This game is a lot of fun a it is, the Quick Look isn't really reflective of what I've been playing. Yeah it is a little janky, but with a few fixes and some content, in a few months I think it will turn into a very solid game.
I highly recommend getting either the board game or Steam release of Twilight Struggle if you have someone to play with. Some tips:
The USSR is the aggressor and will be starting a lot of fires that the US needs to focus on putting out. As the game moves from the Early War to the Mid War the US starts to position themselves as a bigger threat, and by the Late War the US will be on the offensive.
If the USSR can lock up the Middle East early, it is very very hard for the US to get back into the region. This is also true of Africa for the USSR, and South America for the US.
A way to think of operations points vs events is events create opportunities, while operations are about making plays with those opportunities. Early on you'll play a lot of operations, but by the mid and late war things become much tighter, and so you'll need events to break control or open up a region.
https://twilightstrategy.com is a great website to learn about the game. Board game or video game, Twilight Struggle is a fantastic game.
At some point in gaming I shifted my goals in a big picture sort of way. I used to be a completionist, especially in grand RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, etc. I wanted to see everything the creators made, check out every nook and cranny in the world, recruit all of the characters; I wanted to get the "full experience." It was with Mass Effect 2 that changed my mind on how I play RPGs. I decided I was going to role play the role playing game. Seems obvious in retrospect, but I didn't sit down and preemptively make the choice; it just felt like the right move when I started the game.
To clarify my statement a bit, I was going to play Mass Effect as Shepard. He was tasked with an impossibly imposing task: save humanity from the Reapers. And so as a ranking official, I did my job. No, Miranda, I am not going to spend time going to settle your family squabbles. You came on knowing that I needed to save the universe, and it seems like a pretty urgent issue if I'm being honest. Strange ship sending an odd signal? Not my problem. Saving the universe. I didn't try to romance anybody either, because it would be unbecoming of an official and frankly my mind was preoccupied with saving the damn universe. Except for Jack.
The details to me are fuzzy at this point, but something pulled me towards Jack. Her story was compelling and her spending time in the basement of the Normandy made me feel sorry for her. So I rationalized taking the time to help her as a means to ease her unstable mind. What good is a soldier if they don't have the mental strength to deal with the harsh reality of war? Sure, the rest of my crew had stuff on their minds, but they were strong enough to deal with it. I felt like Jack could snap at any moment, and it would be a danger to me and my mission. So I spent a lot of time with Jack, and even ended up completing her sidequest. It turned her around emotionally, and suddenly the dismal war effort was re-invigorated and as I moved into the final mission, I felt good.
And then everybody started to die. As is known now, most of your party in Mass Effect 2 can die in the final mission of the game. It ultimately meant little in regards to the series finale, but at the time it was a dramatic choice to let all of these characters potentially parish based on your previous choices. I hadn't made personal bonds with most of them (to restate: I was too busy saving the damn universe to make friends.) but I did with Jack. When it came time to select a biotic to hold up a force field to protect the group, I went with Jack. After all, she was the more gifted biotic of the two choices I had, and she had put away her emotional demons for the time being. It was an obvious choice. Until she died too. It was crushing. Potentially the most emotionally crushing moment I've had in a video game. The only character I took time away from my job to learn more about has now been killed along with the rest of my crew. It was hard times, but it cemented my choice at the beginning of the game: to role play. It made my journey through Mass Effect that much more personal. While my friends were talking about saving all of their crew and the side quests they had completed, I was enjoying missing out on all that. It made the universe Bioware created that much more alive and personal to me, like the urgency of the main quest had the consequences it feels like they intended.
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