How deep can I go with some of the game's systems?
As some of you who joined Invasion's Discord server (you can too, by clicking here) know, I often advertise the game as having deep and complex gameplay.
To me, this means that if I add a something to the game - I want it to affect the game world in a similar way it's reallife counterpart would affect ours.
Let's take an example. Your main task in Invasion Machine is improving the quality of life in an occupied province and ultimately - recreating a working society. This means, among other things, rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure.
Our example of the local infrastructure needing our help will be a gas station:
By default, as you start a new campaign - this station is abandoned. Nobody works there, nobody stops there for gas.
The locals are unlikely to put effort into any reconstruction in a still war-torn province, so the burden of re-opening it falls onto your troops.
As long as the nearest vicinity of the station is clear from enemies, you can order your men to start reconstruction. After a longer wihle, when they're done (reconstruction will take a long time, cause I don't want these projects to be too easy of a fix), the station becomes operative, again.
This means a couple of things:
1) We now have a new legitimate workplace for the locals. This means they won't all have to be working in the opium fields, and the local guerrilla druglords will have a little bit less power (and money) in your province. Over time, this should mean less opposition and less attacks on your forces.
2) A gas station needs fuel to operate (duh), so fuel trucks will start making deliveries to it. Normally, the fuel deliveries will be made by local contractors, but if the area is deemed to be too unstable - your Command will order you to send your own convoys (a local fuel truck plus some of your vehicles as security), instead.
3) Cars will occasionally stop for gas here, but only if the station actually has any gas left. The more customers it has, the more money the station makes (double duh).
4) A newly re-opened gas station means two things to the guerrillas. One - it can become a juicy shakedown target for them, so if you don't protect it with your troops - they might start collecting the earnings from it.
And two - any Social Project you complete makes your faction appear stronger and more effective (as your start winning some hearts and minds over) - and is sure to rub your enemies the wrong way. So, they might decide the best course of action is just to take your newly-operating project out of the picture - either by setting up ambushes on it's premises, attacking the staff, or simply blowing the place up (this last part is actually not yet implemented and will come as a future game update). Which again - forces you to place some security in the area.
In the end - with every completed Social Project you bring more stability to the province. But also - the more projects you have, the more troops you need to consistently deploy for security. And since your troops cannot patrol forever (they get tired, stressed out, and run out of resources) - you also need to rotate them.