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Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator is a turn-based strategy game about playing as Israel. The year is 1997 and the former Prime Minister has just been assassinated, leaving you in charge. With full control over the country's diplomatic, intelligence, and military capabilities, your goal is to navigate the realpolitik of the Middle East to achieve your goals. All the while, you must address the Palestinian conflict, compete in nuclear arms races, look good to the United States and United Nations, balance your military buildup against internal dissent and economic development, and manage military deployments and weapons procurement.

There are quite a few differences between the original and the remake:

In the original game, your goal is bring down the governments of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan before they do it to you first. In the remake, your goal is to get re-elected, which in turn can be helped by fulfilling randomized campaign promises ranging from the elimination of a certain country from the game, to preventing them from having a nuclear weapon, to democratizing a nation, and so on.

In the original, military expansion is done through two methods: decision at the end of each year to add 2 infantry brigades to the Israeli army, as well as purchasing military equipment from foreign countries, with more advanced equipment becoming available as a reward for repeated purchases. In the remake, there is no distinction between "brigades" and equipment, with all unit types produced domestically.

It has a Let's Play here. Someone recently made a freeware Fan Remake of the game, which is available for download here.


This game contains examples of the following tropes:

  • Assassination Attempt: When a country's insurgents are sufficiently strong, you can call for the assassination of the their leader. If this succeeds, it will bring about the collapse of the country a turn or two sooner than would otherwise happen, which might be important if you happen to be losing a war with them at the time. If the attempt fails, however, Israel will be condemned for planning terrorist action, and the insurgents will be left in disarray, delaying the defeat of that country.
  • As the Good Book Says...: When you first launch the game, it randomly selects some flavor text to display before showing the main menu. One of them quotes Revelation 8:7:
    The first angel blew his trumpet,
    and there followed hail and fire,
    mixed with blood, which fell on the earth;
    and a third of the earth was burnt up,
    and a third of the trees were burnt up,
    and all green grass was burnt up.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Nuclear weapons are a literal instant-win button for any war you're fighting, and the game even congratulates you once research on them is finished, but every time they get used there's a chance to trigger a global nuclear war and instantly lose the game. This can be particularly frustrating if Iran or Iraq develop nuclear weapons while fighting each other, as the failstate can be triggered even if you're not the one using them. The only defense against this is to keep Middle East tension low since the chance to trigger a nuclear war scales to it, but given the goal of the game this is difficult at best. In addition, because nuclear weapons can cause an instant loss of the game, actually using them generally means you've seriously screwed up or been the victim of horrific luck elsewhere, such as having a war with Egypt before your conventional forces are enough to hold them off.
  • Blatant Lies:
    • Newspapers will often misrepresent who the aggressor is in a conflict. For example, even if you've done absolutely nothing to antagonize Syria, you can see headlines blaming Israel, such as "Hostility towards Syria ups Middle East tension" or "Syrian border towns fear Israeli army presence".
    • The game itself can do this. If a war you're involved in results in nuclear holocaust, the leadership analysis screen will say, "As the world is drawn into a nuclear holocaust by your actions, you wonder if you could have served mankind any better." This statement is shown even if you did nothing to provoke the war and Israel was on the receiving end of the nuke.
  • The Chessmaster: Any player who wins the game.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Without help from another country, Lebanon or Libya are immediately flattened if they get involved in a war.
  • Democracy Is Flawed: In the remake, your constituency is generally a pain in the tail, having opinions about politics and other countries that usually have nothing to do with the facts on the ground, and they're also jingoists who want you to fight and conquer other countries and don't at all take kindly to peace negotiations; giving the Palestinians independence will particularly drive them bananas. On the other hand, spreading democracy is probably the best way of spreading peace throughout the Middle East.
  • Eagleland:
    • In the original game, America is clearly on the side of peace, freedom for Palestine and, if you haven't gotten too nasty, Israel.
    • In the remake, America's foreign policy is comparatively incoherent (fittingly). Their role in the Middle East is still to funnel aid into Israel's defense, and they like it when Israel spreads democracy, fights Islamists, frees the Palestinians and avoids striking first. However, America also dislikes Israel forming alliances with Arab powers, and their own foreign policy toward each Arab state is randomized for every game; failing to maintain similar relations with each country will cap the possible amount of aid America will send...but they'll lose interest in a country if it's toppled. They also have no Moral Event Horizon, and can forgive anything with enough time (assuming that you care). invoked
  • Enemy Civil War: One way to take out an enemy country is to destabilize it until it collapses into civil war. In the remake, though, a civil war will create a refugee crisis and hurt your popularity unless you toppled the government directly by assassinating the leader or sparking a democratic coup.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • If Israel has a military pact with country A, and subsequently goes to war with country B which borders country A, country A will reduce relations with country B until they declare war in order to help you. This does not stop you from funding insurgent groups within country A to orchestrate its eventual overthrow. Other countries, of course, may do the same to you.
    • In the remake, every Arab country (all potentially your enemies) has a democratic opposition and an Islamic opposition. The democrats are your friends, while the Islamists hate you even more than the autocrats who govern the Arab states do. You can disrupt the Islamist movement to preserve the autocrat's government (either to preserve an ally, or to keep an enemy from collapsing too quickly and under poor conditions), but you can also support them if bringing down an enemy is more important than keeping your people and America happy, such as when Egypt is about to overrun Israel.
  • Failed Future Forecast: The Soviet Union still exists in this game, and Iran seldom goes hardline.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: It's possible for the game to freeze after the winning player turn, so the victory screen isn't displayed. It doesn't always happen, but if it does... you had better have a savefile.
  • Godzilla Threshold: Because nuclear weapons have a high chance to trigger an instant failstate every time they are used (due to causing a nuclear war), it is generally only a good idea to use them when are facing imminent defeat in a war, which is also one of the failstates.
  • Irrevocable Order: Unusually for a turn-based war simulator, the only orders you can take back once you've made them are decisions about diplomatic actions and insurgency, and then only if you haven't moved on from the foreign policy screen. All other decisions, including dropping a nuke on someone, can't be changed, even if you haven't advanced to the next month yet. Depending on game conditions, some decisions can be reversed the following month without serious consequences, but others cannot.
  • La RĂ©sistance: Every country in the game can have an opposition party or rebel group. They can either be supported in hopes of destabilizing the government, or disrupted in order to protect a foreign government. Strong insurgencies will gradually weaken whatever country they're in, but once either they are powerful enough or the government weak enough you can "consider extreme measures" in the Intelligence screen to either launch an assassination attempt or a coup to try to instantly plunge them into anarchy or civil war. Internally, Israel must deal with the Palestinians, either by eliminating countries that incite them, using a brigade of soldiers to police them, or creating a Palestinian state at the United Nations. It's worth noting that the player must also deal with dissent from Israeli citizens, who will remove you as Prime Minister (and thus lose the game) if military spending gets too high or wars go on for too long.
  • Mood Whiplash: When you succeed at building a nuclear weapon:
    Israel is now a nuclear power. Have a nice day.
  • Moral Event Horizon: In-Universe, in the original game, it's almost impossible to recover your reputation after nuking someone, restricting you from Western arms imports and American subsidies.
  • Next Sunday A.D.: The game starts in 1996, after the Prime Minister of Israel has been assassinated. The game itself was made in 1990, before Yitzhak Rabin took office.
  • Realpolitik: Conflict is the literal name of the game, and your only goal in the original is to destroy all your neighbors by any means necessary, or else be destroyed yourself. All alliances and friendships made are only temporary measures to buy time until you they either get nuked, invaded, or overthrown by an insurgency. Diplomacy is literally nothing more than the option to either improve relations (to keep a country off your back while you eliminate others or build yourself up) or worsen relations to justify going to war. The closest thing to a constant ally you have in the game is the US which gives a military aid package once a year, and even still they have their own interests and will refuse to help if you anger them through provocative actions against your neighbors.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: There are some bothersome typos in the game's text at times.
  • Rule of Escalating Threat: The four countries in the original game you must defeat to win are Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, in ascending order of threat and more or less how they are eliminated.
    • Lebanon is almost always the first or second country to go, as it is so unstable it will simply collapse on its own in many if not most games... that is, if Syria doesn't invade it first.
    • Jordan doesn't usually develop nuclear weapons and borders 3 countries (Israel, Iraq, and Syria) that both often do and have much stronger conventional militaries anyway. Their political stability is enough that causing them to collapse requires direct support of insurgents, but its just as workable an option as conventional warfare or waiting for a neighbor to take them out.
    • Syria is a country whose military is roughly equal to Israel's, but it borders the powerful Iraq, which sometimes gets into fights with Syria or Jordan on its own. Even better, Iraq can often be made into an ally, which only eases this process of elimination. It can sometimes be brought down by insurgencies if your support them long enough.
    • Finally, Egypt's government is so strong and stable that supporting insurgencies usually doesn't work (or takes a very long time), and has both a military around twice the size of Israel's and a strong tendency to pursue nuclear weapons. Defeating them requires either surviving long enough to develop a more powerful military, which in turn requires maintaining good enough relations to avoid war while also destroying their nuclear research installations to prevent them from simply nuking you once war starts (and this decreases relations), or developing nuclear weapons of your own, which carry a high chance of instantly causing the global nuclear war failstate every time they are used.
  • Tactical Withdrawal:
    • A common strategy employed when Lebanon decides to go to war with you while you're elbows deep in another war. Since Lebanon is typically weak enough to be defeated by a single brigade, you can withdraw one from the front and send them at Lebanon instead.
    • Sometimes you might choose to pick a fight with one country by parking troops on their border, then find that the next month, another, stronger country has decided to pick a fight with you. If relations with the first country haven't deteriorated too much, you can pull your troops from that front and redeploy them elsewhere, and the other country will usually respond by withdrawing their troops, as well.
  • Won the War, Lost the Peace: Winning a war might bring prestige, but if you're perceived as being the aggressor, it will sour Israel's relationship with the West. This can lead to an arms embargo and reduction or elimination of the annual U.S. aid package. The conquered nation may also have an angry and much stronger ally.
  • You Nuke 'Em: Once you have developed nuclear weapons, you can drop them on any country with which you are currently at war, which leads to their immediate surrender. This is not without consequence: the action could lead to a nuclear holocaust, which is an instant game over. Even if that doesn't happen, Israel's relationship with the U.S. will tank, and you'll immediately be hit with an arms embargo.
  • Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Averted. The names of the insurgencies are just flavor text and the real-world causes they fight for are not relevant to gameplay as the result of victory is the same in every country. In keeping with the realpolitik of the game, opposing political parties and terrorists are just another tool for countries to attack each other, with victory for any group resulting in destruction of a country regardless of its real-world goals or ideology.
  • Zerg Rush: Light tanks can easily be spammed, costing only $1 million each, half as much as main battle tanks. Depending on your military budget, anywhere from 100-400 can be purchased every single turn, and in batches of thousands every time you get US aid in the billions.

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