by clivej
Antistone wrote:
I think it is fairly obvious that Paramilitary Escort was intentionally overpowered, to try to entice you to take it, to set up the betrayal.
That may have been the way you were thinking, and it may look obvious with hindsight, but we didn't spot it. Nor did we spot more generally that the military involvement was a bit sinister and out of hand.
Why not?
Well, firstly, it's not real life, it's a game. In real life, an epidemic might be a trivial non-event, or it might be doom that nobody can forestall, but in a game we know it'll be balanced to present an interesting challenge. What we don't know is how. You may have smelled a rat when you saw Paramilitary Escort; we just became apprehensive about how much worse things were going to get if the game's designers had thought it important to give us such a powerful ability.
Similarly, some of the flavour justifying military intervention did seem a little specious and hackneyed at the time. Had a real politician turned up on a real television set and said such things I'd have been deeply skeptical. But again, this is a game. How were we to know how well written or otherwise the script was?
Apart from anything else, I've never seen Matt Leacock script a plot twist before, and my previous experience of Rob Daviau is Betrayal at House on the Hill which, in the nicest possible way, is somewhat cliched gothic melodrama where the plot twist is so up-front it's in the game's name!
It's also interesting to revisit [article=21229264thi]this[/article] thread having experienced September. I wonder what the thread's author is making of the rest of the game. My own comments on the thread were written when we were around May/June - I note that I mentioned nukes, and noted decisions might get tougher, without sounding any note of suspicion about military involvement per se.
The only other thing I'll say is I'm glad I'd not already rated the game. September has pulled the spectacular trick of retroactively improving the previous months in hindsight!