My Heart of Iron: Part 2: 2 March, 1936.

So, the country seems to be ticking over fairly well. The only worrying thing is that the dissent value seems to be very slowly crawling upwards. That can’t be good. Turns out it isn’t good, as it means that my national production goes down as that number goes up. Basically, that means that unless I can make the population happy, my production is going to collapse, along with my economy and military strength.

Checking the production screen, I notice that my ICU (production) unit is slowly falling as well. Well, I reasoned, what is it that people like. Consumer goods, right? Radios, food, fridges all that kind of stuff. So I cut production in everything else. That means unit upgrades, reinforcements, supplies, everything but consumer goods. How communist of me. My production collapses, nothing is being built. My technology was rapidly improving, but I couldn’t apply any of it to my units. On the plus side, dissent did start to fall. By 0.10% every day. Not the huge drop I had been hoping for but it’s a start.

Then another disaster strikes. Riots. Several of them, at the same time. Obviously my government was so unpopular by this point that the country was about to collapse into anarchy. But I sent in the police and army, managing to quell them at great monetary cost. Checking the politics screen, I had a look at the pie-chart representing the popularity of the different parties. I couldn’t even see the Stalinist Communist Party. That couldn’t be good. I eventually found our 1% share of the popularity, and as far as I could tell most people hated our secret police minister, understandably perhaps. Unfortunately, I can’t replace him as there are no other candidates. Brilliant. I’m just going to have to hope that I can lower dissent enough to be able to gain some control over the situation again.

1937 arrives. One year I’ve been running Russia for now, and all I’ve managed to do is alienate the entire population, drive production into the ground, make loads of money and increase our level of technology by unfathomable amounts. A small alert appears on my screen. I hover over it. The Great Purge. Hmm.

Collection: http://mouseclicksandmovingpics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/my-heart-of-iron-collection.html