Alternative title: Trotskyite gets put in charge, tries to push communism button, finds out the material conditions of a fucking ice age may not be conducive to declaring a final victory of the 5th internationale over Stalinism in a videogame.
My favorite quote in the article
Everyone was incredibly happy with me and all my kept promises right up until the coal ran out, which I'd kind of stopped paying attention to as I got ensnared in a thicket of political manoeuvring and ideology. I wasn't overwhelmed—the game does a good job of not bombarding you with too much information and mechanical complexity, and Stokalski says it's a conscious effort by the devs to make sure you're never "doing notes, doing maths on the side just to not die"—I'd just gotten wrapped up in ideas without paying much heed to material reality.
For a bit. You've got to give me this: Things actually went real well for a while there. Sure, the equal pay law kicked off a chain of events that saw my city's more managerial and bourgeois elements grumble and mither, but people were—mostly—quite happy under the new order.
Writer thinks socialism means everyone gets paid the same.
Wage flattening was a persistent talking point in Soviet politics and IIRC was one of the hair-brained things Gorbachev tried to implement after he ran out of Andropov's policies to continue and before he started hanging out with revisionist liberals and enacting their anticommunist agenda. It's just apart from Gorbachev Soviet policies were generally more grounded in material necessity than idealistic gestures, so even though it was a thing that was talked about no one else was foolish enough to actually try it.
Gorbachev was a comprador liberal so I take any batshit thing he tried to implement as intentional sabotage to divide the population and push towards reform.
Inexplicably, none of them were keen on building the Fifth International. The laws I wanted to pass would ensure that everyone in my city got access to basic necessities regardless of whether they worked or not, and that everyone who did work would earn the same pay, from the garbagemen to doctors.
Ergo me poking fun at them for their silly idealisms
Is this a Trotskyite or a Facebook boomer reposting a meme about Cuba
does badly in a video game because he wasn't paying attention
"Wow this really says a lot about society"
it's a conscious effort by the devs to make sure you're never "doing notes, doing maths on the side just to not die"
My spouse bought Frostpunk and it makes me laugh because it's probably the least optimized game I've ever seen. It's a game about the world being too cold and it turns your computer into a radiator
Yeah, it's hard to have short days and low temperatures and not think "damn, I should reinstall Frostpunk"
Standing in the cold with snow slowly covering me while I'm waiting for whatever bullshit of the day has in store for me really does make me think "damn, I should reinstall frostpunk"
I'm not sure it was intentional but the Secret to having a real easy run on Frostpunk 1 was to send engineers into the coal mines freely and ignore all their bitching since they're too small a faction to actually do anything
Eventually, but from the first second of the game, sending in engineers to the mines and maximizing the first circle (if you cheese it you can get everyone housed on the lowest tier on day one) are critical to a no death run.
Also never hitting the overtime button is a requirement for no death, so you really have to work the engineers early on to prevent that one story death.
Sure, for the early game engineers aren't super useful but you need them for their skills later
Yeah, and if you're going for no death then it's not really an issue. It's just impossible if you let your engineers loaf around early game when stockpiling and hitting those tier 1 upgrades are critical.
Those silly little steampunk daddy longlegs were so silly but a real pinch hitter when you played your cards right
