It is 1928, and it is time for the glorious Soviet State to crush the Kulaks and bring the CCCP dragging and kicking into the Century of the Fruitbat, I mean, the 20th century. We must collectivize, industrialize, and electrify, Comrade, lest the forces of capitalist reaction overwhelm us in the inevitable world-struggle to come!
Created by Ed Bever, one of the original Microprose developers and now a history professor, Stalin's Dilemma is a little economic simulation -- little more than a spreadsheet, really -- in which you design three five year plans, spanning the period from 1928 to 1943. Your objective is to increase Industrial Capacity to 48, Military Effectiveness to 66, and Political Stability to 1.0 while suffering fewer than 10 million deaths due to unrest and starvation. The structure is simple, but 'winning' is not -- I've yet to do so, in fact.
Your peasants and tractors produce food, and you have a choice of how to extract it from them in order to feed the rest of the populace -- voluntarily, that is, bribing them with consumer goods, or forcibly, that is, by collectivizing agriculture and setting quotas. The former is basically a no-go -- you don't have enough industry to produce sufficient goods (though you might try expanding oil production enough to export and purchase goods). Thus, the peasants will suffer for the greater glory of the Soviet state, but what of that? The future belongs to the industrial proletariat, surely.
You use your surplus food production to feed your industrial workers, miners, and oil workers, as well as your soldiers, of course. Oil and metals are transformed by factories into production, which you can use to build more factories, as well as tractors, oil rigs, mining equipment, and weapons. The game tracks "Standard of Living" (SoL) for each sector of the economy -- you can improve it by making sure everyone gets enough to eat, and perhaps reluctantly allocating some small quantity of consumer goods -- and the worse the SoL, the more people die.
Despite the sparse--well, non-existent--graphics, this is a bleakly humorous game, a sort of noir version of Hammurabi in which your only hope of victory lies in fervent imposition of stringent tyranny. But we have no choice, Comrade. If you fail to play, the terrorists, I mean the Nazis, will already have won.
Problems Downloading
Tried to download the game - however the underdog site told me that I was coming to the download via a third party and that was not allowed....
Shame. Sounded good.
I had no trouble
I had no trouble downloading, other than that the download page is a little cluttered and confusing.
After two messages, the game complains that FM20.DLL is not found. I tried downloading said DLL from www.dlldump.com, but that only changed the message into a general runtime error 339. I suggest that the gamemaker include the correct version of whatever libraries are required in the zip-file. I doubt many people are willing to experiment with dll's to get it working.
Oddly once I got round the
Oddly once I got round the download problems - by going direct to underdog - the game worked for me. And I found it rather fun...
However I suspect it might actually be logically broken in that I don't see how you can actually generate enough metal to run your factorys to get a high enough score to pass that criteria.... The main problem is that your mines are a fixed number (15) and the best you get from a single mine is 2 metal and you need 42 to run your economy enough to score that high enough..... Which seems a wee bit broken.....
stalin's dilemma
I think that may indeed the 'point'. Maybe this game is trying to suggest that Stalin's dilemma was that he was destined to fail, no matter what he did.
In fact there seems to be a bit of a YOU WILL FAIL motif going around on this blog as late - see "I Wanna Be The Guy".
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
The trouble is - and if
The trouble is - and if anybody wants to tell me I'm wrong that would be grand - no matter how much of an uncarring swine you are - I don't see how you can match what actually Stalin did economically. Which is why I think it's broken.
I'd be happy that it's impossible to do as well as stalin AND be a nice guy. That there would be a dilema....
Mines
I believe adding mine equipment will increase your metal production. Of course, you have to use fuel to operate it.
Alternative Download
I've put up a copy of the game here, also, so if there's a problem with the Underdogs link, this should work:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/playthisthing/stalin.zip
It is theoretically possible
It is theoretically possible to achieve an industrial capacity of 48 - the in-game help text is wrong. An un-assisted miner actually produces 2 units of metal, while a miner with fueled equipment produces 4, instead of 1 and 2, as the text suggests. This gives you a maximum of 60 units per turn. It's also possible to cheat the stability system by giving all your goods to your transport workers - That said I've still not won - I came close, but I didn't match Stalin's economic success, and I was more of a monster in doing so.
Your right, it is possible
Your right, it is possible to match his economic capacity. And with that I've managed to achieve a good result but only by abbusing that stability system and really abusing the overseas trading functions.
This is oddly compelling for
This is oddly compelling for some reason I cannot adequately explain. The best I've been able to do is Probable survival, but in part I'm sure that's because I'm completely exploiting the Transport/SoL thing noted above. It was rather eye-opening to find myself exporting food to gain the necessary resources to gain some industrial production, knowing I was starving my people to do so. As it happens, I ended up killing way more people when I did that than when I went with some other slightly less brutal strategies, but still. I have yet to achieve Stalin's production and I'm killing off 13 million or so people as it is.
I've yet to figure out how
I've yet to figure out how to get enough workers for the last plan - you start with 21, and get 14 to 15 each turn with the most brutal collectivization option. That gets 49 - 51 workers, when you need 48 for the factories, 5 or 6 soldiers and one or two to run the transport, for a total of 54 in the best case. I suspect the solution may have something to do with experience letting you get away with a smaller army, or tractors helping encourage peasants to leave the farms - as costik presumably knows, Commies love their tractors.
The best I've been able to do, with blatant exploitation of SoL, international trade, and possibly a hysterisis effect when assigning goods to increase farm production is 42 for industry, 66 for military and 0.9 for stability at a cost of 5 million dead Russians.
Tractors and Population
Getting enough non-peasant population is definitely the hardest part.
Regarding tractors, there are two facts that are undocumented that are key. (1) Peasants will only leave the land due to tractor build/purchase if you choose the 'market' option for getting food. (2) The number of peasants leaving is the maximum of tractors built/purchased and the amount that would leave due to collectivization.
If you are willing to stand a few deaths due to starvation, there is a fairly wide band of strategy that results in ~10 million deaths and meeting all the requirements. It is just barely possible to get 66 military/48 industry/1.0 stability with 0 deaths. In order to do the latter, you have to exploit every little corner case.
-D