ever since!

[ShadowPres]

OK, now I've played this game a few dozen times and have it fairly well figured out, usually the most challenging way to play is to try and invade and hold onto as much of the world as possible without getting nuked. But (after nuking New Zealand) it's the first thing everyone does. So I'd like to share with you my strategy for building a peaceful world.

In every scenario Iraq will invade Kuwait in August 1990 so the first thing I do is go to Saudi Arabia(If SA won't allow you to place troops Kuwait or Iraq/Saudi Neutral Zone will do just as well) and Turkey and send as many troop as possible(about 2.1 mil)
if they won't allow you to send the troops try sending fewer troops to start with(even as few as 1) then up the numbers a few days later.

Then I go to the budget screen and and have a bit of fiddle with that
1) abolish sales tax
2) get rid of all investment(in the US Econ decline scenario this alone will actually increase growth as you are balancing the budget)
3) if you're not playing the US Econ decline scenario decrease taxes so the budget deficit is the same as it was before you got rid of investment. The people are now happier, you have higher growth and the budget is in the same shape.(I usually lower Corp. taxes to about 45% and then make up the difference with income tax)
4) increase foreign aid to about $50Bn, you'll need it later on.

Then I start handing out MFN trade status like there's no tomorrow.
First to any Western European country that doesn't already have it, also Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria
Then Mexico, Brazil, India and Japan. Your budget should be in better shape now.
Giving out too much MFN is dangerous to your popularity though but giving it out to developed countries doesn't seem to hurt and the other big economies are well worth the small popularity hit for the extra cash.

Next I'll usually just hit 5 and wait for Saddam to invade Kuwait
I have my troops help defend Kuwait and invade Iraq at the same time. Sometimes Turkey will help you out with some troops but don't count on it.
Immediately hit Iraq 5 or 6 times with Surgical Strikes, don't overdo this, it'll make your human right and ethic scores plummet and make it nearly impossible to get anything done later on.
Unless Iraq does it first restrict trade, it'll be a blow to their leadership effectiveness.
The war should be over by the early 1991 if not before the new year.

Typically I'd put about 500,000 troops in Iraq as an occupation force and bring the ones from Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula home. Return trade status for Iraq to Regulated or MFN.

I'd usually hang onto Iraq for a while, doing Peace Envoy and Promote Human Rights until HR has reached 'Mostly Free' and peace has reached 'Just Peace'(Use the 'Filter View'), then return Iraq to autonomy and bring the rest of the troops home.

Ok, this is where the real statesmanship begins, armed with 90+% leadership effectiveness from the victory in Iraq I start doing Peace Envoy and Promote Human Rights in South and Central America until each country has 'Just Peace' and 'Mostly Free'.
I then give all these countries MFN and Economic Aid to have them growing at 3.6%(or 4.2% whatever the green level is) or above and Social Aid in proportion to the Social Aid Needed filter.
Mexico and Brazil will take ridiculous amounts of aid to get their growth up to scratch so I'll usually leave them out of this step.
You can also win over some small countries to your team by giving military and intelligence aid(as well as nuclear but i usually wouldn't, we're trying to build a peaceful world remember)

Now you have your own backyard in order, Economic Growth at about 5% and popularity of about 60%. Now you can start worrying about what to do with the rest of the world. Use similar patterns for the rest of the world. You have a lot of credibility so you can afford the occasional little war, Libya and Syria can be a pain in the ass so invade them and set up a friendly government like you did in Iraq, North Korea is a pain also but invasion will usually result in Soviet intervention so I'd leave that alone.

A few Misc. observations

The game is very heavily geared to a free trade ideology
ie:

Lowering Tariffs is good for the economy but disastrous for your popularity, don't touch it.
Investment will never get you as much growth as an equivalent tax cut(as mentioned above you should just do away with it early on)
MFN always gives growth benefits to both countries but is unpopular if you give it to poor countries.


The game model only really works well for about 7 or 8 years then weird things start happening (It seems to happen even quicker the more you upset the status quo, eg. if you are having a lot of wars or flinging nukes about the place)

As mentioned a few times in this forum quality of life starts going a bit wacky(I have a theory about this; that one country achieves a huge increase in QofL and as it is relative to highest ever reached other countries therefore have a lower ranking despite having not gone backwards, I don't know if the game gives enough data to verify this but Avg GDP seems to not change so who knows, it is just as likely to be me over-rationalizing a bug)

Also national ideologies start changing in unpredictable ways, you quite often see Russia or China adopting imperialism and joining a team with South Africa and one or two other randoms that have decided to adopt it as well.(this is just one example, I've also seen a socialist Mexico and a few other weird things along these lines)

Hope this is useful to someone.