Beecarbonize
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The game is quite easy, especially when you forgo the "20th century industry" card. Wind turbine seems to be better than the other natural source.
My only issues is that is there any way to slow down the game when a crisis card that destroy others card appear?
A lot of time, in the midst of gas particles, I will suddenly realised my cards had gone missing. It was then i realised a crisis card had appeared, and time ran out, and it took my cards with it. (I was playing at double speed all the time, and I rarely notice the appearance of crisis cards)
Actually, the hardcore is not that hard. The difficulty lies in the accumulation of crisis cards, and most crisis card can either generate more crisis cards, or spawn a even harder crisis when unattended.
So my strategy is the same as normal mode (rushing out renewable energy, science funding, wind turbine), with the exception of getting social changes card too.
Next, i wait for the second tipping point to trigger. By then, i should be able to dispose 20th century industry and have the resources to resolve the 2 crisis that it bring. i abandon that card, resolve the crisis, and throw away the social card given from the crisis.
If I cant survive till then, then there is not much to say. it is quite rng based on the crisis you get.
In this way, my energy should generate at 54s a round, and my social 80s a round, after discarding the 20th century industry cardx=.
After resolving the 20th century industry card , i dont even need to focus on the sectors anymore. most crisis at the start provide cards for the sector. Their distribution seems to be mainly in Ecosystem, industory, science and people. So unless you are getting all people cards, then maybe you will want to discard some of them to prevent world hunger crisis.
So at that point, I just look through the crisis card, focus on resolving the ones that spawn harder crisis, follows by the one that spawn more crisis, and the one that remove cards and/or resources, and finally the one that add carbon(pollution?).
Really, having a +70 carbon(pollution?) per round crisis is not a big issue, when you have 1 emission clearence and 4 carbon capture. I do have to resolve it at the start, but after the cost rises to 10 people resources to resolve, I just leave it at background.
So yap, I spent 30 min, 5 restart and beated hardcore in one hours total.
This was fun! I beat the game after 5 tries with the bio approach, took 99.8 turns
It was not clear to me that cards can be moved out of the area. Once I got that, I could get rid of the heavy pollution and won pretty quickly.
Also took me a while to understand why I get the "starving people" card. It's obvious now, but somehow I didn't understand that "You didn't have enough pink currency so people are starving" relates to the specific point in time when the people area generates a point.
Good work! Thanks for putting this online!
I wish the game would somehow visually indicate which upgrades you've never bought before. I feel like it would make it easier to unlock 100% of the entries in the beecarbopedia.
I found out this information is availible in the encyclopedia, you just have to look at each card description to see what they turn into. Somehow I'm still missing one Nature card, though. Maybe it gets auto-built when you fail an event, or something? I googled it. Apparently I got good at the game too quickly. I needed to let pollution pile up until I get a specific event, then succeed at that event.
I'll just play a round and keep 20th century Industry around for a while.
I’ve quintuple checked & one nature card is indeed missingeven going through all of the entries trying to find something that upgrades/is replaced by “???” turned no results; most likely it’s just a bug or a card forgotten to be implimented - or maybe a card that you can only get through those disaster events & is super rare?
e: looking @ the tech tree it seems it was the last option, a card obtained only through 2 disaster eventstech tree, made by user wondible
e2: yep, managed to get it by making a bunch of ‘massive mining’ cards (fossil power branch)
You think you've seen easy.
My go-to start is to throw down Renewables, Science Funding, wait for People to tick once, and then fast-track Home Wind Farms. Random Events usually stop me from building it optimally, though, forcing me to buy into Societal Change. But if I can get one Home Wind Farm up and running with no more than one People card on the board, I can then throw 20th Century Industry in the garbage right at the start withzero repercussions.
(I might have to grab one or two Ecosystem or Science cards before this, just to stave off the first Tipping Point. Again, a lot of this depends on Random Events.)
From there, it's a brief but slow crawl towards the Big Three cards that are the backbone of my economy: Biodiversity Credits, 30 By 30, and Greening Deserts.At any given point, I'm saving up for whichever of these three is the cheapest, while also buying up one of each of the +1 People cards, so I can boostrap into Carbon Negative, to fund more Industry and Ecosystem cards.
A mature economy starts to run out of growth potential due to diminishing returns around three Carbon Negatives and 3 or so of each of the Big Three. Industry and Ecosystem both both provide industry tokens, for some reason, and tick roughly once every 10 seconds.People ticks at roughly the same rate. There's a huge surplus of Industry tokens, I'm producing negative hundreds of pollution per turn, and if I did it right, I only hit 0-2 tipping points before going negative emissions (through gameplay, I mean,not the card with that name.)
At some point, I probably bought some extra science incubators whenever the science tokens were coming in too slowly, but I never need more than Science Funding and maybe Emissions Cleaning to get my economy off the ground. When diminishing returns start to get really bad, I'll supplement the Big 3 with whatever almost-as-good cards I can afford. Solar Subsidies, Decentralized Power Gird, Sustainable Transport 2, whatever's convenient. You might have to discard freebies the game throws at you in order to make room.
Just for fun, when I start to run out of room, I inevitably sell the windmill that's literally the only power plant on the entire planet, in order to make room for more Biodiversity Credits and Solar Subsidies. (Never any actual solarpanels, though. At 1 Industry Token : 1 Pollution, those things are basically fool's gold.)
In conclusion, we are not the same.😂
Edit: I just noticed that Sustainable Transport 2 is actually pretty good mid-game before I go all-in on my first Carbon Negative. That's one of the things I like about this game. The more I play it, the more optimizations I notice in my strategy. Always be on the lookout for +2s you can make using different resources than the current bottleneck. They can speed things up significantly!
Great. 100 recommend, think I'll go check out your other games after my exams!
I did find science kinda OP :D. My goto strat in hardcore was to focus solely on science at the start, getting things that reduce its cooldown in combination with several of the carbon-capture cards. Once you get the sci cooldown low enough it becomes quite possible to mitigate most of the +20 emission from 20th century industry. Amusingly, the key is also not to build any energy generating cards in the beginning (since they will decrease cooldown of the red sector and lead to more frequent emissions).
It took me a while to figure out how to beat it. I was a bit surprised when removing all the polution didn't work and started panicking when running negative emissions also didn't work. I got there in the end, though. I think I had three victory conditions under construction at the time? Hard to say, since I haven't found them all yet. Overall, great game. Obtuse and stressful at times, but I suspect that was kinda the point.
Really enjoyed playing this game, a great card game with some good depth behind it, especially on hardcore mode! Kudos to the developers, all the best to you!
Message-wise, it's a really apolitical and rose-tinted view on the impeding catastrophe, where carbon credits can somehow fix the fact that our entire economic system relies on destroying the environment for short-term gain and 90% of what is shown here in the game will never be allowed to happen by our current capitalist governments. What we need is revolutionary change, not carbon tax credits.
However, this game provides a hopeful, albeit unrealistic future that mankind can go towards, and isn't that the most important thing a game like this can do? Because hey, if you portray the realities of our climate situation, you'll just get gamers to "First Reformed" themselves :(
If you liked this game, try out Green New Deal Simulator! Same underlying problems with the game's politics, but if you liked this game, you'll like this one too!
Thanks for your review, happy you enjoyed it and I wholeheartedly agree with the Green Deal Sim recommendation :) The political outlook of Beecarbonize was made to suit its use in schools as a conversation starter and also to be as broadly accessible as possible. Showing the toolikit that is there to fight the climate crisis, not necesarilly reflect any clear political message. A catch-all approach.
Starvation should be a much more significant penalty. Out-breeding starvation to keep people happy and the economy humming should probably neither work nor be the optimal strategy.
That said, game is sufficiently fun and not horribly broken, making it much better than most games I've seen in this genre. It's funny that you can basically win at any point if you're willing to throw away 20th century industry and either are okay with the world becoming a entropy-defying cannibalistic hellscape or have an okay industrial base of any kind. It does take a long, long time, though, without those sweet resources.
I thought it was not available yet, but it appears it unlocks when normal is beat! That mode fixes a lot of the problems I had, and also it seems that emissions although graphically produced only at the end of a cycle are actually produced along the way in some sense, which is good because otherwise the juggling I'd been doing putting industry out of the field and then back in again would let you get all the benefits at none of the cost.
You can still just toss industry to win, though, basically, although you need to wait a bit to gain enough resource production to handle the worse and more frequent events now. You just leave it out of the zone and then bring it back in briefly whenever it is about to be destroyed.