Ashes of Empire: Survival Horror Political Sim

Such a strange design, pipe going off horizontally, then just stopping for a small pipe down.

Last time I was heading towards a Pump Head to get unlimited food for the province of Moldenia I was in. This turns out to be quite simple, because all the guy in charge of it wants is food. Giving food to get unlimited food seems like cheating the system, even if it's only in this province. Every problem's going to have to repeat itself over time. 

Next up, there's an administrative block here, which I need to blow up. Because of the way attacks work, I need to leave my previous vehicle, order up a bomber, blow it up, exit the bomber, then return to my previous vehicle. There's no special attack there, it's just point and shoot. Like a gun, not even a missile. I suppose not having to aim that much is good news.

Mezzanine floor feels like a bit too purple for this game.

I continue south, and find myself at Yevrograd, which has a refinery, which with an oil well I get unlimited fuel in this province. I haven't seen an oil well just yet, but that should mean I have no problems replacing vehicles. Should, being the operative word, since there might be a component beyond vehicle + fuel for airdropping them. I can't see one from where I'm at, so that'll have to wait.

No wonder we're trying to save this place if they've built habitable underwater cities!

 But I do spot a town in the middle of the lake, which has several useful facilities and no enemies nearby. Which is fairly important considering that once I get near to the eye of evil, I'm going to be fighting wall-to-wall enemies. So I go south, and forget to consider that the game didn't just set the town in the middle of a lake, it's underwater. Damn it, Singleton, why did you add underwater towns to your realistic Yugoslavic conflict game? You were doing so well. This really is a reskinned Midwinter 2.

Down the coast is an Admin Block, and I still have a bomber, so that's a good choice. Just a nice, gentle, flight, identify the building, easy enough because the other options are a Loading Dock and a Mosque, blow up the block, and check the others for what they can offer. Loading Dock wants a barrel of wine for a ton of goods, Loading Dock gets a barrel of wine. Now what? Therein lies the trouble, because while I have an unlimited amount of air vehicles, I don't have unlimited air drops and there's no other way to get your unlimited vehicles. So I really need to find that oil well or I'm going to have to use the batteries I've picked up a supply of to get something to fight my way through the horde of enemies.

It's a bit odd seeing backgrounds which seemingly have no relation to what's going on around things.

I go north two towns, one only had a farmhouse, to Crokrara. Where there's a Well Head, which is the aforementioned oil well. Did I misread Well Head as oil well or did the game mess with me? I'll probably figure it out eventually. I of course, negotiate for it, simply because I also have to wait for the Captain of Works. I manage to negotiate myself both the Well Head and the Pump Head while waiting. Unfortunately, the Captain of Works wants a military team, and I'm out of those.

There's no fatigue, like Midwinter, so I can run across the entire country if I wanted. Like an European version of Africa Trail.

My next course of action is to head northwest, to Prernalsk, a town with a Depot. At this point, two bad things happen. Despite having unlimited fuel and aircraft, I can't have another airdrop, guess I need to track down another factory or something. The second is my bomber blows up. This may be related to how I don't seem to get what I needed in a moment. As I have to destroy the Depot, this presents a big problem. I can get there in a reasonable amount of time, but I can't do much other than just negotiate for places I've already won. There's no way to get more vehicles if I'm out of airdrops, short of running up to a tank and using a ECM battery, which when I have to run there, sounds unfun. I really hate to resort to this so soon, but I foresee if I try to restart the game this is just going to turn into a series of restarts until I get sick. In other words, time to cheat, this time, hex editing, since I can't negotiate airdrops any other way.

From top left, emergency medical treatment, firefighting teams, batteries, time before partisans attack, military teams, air drops.

Giving myself 255 airdrops is trivializing an important aspect of the gameplay...but if I lose this game I kind of want it to be because I did something wrong and not because I fumbled my resources without realizing this was a survival horror political sim. Actually, that might be on me. Now that I can actually move, I start taking out buildings I need to take out, dodging most of the enemy patrols on the north side of the circle, since most enemies can't hit planes, they just sort of follow me.

Despite being Eastern European, there sure are a lot of Italian, French and English names around here.

Heading north, towards where I started, I discover a couple of Well Heads, which I thankfully don't crash into this time. I basically just grab any Processing Plants or Pumping Stations I missed, and take out any Depots or Barracks I didn't before. After a while, the distance between towns starts becoming more and more pronounced as I start exploring the northwest side of the province. Enemies are there, but scarce enough and not in fighters or AA vehicles, so my bomber is safe enough. I meet an Ossian nurse, who gives me the needed votes to solve that side of the voting equation.

Come to think of it, there's probably more guys over there, but why tempt fate?

Deciding I need to better figure out this part of the area, I head to a radar station on the lake. That seems to reveal the rest of the towns and enough of the enemy forces that I don't need to worry about getting another. There's nothing I need on the western side anyway, and when I eventually move on, I'm headed south anyway. Some of the purple dots over water are enemies. Which means they're basically irrelevant to my objectives, underwater towns don't have build objectives and I don't need to kill them to advance. That means...it's time to go east. Well, first a bit of bombing, then the big fight.

Radar is actually the most important way of detecting enemies, light red are flying enemies, bright red are ground enemies.

It's not quite like Midwinter 2. There's more consideration than just circling around pressing the fire button until everything near you is dead. You can crash into other vehicles, which renders this tactic dangerous. Aiming, on the other hand, is easier and enemy numbers are usually modest...which actually results in encounters being longer, since you have to gun them all down over a longer period.

You get two weapons, missiles and gun. Missiles are fire and forget if you've aimed them well enough. Enemy missiles hit them, but you are limited by firing rate, not number of projectiles on-screen. In a confrontation, you win...assuming you have superior ammo. Even knowing where they are ahead of time thanks to the radar, they'll still be a threat if you shoot just one missile, you need to drop a couple. The gun's surprisingly easy to aim, even against flying enemies. You just have to make sure you aren't in a circling pattern. Which despite the great speed at which you can go, is hard to avoid doing if you mess up the initial salvo.

Then there are friendly assault groups, which do take out some enemies, but you can't really rely on them, you have to be using them as a supplement. So you can't use them to take out ground units while you're in a fighter, you have to be taking out ground units with them. Considering that this game runs off of limited resources, they're not much good. Less cost effective than just burning through the ammo yourself, or heck, just taking a shot and having to spend a couple hours in the hospital.

The battle lasts for in-game days. I'm reluctant to switch to the map, so sometimes I get away from the enemy group I'm trying to take down. They never retreat until they're down to the last man. It's grueling, but by day 3, I decide I should clear out around a town. Seriously, you spend so much time chasing down enemies that you end up having to run back to the primary group and it's just a lot. It's not even grinding down the enemy numbers I need to pacify that much, when it starts really thinning out I still have work to do.

Still, I take a break to go to Stotroran, which has some mostly unnecessary buildings. At this point I view food and a barrel of wine as nothing worth holding back. Pretty sure I don't have unlimited wine, but it sure feels like it. The most important of what I grabbed is a Communications Centre, which allows me to see all the professionals in the area. Which I'll need to fill out the votes, nearly there, but I think I need it for the building programme. Seems like there aren't 9 forts around on the map. One of the guys I spotted was an Engineer Builder, so I go there.

And he doesn't have anything I want. There's a certain irony in him offering me the kind of building I do not need at all, since there are more than double the number of Control Towers I need. The votes are a little important, but for what else he's offering, I'm not buying it. The other guy...also offers a Control Tower. Is nobody going to offer to build a Fort? Well, at least the area is starting to be clear enough for me to fly around with a little freedom. There's still a big chunk under enemy patrol, but I'm cutting through.

Reagan was wrong, these are the nine most terrifying words in the English language.

I finally reach into one of the more central towns and meet this fine Doctor. The votes and the treatment don't matter. The only thing that matters is that this guy is the answer to everything I've been avoiding for the past two entries. The big battle. And it isn't even the answer, because I should have just run past the hordes and headed for a town. Because that way I wouldn't have to grind them all down. Equal parts genius and cruel. If I had just headed this way to begin with, so many problems that I had would have been solved. Not the lack of forts thing, that much I can't avoid, but this. I'm impressed.

Next time, I don't know if I'm going to restart or just keep on. In favor of restarting, I'm just now on day 10, and I'm not that close to solving the province. Most of the building programme is unfinished, but the other three need a little push to finish. As I said in the introduction, since I have a time limit of 150 days, that means that spending more than 10 days in a small province like this one is setting myself up for the doom spiral. If I do it again, I'll know where to go to deal with the big ticket things, but am I really going to be doing this for all 15 or so provinces I'll have to go through to win the game? It doesn't help that most of the places that have obvious designs are not that important. Churches and Mosques give you extra time before partisans attack, only one Well Head is needed for fuel, the rest are blocks of varying designs. I keep having to stop to check my targets, which means getting out of my plane, getting within entering range, then returning.

Bear in mind, restarting feels like the only thing I can do, since you only get one save slot short of copying the save elsewhere. I get the feeling this was either intended to force games to be played without restoring outside of extraordinary circumstances or for the player to go through long periods of the game without saving. Technically you can save scum, but some situations make it less useful than others. To have multiple saves, I need to physically copy the save folder to somewhere else.

This Session: 3 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 4 hours 20 minutes