YMMV / Rebel Inc.

• Breather Level:
  • Distant Steppe, the fifth map, has fewer dirt road regions than Pistachio Forest, so it's much easier to move your army units to deal with threats. Also, all of the urban centers are very close to each other, so it's easy to bring them under your control early.
  • Certain modifiers, during either the weekly challenges or randomly during campaign mode, makes the game much easier. Examples include: Having no Corruption (ignoring the reputation loss, and saving money from costly anti-corruption endeavors); no Inflation (everything is significantly cheaper and can be purchased more swiftly); Funded initiatives (particularly if those initiatives are expensive like roads or electricity), or destroying Insurgent Camps turning into Garrisons (Basically having a free, if stationary, soldier).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The variety of governors (with the exception of the civil servant, who doesn't add any modifiers) mostly offer some gimmick mechanics that, while useful, require extensive practice, and can be outright detrimental to your performance if you fail to understand them... except for the General. His upgrades, while not possessing the same potential, are simple and straight to the point. The long list of military buffs he receives makes him absurdly efficient at not just holding the ground against the insurgents, but fighting them back. Once he's unlocked, good lucky trading the benefits troops under his command receive for anything else.
  • While this can easily stop being the case for the general in higher difficulties, due to the increased civilian initiative cost, the Smuggler can also lead to this, as his ability to speed up soldier training and obtain extra cash from them can very well allow one to mobilize an effective defense faster without compromizing civilian spending, as long as they are willing to delay going on the offensive.
  • Picking the International Assistance operation & paying the very small cost to reduce it's corruption impact is a real life saver, when you're strapped for cash just defending against the insurgents and keeping corruption down, their free upgrades are exceptionally helpful in the early & middle game.
• Game-Breaker: In campaign mode, some upgrades can absolutely destroy the challenge associated with it. For example, the "Gold Standard" completely removes inflation which makes it easy for the Economist or the Banker to have HUGE spending sprees with only corruption as a concern, giving you valuable time to gain support and stabilize regions against the insurgents. There's an extra layer of entertainment when the map has "Inflation increases dramatically." as a negative.
  • The Billionaire as a whole can also be this. Facilitators can destroy insurgents without even needing support, let alone encirclement, and moreover unlike coalition soldiers they never leave. The downside to this is that they cost money... which is easily more than overcome with the Investment Portfolio's ridiculous - and reusable - return on investment that blows even the normal funding ticks out of the water, which by the way you get as well. One might imagine this is to balance juggling funding with civilian initiative, but that's almost completely covered by the Billionarie's personal N.G.O. Superpower of a charity operation, which not only invests in initiatives faster than normal, but does so completely corruption-free, meaning that for the most part it can be safely ignored while you literally pay people to f**k off faster than even a full-size army of nine units can wage guerilla war. On lower difficulties the typical outcome is literally running out of initiatives to fund as the Money for Nothing rolls in and the region steadily flips to green. The one actual downside is that the Billionarie doesn't get events to reinvest excess funding over 100 into charities (which he owns anyway) or the military (which he doesn't form).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Rebel Inc is effectively a game about the United States bringing Afghanistan under their control, with the developer even meeting with Afghan officials in Europe to discuss the situation while making the game. The war took place in real life from 2001 to 2021. The key elements of winning the game are to reduce corruption, keep insurgents bottled up with large forces including a significant element comprised of highly trained local units and to improve the ability of locals to access modern infrastructure. In real life, after the United States failed to convince the Taliban to hand over Osama Bin Laden in early in the war, the country spent the next 20 years gripped by cancerous corruption that hollowed out any positive improvements, with an pseudo-army that didn't bother fighting once the Americans left, and former President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country with $150 million in stolen US Dollars. The Opium Trail level takes it further, as opium was a major source of funding for the Taliban while they were in exile, and while in that level keeping control of it is vital to victory, the US despite multiple attempts of varying success, failed to stop or even meaningfully limit the opium trade in Afghanistan.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Players have often complained about how difficult to exterminate and persistent the Insurgents are. Considering it's basically the entire crunch of the gameplay, it's a somewhat silly complaint.
  • The initial roll-out of the Campaign mode and its modifiers has lead to numerous complaints about totally unbeatable levels on Normal and Brutal difficulties. The key issue is how there are certain modifiers that the insurgents can get that make it all but impossible to win.

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