Balance of Power is among the first political simulation that emphasizes diplomacy and politics over outright aggression. When he first released this seminal game in 1984, Crawford single-handedly established the political simulation genre and left a lasting legacy on how to design good diplomatic models in a game that gives a nod to reality.

You must use diplomacy, make treaties, issue risky, covert CIA or KGB actions, or riskier, direct military intervention to prop up 3rd world countries or help their insurgents and win them to your governmental philosophy: Capitalism or Communism.

The game, not surprisingly, attracted many non-gamers to the field and inspired countless books on the subject. International cold war politics at its best!

Review By HOTUD

A retrogamer provided a fixed version of the DOS game:

I've put together an improved package for Balance of Power (1985 DOS version) that adds graphic options and fixes some gameplay-affecting bugs. As far as I know, there aren't any abandonware sites with any versions of BOP for DOS that work correctly.



The version that you have has some bugs in it. An easy one to reproduce is to start a game, click on the South America menu, and choose Argentina. Instead of highlighting Argentina, the engine will highlight the entire ocean. The various geopolitical maps generally don't work; some countries will never be shaded when they should, which harms gameplay.



The bug seems to be tied to the graphics mode. So I made a setup tool that lets the user select one of five graphics modes. They are high-res EGA monochrome, Hercules, low-res EGA color, CGA, and high-res EGA color. The first four work perfectly, the fifth one looks nicer but exhibits odd behavior.

To play the game properly, don’t launch the bat file directly. Run DOSBox, mount the BOP1985 folder, and run the bat file from within DOSBox.

You can see the different video mode in the screenshots, in the following order: