3rd World Farmer - Most depressing game I played lately

[PeZook]

I have found this game yesterday, and boy did it ruin my mood. Which, coincidentally is what the authors were aiming at.

It's a relatively simple Flash game, where you are an African farmer. You and your family have little money, even less perspectives and in order to survive you have to make constant painful decisions. Do you give your children medicine, or send them to school? Do you buy the cheapest crop available so that you can afford medical attention for your wife, risking loosing everything if the crop fails, or do you invest in more expensive, more profitable crops but risk loosing your wife?

In addition, various things will happen every year that you can't do much (or anything at all) to control. It made me really glad I live in a moderately rich, European country.

Interested? Check it out: Here it is

[Bounty]

No kidding. I'm a dozen or so turns in and already I've lost a quarter of the family. I now own a shed, three chickens and $1 after the market crashed.

I guess we'll have to eat little Timmy

ETA: 22 turns, everyone starved.

[K. A. Pital]

The game could've been Russian farmer for all I know. Russian agriculture essentially reverted to a Third World level of unstability.

Depressing and pretty realistic. Those who've never been to the Third World should try and visit it one time. See farming and industrial workers in a country like, say, Gambia... or Brazil. Depressing.

[PeZook]

It could've been much worse, to be honest.
For example, your family is pretty damned lucky the guerillas don't ever rape or murder anyone, or press gang one of your sons.

Civil war also doesn't result in dead family members.

[Prozac the Robert]

I won fairly easily. I guess it depends a lot on what random events you get, I got a few good harvests near the start.

[PeZook]

I won fairly easily. I guess it depends a lot on what random events you get, I got a few good harvests near the start.

Yeah, if you're lucky it's pretty easy. Most of the time you're not, however.

[HSRTG]

I won in a dozen turns. Mostly with bad luck. It's all about crop diversity and improving the crop harvest. Maybe a couple cows & pigs sometimes. Grab the lowest crop-improving tool first, then go for a well. It'll make wheat a lot more stable good.

[Bounty]

I won in a dozen turns. Mostly with bad luck. It's all about crop diversity and improving the crop harvest. Maybe a couple cows & pigs sometimes. Grab the lowest crop-improving tool first, then go for a well. It'll make wheat a lot more stable good.

Which is what I did, right before my farm was looted and the national bank crashed. Crop diversity doesn't mean dick when no-one's buying and your family drops dead around you.

[Netko]

Well, I also won 2 times now by focusing on crops and pumping out babies like crazy, disregarding education and health until those 1k+ harvests come in. Then first goes the representative and a shift to livestock for survival (shed and well - full pigs and chickens) and then getting a good mixed crop and education where I can and buying up improvements when good harvests happen. First time I lost the first wive, the second two kids died, but both times I established a farm that not even the worst effects faze in a dozen turns (I intentionally didn't buy the last improvement for a while the second time around and in the end was buying up full elephants and harvesters since I was overflowing with money).

Still, I also lost once by going the expected western way (educating the kids and trying to keep everyone alive), so its still very depressing since you essentially have to rely on random chance on who survives and who dies, no education and baby factory tactics to win, and the most depressing thing is even such a crappy life, while a very good tactic in this game, is worthless in the real world with all the crap that happens, as Bounty already noted.

In that vein, I remember seeing this interview with a victim of the civil war in Sierra Leone. This young man had both his hands cut off at the wrist because the militia was doing that do to some stupid mechanism about democracy there (think it was something similar to the Iraqi purple finger thing). Whats even saddening then that is when you hear how it happened and his backstory. He was the first in his family to attend university, something that was enabled basically by random chance (his family got lucky for a couple of seasons and got comparatively rich). So here is this smart kid who for the first time in the family will not remain on the farm and be yet another cog, but rather go to the university. And then some militia raids the university, forces him at gunpoint to put his arms in front of him (while he is all the while begging them not to cut them off, offering absolutely anything to save him/them, from money to joining them) and they chop them off in a cool methodical fashion.

Really makes you feel lucky you weren't born into that crap, even when you lived a good chunk of your childhood in a country at war.

[brianeyci]

I won on my first try.





I'm not sure if it's luck or not but here's the strategy I do. I diversify my crops and focus on only crops. When the rebels come, they only destroy your livestock and equipment, not your crops, so you need to focus on crops until you have enough to bribe a politician. So basically, I have five or four of each of the crops. I send my kids off to school with whatever leftover money I have, and make sure to give my people enough medicine every year (more important than school). If you go to animals too soon, you lose because you don't have enough to pay off the politician on the same turn. Once you have the politician, game's easy. Spend all your money every single turn. Don't have too many kids, or the medicine costs skyrocket, I just had 4 for most of the entire game. I bought insurance early, so when the crop failures happened I had enough. I could've won on turn 16, but I waited awhile. In my game the bank crashed at the end of the game, but I was making thousands so it didn't matter. I had two wells and a barn and a shed most of the game, the other barns to the right I bought right at the end to boost my score. Also rebels visited twice, once wiping out two chickens and two cows before I had a politician. My kids had 10 years of school . If I played for another dozen turns I could've had the highest score.

Is this supposed to be a realistic simulation. I think the refugees in Darfur would kill for an opportunity like this. The "rebels" don't rape your wife and put your health to 0, or kill random family members, or destroy everything you have. Only one disaster a year too. By third world they must mean relatively prosperous fertile "third worlds."

[K. A. Pital]

I managed to win.


I went for corn in the beginning because it was resilent and never let anyone go to school before the very end, gave birth to only 1 baby and always treated my guys.

There's a bottleneck in the beginning, if you have a drought or several at the start, you're soo much dead Another play ended with all dying around turn 12.

I especially like the paramilitary camp option, where you can "refuse" to give them land for the camp If it were realistic, after pressing "refuse" you'd see a murder scene.

[Melchior]

The idea is good, but it is far too easy to get absurdly (for the the third world) rich, it isn't very well-designed.

[Ace Pace]

The older version, which had no new kids, none of the last few item groups actully, was far harder. Abit too hard to be realistic.

[Master of Ossus]

I found that game shockingly easy, to the point where if it's insulting to third-world farmers everywhere. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars and soon managed my peanut farm with four 1st world harvesters and a herd of elephants.

[MKSheppard]

This game is stupid and unrealistic.

Why?

it doesnt even include opium, cocaine, hashhish etc which are the most profitable plants but bring in the threat of death from drug eradication or drug lord fighting

[Master of Ossus]

This game is stupid and unrealistic.

Why?

it doesnt even include opium, cocaine, hashhish etc which are the most profitable plants but bring in the threat of death from drug eradication or drug lord fighting

It actually does. I was solicited by someone who wanted to plant opium in my fields, but I told him to screw himself. By then, I had thousands of dollars in cash that I couldn't use to buy anything. Besides, where would my peanuts go?

[MKSheppard]

Keep knocking up your wife; it ensues more workers later on

[brianeyci]

Yeah when I first started the game I was like, 750 bucks for an piece of equipment that costs hundreds of thousands USD, wtf. I was hoping for really stingy shit when I started with just 50 bucks, but then the money kept rolling in even after disaster after disaster. I got a few droughts too early on, but unless you're extremely unlucky you should have a well. The well doesn't get destroyed the same turn as a drought, the trick to this game is only one disaster happens a turn.

I don't think "realistic" and "playable" necessarily have to be exclusive. They pick somewhere protected by some multinational force and not call it "third world farmer" (in Grade Nine geography my teacher told us that using terms like "second world" and "third world" were stupid, I am sure if I looked I'd find the motivation for such terms to be Victorian in other words like separating the world between savages and barbarians and civilized people, insulting). Then the game could be a little more credible. UN or NGO's could visit your farm every now and then and give aid and medical supplies. And every now and then an impending war could force you to flee and start in a new spot. It could be, Afghanistan, in one of the more peaceful provinces with Taliban visiting every now and then and extorting money (the "politician" should really be mafia/gangs/local strongmen/terrorists/whatever). And Shep's right, drugs.

In those world vision or free the children (or some other donate money to the poor people guilt trip commercials) I see kids huddled around a computer, clicking on shit and playing a game that was supposed to simulate the third world, donating cows and so on to Africa with a click of a button. Is this what they meant? They're not getting their money's worth in education then, better watching Blood Diamond than being dishonest to children with this sanitized shit and having them click animated cows and pigs.

[Uraniun235]

(in Grade Nine geography my teacher told us that using terms like "second world" and "third world" were stupid, I am sure if I looked I'd find the motivation for such terms to be Victorian in other words like separating the world between savages and barbarians and civilized people, insulting)

"Third World" was, if I remember right, originally coined to describe the nations which did not align themselves with either the USA or the USSR during the Cold War. A lot of these nations had weak economies, at least at the time, and so "Third World" eventually became synonymous with "impoverished".

[Quadlok]

Wow, its really hard to get people to marry or have more than a couple kids, and the only disaster that effects you at all after the very early game are plagues, and that only because they are pricey (one cost me 200k). But yeah, this isn't a particularly realistic or deep game.

[Master of Ossus]

Wow, its really hard to get people to marry or have more than a couple kids, and the only disaster that effects you at all after the very early game are plagues, and that only because they are pricey (one cost me 200k). But yeah, this isn't a particularly realistic or deep game.

You can only have eight family members at a time. Otherwise, you automatically have kids, I think.

And this is a frickin' depressing game. My third world peanut farmer just saved up more than I make in an entire year, in the midst of a series of civil wars and elephant poachers killing all his livestock.

[MKSheppard]

THis raises the point; why does the third world even need to farm? Simply import food en masse from the first world, and build up industrialization and put people to work in factories stamping out cheap crap?

It's what the Chinese are doing in africa right now, FYI

[PeZook]

Well, I myself got out of my depression on the third try. Amazingly enough, I found that the trick for me is not to spam kids at the start. It's nice to have all those workers, but they will start really bringing profits after 12 years or so, and pregnancy A) Lowers the mother's productivity and B) Makes her health go down. And you really can't afford massive doses of medicine at the start.

So I buy a shovel, plant wheat and corn, then reinvest. If nothing incredibly horrible happens in the next few turns (like a drought, which can practically kill you at the start) I soon get my first thousand, get a representative, then crop insurance. Next 600 goes to a clinic, and then it becomes piss easy.

It should be harder, I agree. As I said before, guerillas should fuck you up more, militia camps can't really be rufused, and mechanized tools should be much, much more expensive.

[Praxis]

Keep knocking up your wife; it ensues more workers later on

I tried that early on, but the increased cost of living and medicine killed me, plus we kept getting hit with diseases.

The strategy I found was to keep everyone at 100% health at all time. Have a kid every three turns or so. And diversify crops (Half corn, half wheat, just in case). And get lots of tools (I usually purchased two scythes as soon as possible).

You end up getting crops that become so profitable that you can lose half of them and still make a huge profit.

By the end of the game I had two kids and 6 adults. Took me 21 turns, 1170 was my score.

[Praxis]

Did it again in 14 turns. 1040 total.

EDIT: Did it in 12 turns, 1150. That makes me the fastest of all of you

I also found a cheat. Essentially, make the head of the house a sleaze. Every turn I would get married and get a brides price of $160. Then I would during that turn send her away to work in the city for $20 extra.

The next turn I would get married again for another $160 and send her away for another $20.

As long as you keep the health at 100% for the man, you'll always get good money out of it. Basically a free $180 every year, for getting married, throwing out your wife, and getting remarried again every year