This bit is out of chronological order, as I wasn’t involved directly in this story, but two of my team (the Ambassador to Africa and the Secretary of the Navy) were. I think its pure brilliance so I’ll share it with you.
They’d both been helping the African nations for a few turns with US Interceptors to stop alien incursions. However the African terror track was high and all the player nation’s PR ratings were low (limiting their income each turn, as well as risking the collapse of the governments). No matter what we did to help them, all our successful interceptions just gave us a bonus to our PR that we really didn’t need.
So whilst helping the African nations fend off the aliens and crushing a super-insurgency by a faction that they jokingly named ‘ISIS-Boko-Harem’ (*shudders to think of that alliance in the real world*), they forged a plan with the control player at the table. (I paraphrase below)
“What if we paint our interceptors in the colours of the African countries? Would they then get the PR from the interceptions?”
“Errr, I’m not sure if you can do that”
“Sure we can, paint exists, and the African colour schemes aren’t exactly secret, look this one’s painted green” *Points at Nigerian Interceptor*
“Errr OK, for $1M a turn you can do it”
Thus Operation Goodwill is born, US interceptors are painted in Nigerian colours (but still crewed by brave US airmen and women), and started flying successful intercepts, gaining PR for Nigeria (the only country to take us up on this offer), this steadily helps there PR rating climb back up, increasing their income and stabilising there government . We’ll conveniently overlook the fact that the Nigerians crashed one of our Interceptors right into an alien craft, an effective, but somewhat unsustainable tactic.
I just wanted to share this as a brilliant little story (and bit of game play) from the day that helped maybe just a tiny bit.
