Intro on who I am and why you should listen to me: Nevermind, you don't care... :(

You all probably got this game to lets be honest.... Restore the Russian Federation to the glorious Soviet Union... NO? Okay wellllll probably to turn Germany into the 4th Reich??? Was I Reich? No, okay well half of you are lying already.... Restore British Colonization ??? No, Unite Korea???? Reinvade Afgan as the USA? Selling narcs as the son of Pablo Escabar and as President of Columbia????? How about all of these? Well you are in luck because I am going to show you how!

Well.... If you started the game before, and realized there is wayyyyy to much going on and you have no clue what to do because the game has absolutely no guides, or official tutorials that we are actually willing to click. Especially after clicking it and seeing the USA leader as "Baden Tom", with a selfie taken by Sleepy Joe on his zoomed in 2001 LG flip phone camera.... But for real, you really need to grasp at least basic economics of a country \ have a large knowledge of history and an atrociously large amount of knowledge in modern Geopolitics to thoroughly enjoy this game properly. So if you do not know all 3 of these go ahead and pause, study for about 10,000 hours on youtube about these and resume.

Done? Okay Cool, you now know how to play...

For beginners that did not want to spend half their life studying all the cools things in the world like capitalism vs communist economic theory's and geopolitics while remaining an untouched virgin for the rest of your life just to play this game, here you go!

Start as a country that requires very little effort to play.... Saudi Arabia. I knowww, I knowwwww. Sounds boringgggg playing as some rundown backwater middle east country right? (yes ik its not a backwater but if you knew then you probably watched the 10k hours of youtube as instructed and need to not read anymore!) Use the "Free mode rulers 2023" and leave all the difficulty settings the middle because ♥♥♥♥ it. Use dollars as the currency because I am American and as the Mandalorians say "This is the way".

Turn off Gods and Spy DLC if you bought it. Because you want to learn and not bug your game out right? (Trust me you wont need it to have fun as Saudi Arabia) Strong Opinion: Editing the game parameters has done wayyyy more harm than good in my experience when it comes to bugs. Yes there's some uses for it but in one of my 50 hour playthroughs as Saudi Arabia and now in the year 2053 , i have had no issues that would require me to have it. People use it, it breaks their games because they are changing parameters that should not be changed, it conflicts with some random other scripts that was connected and it will break your game. They will then sometimes be in the discussions complaining about their game saying "unplayable" or "completely broken game". There are some players having issues like not being able to even launch the game which is not cool and i hope the devs help them, but for those using this dlc and complaining the game is broken after using it, 0 sympathy from me. There are some bugs obviously but in my experience no game breaking ones as long as you turn on frequent autosaves so you can revert back if something crazy does happen. I have had to restart to an autosave only a couple times in the playthrough due to 1 construction manpower pool bug which i sent to the devs, they acknowledged and i fixed by just not clicking the checkbox for auto reconstruct after complete box for now. So keep that in mind if you run into that bug as well.. Just dont click the checkbox for auto construction.

Here we have depending on the year, a top 3 oil producer in the world with a relatively small amount of population to manage in comparison to the USA and Russia. Also NO ELECTIONS! You know what this means? Means you get to play the game in easy mode while you learn the game mechanics so you can play those big guys like the almighty USA *grabs beer* or Russia *grabs bear*.

Next , pick the youngest leader you can because I do not trust the devs to not end my game completely after dying of old age.... Then name him\her after whichever parent that never came back after you was born, so you can appreciate why they had to leave.

Lets play....

Saudi is a very traditional country and "Liberal" influence over the country will be greatly opposed by the party. Roleplay into this because its going to allow you to constantly keep up good popularity especially early game.

The first thing I do as Saudi is I up the training of my secret service. Why? Because That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Ecologist under intellectual category will be the one and soul reason you will ever lose significant popularity as Saudi Arabia.... He will every single year like clockwork, say he will starve himself to death at your popularity's expense.. Help him along this process and kill him day 1 of this and watch as all your people become 10,000 Calorie a day eaters because they think they die if they don't eat.

Next have fun and enjoy yourself looking at the options and figure out how you want
to role play this.

Personally I role play the ultimate king of oil route. I start laying more pipe down than Riley Reed receives Annually.... hehe

To actually set down the Oil Wells you need to hover the mouse over spots in the country and it will say "calculating". Always find a spot that says "very good" and do not place Oil Wells next or super close to each other as they will siphon off each other and lower both efficiency.

Do this with some GAS wells too.

This is fairly expensive early game and might affect your popularity. So increase spending on sports, culture and especially education to up your popularity temporarily so you can build these wells.

****OPEC****
Once you have these built you probably came across a popup saying "OPEC" and got to decide a price. Welllllll this is where you hold alllllll the power. As Saudi Arabia you influence every single country that is not a excess oil producer which means most the world is reliant on the price you influence including the USA.

Let me give you perspective. This years Current oil prices are at about $70-80. At this very second its $75ish. In 2022 the average price for the year was $100. And i don't know about you but I have a built 78 Corvette that is a gas guzzler so that did not get driven hardly at all without spending a fortune to fill up. Even driving my little lawnmower Honda civic was still rather expensive to fill. 2012 prices got up to $109 avg price for the year....

Long story short , anything above 150 will completely ruin lower class people in most countries that buy oil from you. I know prices have gone far above before, however just being realistic you kinda want to role play it. So if you do go above, bring it down after you get whatever you needed done. Dont cheese it you greedy bastard.

DO NOT MAX OUT THE PRICE AS IT CAN BUG YOUR PRICES OUT. IF YOU WANT TO MAX IT OUT. BRING IT SLIGHTLY BELOW THE MAX.

So you are asking yourself, " I do not care about other countries, i just want to make even more money". Very good! The consequence in this game for maxing out that price is very minimum. I did notice the USA did become self sufficient which did not allow me to sale to them but there is this thing called China. China has a massive deficit so just sell to them. I am to the point where even selling to china i cant seem to sell my entire production tho so my productivity has gone down. Losing the USA as a buying partner has great long term consequences but im sure they would have gotten self sufficient either way.

Once you see that GDP raise up substantially, congrats you are now probably hitting higher inflation rates than all countries combined at this moment because you probably got greedy and placed like 20 oil wells at one time while increaseing opec price dramatically you greedy ♥♥♥♥. To fix this you need to raise the interest rate of the country's currency by A LOT, but do it in small portions at a time. Like .25% increase every week (1% per month). This is probably not the best advice but as a general rule when my inflation rate is anything over 4%, ill start putting my interest rate to the same thing to lower the inflation faster. If it goes to 6% or above im putting the interest rate a few % higher than inflation to negate the growth. If its still climbing and i hit 10-15 im just cutting loses and incinerating 25% of all my annual money exchanged. It will definitely not make the people happy but this is what bribing the hottest model in Saudi Arabia is for. She will help you get that popularity up ;).

For those that dont know anything about inflation in a growing economy. In the shortest explanation ever. Growth = inflation = money loses value since if everyone has it, nobody does = bad if unchecked = put higher interest rates = incinerating the money at the national bank = less inflation = putting less interest rates. Real life example, A single dollar in 2008 = $1.38 today..... Basically if you was a teacher making 30k a year every year since 2008, you would have taken a 38% pay cut due to inflation despite making the same amount. Because the currency loses value in inflation.

Interest rates also in short and generic explanation, low interest rates = more people borrow money = growth fast = inflation raising. Generally you want to stay around 1-2% inflation, while still making sure you keep interest rates low. Its all about balance to quite literately get the most bang out of your buck.

Congrats if you have not already lost the game to some dumb disturbance in your country that you decided to send the tanks in and kill your own people you are doing good. Ill be honest i send the tanks in every time because aint nobody got time for these peasants. Just be sure to rebuild the city and place refugee camps if so.

Eventually people learn its futile to keep revolting against you after like 8 years , i get maybe one protest every couple years. i think i have had 0 in the past 10 years due to meeting all groups requirements due to the money i receive that i spend on the people.

So what do i do now? Well your grown... Make your own decisions and play around with some features of the game and use that oil money to fund projects.

As an example i built 3 space launchpads and started spending about 300 billion a year on space. Building space stations \ colonizing the moon \ mars and probing and collecting data from other planets. My entire country's purpose to to make space part of the Arabian empire.

I also went to war with all terror groups around me. I declared war on Yemen and after annexing them i cleansed their terror orgs out after about 5 years of agents trying to get rid of them internally.

I then Allied Somalia gov and starting massively funding them 25% of their gdp per year. I sent UAV's with missiles to bomb out all know terror orgs over the course of years. I built military bases on their land including an air strip to launch futures operations. Eventually i landed 30k men and around 2.5k tanks taking over one terror region at a time and over the course of maybe 8 years i fully got rid of the terror groups and saved the money to buy all the cleansed land. Now i own about 80% of Somalia from purchases and ref votes. Now im buying up as much land as I can in africa while still lobbing rockets into space to colonize the unk. Its been reallyyyyy fun! I have spent probably 2 trillion on land grabs , and another 1-2 trillion on colonizing space so far. As saudi arabia.