sdiberar wrote:
Wouldn't that be a close model of actual COIN practice, which overemphasizes military solutions to civil problems?
Oh, you wag. Then we would be doomed to learn nothing from the game.
sdiberar wrote:
I don't own the game, but could it be the case that there is more of what you are looking for in the card deck? I suspect a sizable chunk of the game experience is folded into there.
The card deck provides a narrative storyboard. While not quite the powerpoint slideshow of history that we see in Twiglet Struggle and Labyrinth, at best it's a random events table. What it does not show is the political and human terrain.
My suspicion is that the designer believed adding factions would add the necessary constituencies to the game. I'm all for multi-faction play in COIN and the dimensions they bring, but the factions in Andean Abyss are curious choices, to say the least.
For example, we get the paramilitaries and mercenaries of the Autodefensas broken out from the government (of whose armed forces they were, at times, an unaccountable extension). However, the rural landowners and the mineral extraction companies that bankrolled their founding also largely supported the government (by which I mean the Establishment). In terms of the human terrain they were, at least for much of their life, aligned.
By contrast FARC is treated as a monolithic entity. Curiously, there is no separation between FARC, with its peasant-centred Marxist ideology, and the ELN, with its roots in student intellectualism and liberation theology. If the AUC gets separate billing, why is the ELN not broken out into its own faction?
Into this mix the designers have also thrown the cartels, whose popular support is very limited and largely dependant on haphazard local patronage. While certainly a force for corruption, they for the most part eschew the political process. So why they are a player faction is baffling.
It seems to me from a design perspective that the paramilitaries and the cartels should largely be handled as non-player nuisances. (Which to be fair, the game permits you to do. Though I don't think they should be allowed victory conditions.)
In a population-centric game I might expect to see an breakdown by class (peasant, middle-class, workers, intellectuals, Amerindians?) and position (business and the Church). Maybe displaced peoples might even deserve their own classification. Politics would tug these groupings in different directions. I also think it would be more apposite to allow for two players representing different species of leftism than the monolithic left the game portrays.