Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition manual
'BALANCE OF POWER' Playing Balance of Power If you are using either a mouse or a joystick as a pointing device you will only need the leftmost button. To click the button, press the button and release it. Selecting a Country. You select a country you want to focus on by opening one of the menus on the bottom menu bar (N. America, S. America, Africa, Mid East, Far East, Or Pacific). Each of these menus contains several countries. The Balance of Power World Map on this card shows which countries are under each menu title. Opening a Menu Move the pointer on the screen to the menu title you want the press the button. Keyboard: Press the Alt key and the Initial letter of the menu title. Lets say you're playing the game from the keyboard and want to make policies relating to Nicaragua by pressing the down arrow key and press enter. Then open the Make Policies menu from the keyboard by pressing Alt and M at the same time. The list of options in the Make Policies menu will appear. Once a menu is open, press the left and right arrow keys to open the other menus. Note: From the keyboard, the USSR and Europe menus can only be opened with the left or right arrow keys. (Alt U oens the USA menu: Alt E opens the Events menu.) To open the USSR or Europe menus, first press Alt and the Initial letter of any other menu title: that menu will open. To open the Games menu, for example, press Alt and G. Then press the right arrow key until the USSR or Europe menu open. Closing a menu: From the keyboard press Esc. Press the button on your pointing device. Highlighting items on a Menu: Keyboard press Alt and the Initial letter of item or up/down arrow keys. A Quick Walk-Through When the title screen appears, start a new game by selecting. The other button is used if you wish to resume a previous game. Choose the New Game button and you will see the Options screen. For now, just select and after a short wait, the game will be ready to play. The world map is playing ground. Each country is shaded to reflect the occurrence of major events within that country. Since you are playing as the President of the U.S., "pull down" or open the menu labeled USA. If you are unsure how to pull down menus and select items from a menu, see the Reference Card. The first item is Diplomatic Relationships. Choose this item;. The computer will shade each of the worlds countries to show their diplomatic relationships with the United States. If you look at Nicaragua (the middle country of the tree Central American countries) you will note that the shading indicates a cool, or hostile, relationship with the USA. You'll show them! Select Nicaragua from the North America menu. The country will turn black and its name will appear at the top of the screen. You have selected Nicaragua for further consideration. "Pull down" the menu labeled Make Policies. This menu is used to make decisions about the world. Select Aid to Insurgents. A policy options window will appear with selections ranging from no aid to a very high level of aid. Select the highest possible level of aid and then choose the Enact button. You have just issued a presidential order-you are shipping lots of weapons to the Contras. (Note that not all options may be available in a given situation. Any invalid choices will be "grayed out" and thus, inactive. The reasons will be explained later on.) Say that this is all you want to do for this turn. "Pull down" the Game menu and select Next Turn. The computer will calculate the state of the world for one year (this may take as long as a minute). The computer now takes on the role of your adversary. If the Soviet Union takes exception to your arms shipment, it may start a crisis over it. In a you always have two options: escalate or back down. Each time you escalate you bring the world closer to the brink of war. If either side escalates beyond DefCon 4, an accidental nuclear war may start. If either side goes DefCon 1, a nuclear war is certain. (DefCon is short for Defense Condition, a term which is used to indicate a state of millitary preparedness. The lower the DefCon number, the closer a country is to actually activating its forces. ) In either case, both sides lose. On the other hand, each time youback down, you lose international prestige, without which you cannot win the game. Your task is to find a balance of power between the two extremes; a task requiring strategy and foresight. When all crises are resolved and the computer has calculated the events of the year, the calendar will be advanced one year and the scores will be updated. If you have done well, your geopolitical prestige will have risen. If your prestige has fallen, you are losing. The game continues for eight years. If, at the end of that term, you and your opponent have managed to avoid a nuclear confrontation, the side with the highest prestige score wins. This is just the briefest of introductions to Balance of Power. There are many other options available from the menus that will give you more information on the state of the world. Weaken your enemies and strengthen your friends-that's all it takes. You may want to play around for a while and then read the Beginner Level section this manual before attempting your first real game. Your First Real Game You have played around with the game for a while and now you are ready to give it a go. Let's begin. Start up the game; in the Options screen, leave everything as it is: Beginner Level, Single Player, with you as the American President. Goal Your goal in this game is to increase your geopolitical prestige and weaken the geopolitical prestige of the Soviet Union. The concept of geopolitcal prestige is no difficult to understand. It's much like popularity. You want to be popular with the other nations of the world. The twist is, you want to be popular with the countries that count the most. In the world of Balance of Power geopolitics, countries that count are the countries that are militarily powerful. Thus, your goal is to ac- cumulate lots of powerful friends, and insure that your enemies are few and weak. Although prestige is akin to "geopolitical popularity," there is much more at stake here than a simple beauty contest. The nations of the world are sovereign states; they do whatever they choose to do. Your country's ability to influence the course of events is directly related to its prestige. Short of direct conquest or the exercise of raw military power, prestige is the closest a country can get to true international power. Of course, you must avoid a nuclear war while pursuing prestige. If nuclear war breaks out, you lose, no matter how well you were doing before everything was reduced to ashes. Overall Approach How do you get a country to like you? There are two ways; you can do nice things for it in an effort to convince it to like you, or you can try to overthrow its current government. The strategy you pursue depends on your relationship with the country. If relations are relatively good, you should try to buy their sympathies; if the government seems unalterable opposed to you, you should (with great regret ) seek to eliminate it. Every nation of the world is blessed with its very own insurgency. From the African National Congress in South Africa to Zapu in Zimbabwe, From the Canary Islands Liberation Front to the Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), the wonderful world of insurgency spans the spectrum of political causes. If matters not what the cause is; the primary significance of a local insurgency is that it is an excellent vehicle for pursuing larger and more important superpower goals. By supporting a local insurgency, a superpower can destroy an unfriendly government and replace it with a grateful, friendly (and presumable malleable ) government. This is the primary strategy of the Beginner Level game. Complicating this are the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. The fact that we can annihilate each other means that every action we take requires the tacit approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the USSR. If either side does something that angers the other, a crisis can start that can lead straight into nuclear war. Offensive Strategy Your strategy in this game has two faces: offensive and defensive. On the offensive side, you must identify and topple those regimes unfriendly to your country. There are two constraints on your actions. First, some countries are much too strong to be overthrown by insurgents. China, for instance: China is far too strong to be overthrown by insurgency; funding insurgency there is a waste of money. Second, you dar not attempt to topple regimes closely tied to the opposing superpower. For example, Poland may be vulnerable becasue of the problems between Solidarity and the government. Yet you dare not foment trouble in Poland, for Poland is a member of the Warsaw Pact and a close ally of the Soviet Union. Any attempt to overthrow the government of Poland would undoubtedly generate an enraged response from the USSR. Identifying Insurgencies There are three types of insurgent: terrorists, guerrillas, and rebels. A powerful and stable government has none of these. Terrorists are the weakest form of insurgents. If terrorists are successful and grow in power, they start a civil war. Then they are called rebels. These seemingly semantic issues are crucial to the game. A special map (Insurgency-the fourth entry on the Countries menu) presents the level of Insurgency for each country of the world. By consulting this map, you can identify those insurgencies that are in the crucial stage of civil war. These insurgencies are the ones most deserving of your attention. Guerrilla wars may also deserve some attention, especially if the country in question is strategically important. Helping Insurgents Once you have identified a likely candidate for subversion, you have two weapons: Aid to Insurgents and Intervene for Rebels. These can be found on the Make Policies menu. You can ship aid to insurgents only if there are insurgents to receive that aid: terrorists, guerrillas, or rebels. The amount of aid you can ship depends on the level of insurgency. Terrorists can't use much money-a few guns, a little dynamite is all they are in a position to use. Guerrillas need more elaborate accouterments-more guns, lots of ammunitions, rockets, mines, and so forth. Rebels are the most advanced insurgents and demand the most expensive equipment-the same tanks, artillery, and other weapons that the superpowers use. A second constraint is even more severe. A superpower can only ship weapons to a country through contiguous allies in which it has stationed troops. For Example, you must have troops in Honduras or Panama to ship weapons to the contras in Nicaragua. The quantity of weapons that can be shipped is dependent on the number of troops so stationed. After all, why should a small country risk all the trouble associated with weapons shipments if it doesn't have guarantees of protection? However, a superpower can always leak a small amount of weaponry into any country in the world; borders aren't airtight. The most sincere form of assistance is direct intervention. This means that you send part of your own army into that country to help the rebels overthrow the government. You are limited in much the same way as with military aid to insurgencies. A superpower must have troops in a contiguous country before it can send troops to intervene in a civil war; the number of troops that can intervene is always less than or equal to the number of troops stationed in the contiguous country. However, both the USA and the USSR have the equivalent of 5,000 marines that can be sent anywhere in the globe in violation of the contiguity requirement. When you do send troops, you must realize that your American soldiers will end up fighting anybody else there. If there are Soviet troops fighting on the side of the government and American troops fighting on the side of the rebels, then you're going to get Americans shipped home with Russian bullets in them, and vice versa. Such a direct confrontation is not conducive to world peace. The world diplomatic climate will disintegrate very quickly if this happens, so be careful about where you send in the Marines. Once you enter a policy, it remains in place until it is revoked. Thus, if you send military aid, it will be automatically renewed each year. Thus, if you choose to send $10 million in aid, and additional $10 million will be sent every year until you change the policy. Defensive Strategy The defensive side of your game requires you to protect your friends from insurgency. There are tow direct ways to do this: Aid to Government and Intervene for Government. These directly correspond to the options available for insurgencies, except, of course, that the action is taken in favor of the government. The restrictions on this action are somewhat different. For example, insurgents are eager to take all the weaponry they can handle. Not so a government. Every government in the world knows that help from superpowers always seems to come with sticky strings attached. Most governments are understandable reluctant to accept an unseemly amount of aid from a superpower. This reluctance is directly related to the degree of enmity between the two nations. Thus, Colonel Khaddafy of Libya would not accept your generous offer of military assistance-he would undoubtedly suspect some fiendish subterfuge. On the other hand, West Germany has already cast its lot with the United States and would have no reservations about accepting military aid from the USA. Nations are even more sensitive about allowing you to send troops onto their soil. This reluctance will express itself in the graying out of the more ambitious policy options in the policy window. When an item is grayed out, you cannot select it. Therefore, although you may want to give 400 million dollars to the government, if the option is grayed out, you can't do it. By the way, there is another restriction on your spending habits: lack of money. You do not have an infinite supply of troops or money to strew all over the world. As you start using us your resources, your options will progressively narrow. If you really want to send some troops to one country, you may be forced to pull some out of another. The total amount of money or troops remaining for your use is displayed at the bottom of the policy-making window. Defensive Crisis Another defensive strategy that can be used is a crisis that you initiate. If, for example, the Soviet Union sends massive aid to support the Red Army terrorists in West Germany, you had better put a stop to it fast. You do this by starting a crisis and standing firm, demonstrating a willingness to escalate right up to (but not including!) DefCon 1-Nuclear war. The mechanics of all this are simple enough. The first thing you need to do at the beginning of each turn is consult the USSR actions item in the Events menu. This will give you a quick summary of all your adversary's actions that demand your attention. If you find any action unacceptable, simple select the Question button at the bottom of the window. This sends a polite diplomatic note to the Soviets, notifying them that you question the wisdom of their action. They will reconsider their action and respond, either by backing down or by challenging you. You may either back down or escalate to the next stage. If you proceed to the next stage, then a diplomatic crisis is initiated; one side or the other will lose prestige by only two possible outcomes: Nuclear War at DefCon1 or a major diplomatic defeat (with consequent loss of prestige) for one side. A military crisis can start an accidental nuclear war. Don't start a crisis unless you are determined to stop the Soviets. Remember, backing down in a crisis will cost you prestige, and escalating can start a war. The Soviets are also free to start a crisis over any of your actions that particularly displease them. If this happens, you must reconsider your policy. If you wish to keep the policy in force, you must stand up to the Soviets and escalate, even if this means risking a war. Of course, if the Soviets are angry enough about the matter, they will escalate right up to DefCon 1 and start a nuclear war, in which event you both lose. So choose your fights carefully. You aren't completely on your own during a crisis. Advisories from the State Department (or its Soviet counterpart, The institute of USA Studies) are displayed at the bottom of the Crisis Window once a crisis has been initiated. The experts will decide the level of importance of the issue in question and will advise you accordingly. If they decide that your legitimate interest in the question is greater than that of your opponent's then it is likely that the other side will eventually back down. If they are equal, then it's anybody's guess. The catch is that the experts aren't always right. The estimates are close, but will always involve some uncertainty. The advice might be bad; sometimes you will want to overrule them. In fact, at the Expert and Nightmare levels of play, they are not much use at all. If you carefully study the world situation prior to centering a crisis, your estimate will probably be more accurate than theirs. Just how accurate are the experts? Well, in the Beginner Level game, they seldom make mistakes. In the Expert Level game, they are very unreliable. In the Nightmare Level game, they are almost entirely useless. Of course, if you have absolutely no idea of what to do, you can use their advice as a basis for a decision. Remember, though, that history and the public have little sympathy for leaders who blame their mistakes on their advisors. Other Menu Options There are a great many menu items available to you that have not been discussed. These provide supplemental information, not central to the play of the game, but very handy for assessing your situation. The countries menu contains items that allow you to quickly determine trouble spots around the world. You can find where revolutions have taken place with the Major Events item, and the state of insurgency for every country in the world with the Insurgency item. The Spheres of Influence chart will give you a brief idea of how the world is divided between the two superpowers. As a general rule, don't mess with countries that are within the Soviet sphere of influence and don't let the Soviets mess with countries that are in your own sphere of influence. The USA and USSR menus contain items that show the global policies of both superpowers. Want to know where the Soviets are sending military aid? How about the status of Soviet interventions? It's all there. The items in the Events menu present an organized view of events around the world. If you want to know what provocative actions the Soviets have taken, consult the USSR Actions item. Unprovocative items are presented in USSR Other. Events in minor countries are reported in the Minor Country news items. Lastly, you can see the policy actions of the previous year in the USSR Last and USA Last items. The Briefing menu contains three items of interest.: The Closeup option gives a detailed rundown on a selected country. It shows your and your opponent's toward the country, and also provides other useful information. Especially useful is the assessment of the strength of the insurgency and how quickly it is gaining or losing strength. The Background option is not necessary to the playing of the game. It is exactly what you would expect: background information on the countries of the world. When you select Background, the menu bar will change to show a list of available information. These menu items are discussed in detail in the Reference section. It is provided for your curiosity only. You are free to browse around in the background mode at any time without affecting the game; when your curiosity is satisfied, select Resume game to resume the play of the game. The History item displays a chart showing the development of the situation within a selected country as a function of time. It is most interesting late in the game, after you have created a little history. An example history screen with analysis is presented in the appendix "Understanding the History Display" in the Reference Section. End Of Game The game ends if either side goes to DefCon 1 in a crisis (thus initiating a nuclear exchange). It can also end in a accidental nuclear war during a military crisis. If you manage to avoid both fates, then the game ends in the year 1994. Your score is your increase in prestige. If your prestige has increased and that of your opponent has decreased, you have done very well; indeed, you have won the game. If you want to monitor your progress during the course of the game, consult the Score item from the Game menu. Well guys this is the docs up to page 21 of the manual It seems to be a very involved game. If you would like to continue where I left off please (send the rest of the manual to SEWER SOFTWARE!.)
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