Overview
Your aim in playing the Aid Game is to improve life in a country by
giving humanitarian aid, constructing an Aid Package. The simplest
gauge of your success is the death toll.
The Aid Package tab of the folder area shows the makeup of the
current Aid Package. Clicking the text or the button left of the
package name (such as "No Aid"), brings up a dialog where
you can select pre-packaged aid or customize your own package.
An aid "package" is a collection of aid types at particular levels.
For instance, the Wisteria Intro package named Develop
includes level 4 aid of type Education, plus level 3 Agricultural supplies,
plus a level 1 Birth Control campaign. ("Develop" refers to
agriculture and people, not industry.)
Each aid type has a level, or Points, allocated to
that type. Each point represents an unspecified but vast sum of money. Adding more
points to an aid type increases its effect, but suffers from
diminishing returns. E.g., doubling the points spent supplying food
does not double its positive impact on mortality. Essentially this is
because you go for the highest-impact opportunities first.
The point system is an attempt to simplify something that's
vastly complex in the real world. I've tried to make a "point" of aid
more-or-less equal in cost between the aid types and levels, but it's hard to say
whether I've succeeded. Hopefully, it's close enough to allow the player
to work with concepts rather than daunting details.
- Yardstick: one point of aid feeds 10,000 people for 5 years.
If you use Step to progress the population through the years, you
can change aid packages along the way. If you use Run, it continues
with the current aid package for about a human lifespan.
You can alter the impact of the aid types
via the Aid Parameters menu on the
Options button.
Topics
Preset and Custom Packages
Clicking on the text in the Aid Package folder brings up the
Change Aid Package dialog. This dialog allows you to allocate
points to aid types. The quickest way to do this is by selecting
a "saved" package from the drop-down list.
A collection of strategies is already saved for you to
explore (Wildlife, Childlife, Bootstrap, etc.)
You can directly change the points assigned to an aid type via
each type's drop down list (left column). When you do this, most likely the
"name" field will change to "Custom". (If you change the points
to match an already saved package, the name changes to that
saved package.) If you click OK, that
"Custom" package is saved for the next time you use the dialog. If you
want more than one custom package, simply edit the "name" field
to the right of the "saved" drop-down list, and click OK.
The easiest way to understand what a particular aid type does is to select
package "No Aid", then set the one aid type of interest to its maximum,
then click OK and Run. Click on the "With Aid" and "Without Aid" folder tabs
to get more information about how your aid package works out.
The topmost ? button brings up this help file. The ? button
to the right of each aid type brings up
a help file discussing that type:
The dialog line about the budget can safely be ignored, but is the suggested
aid per step for a given Scenario.
Aid Parameters (Options button)
allows you to go deeper, by changing
the parameters that describe the impact of one aid point for
each aid type. For example, in the Change Aid Package
dialog, 1 point of Food feeds 1% of the population and reduces
mortality by 10%. By using Aid Parameters you could
change 1 - Food to mean feeding 1% of the population reduces
mortality 3%, if you thought that more likely.
Topics
