Negotiation Tactics by Cosmologicon

[raw]
made by Cosmologicon for LD32 (COMPO)
Strategy game with some timing elements. I knew I'd made it too hard, but it's even harder than I thought. See below for tips and cheats.

Use the mouse. Esc to pause/quit. Chrome recommended.

I challenged myself to take the theme in a different direction than anyone else, while still deriving the core mechanic from my interpretation. Thus I came up with "U.N. Convention on All Weapons". In this game you play as a group of supervillain lobbyists who think that banning weapons will put them out of business (they wouldn't want to break the law!), and are willing to go to great lengths to see that the treaty does not get passed.

Each country has a vote leaning: negative (red), neutral (gray), or positive (blue). You lose if the number of positive countries is ever more than the number of negative countries. All countries start out on the negative end and increase over time. Use actions to bring them back into the red. Some actions also affect every country bordering the one you use them on. Countries with maxed out positive leanings will influence neighboring countries upward.

Timing is important. Since they all go up at the same rate, many countries will turn gray or blue at the same moment.

Guide for Region 1 (Multinesia): start by blackmailing all 5 countries right away. Wait for them to go into the gray and almost blue, then bribe 3 of them. Let the other 2 go blue, and keep getting money from those 2, but continue to bribe the other 3 to keep them in the red until the timer runs out.

Cheat/unlock:
F1-F6: level select on title screen
F8: get money within a level
F9: beat level

Ratings

Coolness 32% 1952
Overall 3.16 570
Audio 2.50 631
Fun 2.79 779
Graphics 3.00 579
Innovation 3.89 90
Theme 4.16 49

Feedback

handkor
20. Apr 2015 · 03:03 UTC
Nice one "U.N. Convention on All Weapons", very creative.
leffe108
20. Apr 2015 · 22:27 UTC
Interesting concept although in the end it seems all about moving your mouse as fast as possible. Though I may have missed some more details as I did not make it past the first level.
leffe108
20. Apr 2015 · 22:29 UTC
Also to add: when I first clicked this game when I was on my phone at the bus, it loaded to 70 % and then did not start on an iPhone with iOS 8 (using the default safari browser).
Nomys_Tempar
21. Apr 2015 · 18:01 UTC
I liked how you twisted the theme.
I don't know if that's me or what but I find your game very difficult (that's why you add cheats I guess).
Mekuri
21. Apr 2015 · 20:35 UTC
I really liked the idea, but I found the game immensely difficult. I tried for about 20 minutes just to beat the first level, and I always failed around day 5 from the voting. Might be me that suck or missed something. I did not want to use cheats, as.. well I don't like them.

My difficulties aside I found myself enjoying the game, good job.
Tortoise
23. Apr 2015 · 03:35 UTC
Clever twist on the theme. I wish there was more to it than just making sure you were bribing everyone until you needed to reduce votes.
OnlySlightly
23. Apr 2015 · 03:36 UTC
Interesting concept. It almost felt like a eurogame. Great job!
chikun Dev Team
23. Apr 2015 · 03:37 UTC
Interesting strategy approach to the theme, but definitely coming a little too strong with the concept - a tutorial may elucidate the proper strategy to win in this game. The moving bars as well didn't really provide a proper gauge of how well I was doing in each region.
TeamQuadratic
23. Apr 2015 · 03:46 UTC
Difficult, but interesting and fun. Nice twist on the theme.
rjhelms
23. Apr 2015 · 03:46 UTC
Really cool concept - I love seeing strategy games in Ludum Dare, and the progressive mechanics introduced on each level were interesting.

It's really, really difficult, though - an easier rampup over the first few levels would help a lot, I think.
GTA LUDUM V
23. Apr 2015 · 03:52 UTC
Very interesting politic meta game but it's still rather difficult.
RoryD
23. Apr 2015 · 04:03 UTC
Wow, this is a really hard game. For judging purposes you probably should have tuned it down a bit. I got past the first level by just focusing on keeping 3 countries in the red. Blackmail everyone at the start to gain money, then keep three countries in red and just let the other two go blue. This is risky because there's no indicator exactly where the red to grey crossover threshold is. If any country goes grey then you lose.

I liked that it made me think about strategy quite a bit. I tried to use the cheats, but they don't work on the web version.
blubberquark
03. May 2015 · 17:48 UTC
This is either way too difficult or just way too fast. I need a pause button.