So, What Have We Learned From Being Kanaya?
Well, it appears that taking a bleeding heart approach and reacting to problems as they come up just doesn't work. That makes sense, it's what we've been doing in Africa since the end of the colonial era in the real world and the results have been pretty unimpressive.
So clearly I need to play to my strengths. I'm a right-wing business nerd, so time for me to get focused on technology and political stability. And then use my spreadsheet nerd skills picked up from Eve Online to figure out where the bottlenecks are in the economy and how to best resolve them. This game loves giving you plenty of figures to sort through and it appears this is one of those games where if you want to beat it, you need to get your read on in a serious way.
It would appear that funding is very much a "Use it or lose it" proposition.
I tried to see if I could save money by only hiring one agent per territory
but that was very much not the case. So much for Wu Wei in the early game. I've got no choice but to focus on stimulating the economy
if I ever want to get a hold of decent technological development.
And therein lay my problem, it turned out. I was thinking too much like a businessman and not enough like a public servant. A businessman tries to spend as little as possible so that he has a profit to further invest into the business (or give away to filthy, greedy, shortsighted shareholder bastards). Whereas a government man spends all his budget, lest it be cut the next year.
Turns out that if I have money left over, I'm supposed to recruit more agents. Trying to fix Africa with a piddly little two agents per region was never going to work.
So, that's the story of how Andrew Ryan saved Africa
by thinking out of his usual box of capitalist fuckholery.
OK, not entirely. This time I looked into the economic analysis and saw the main drain in the African economy was People's wretched state of health
. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you don't retire at 45 beause you're lazy, but rather because you're physically incapable of engaging in full time work any longer. Turns out focusing on medicine gave HDI a real shot in the arm all over, due to increased life expectancy and a healthier workforce. As usual, I am healbitch extraordinaire.
