I picked this game up last friday, and it's seriously affected my ability to do much else besides this game.

I think this game is on the path to what I would consider the best possible game in the world. This game is flawed, but there's a core to the game that is quite fun to play...if you have the right mindset.

To be clear, The UI is horrid, the AI is terrible, there are some game crippling late game bugs, there isn't really any challenge to the game besides what you set for youself. If you go into the game thinking it's a sandbox, you will be pleasantly surprised.

So why do I find it enjoyable? Because of spreadsheets. I'm so happy they allowed us to alt tab out of the game so I can learn and play around with my spreadsheets. I am in college at the moment but am in the business field and I aspire to run my own company one day, and this game is great training for me.

The best part of the game is the supply chain management. You build companies to run certain aspects of your empire, all jamming through a warehouse that gives and takes to each company you set up. Your electronics Factory produces processors and wires and cables for your cell phones, but first it needs raw silica and copper and rubber, which you mine with another company, or create with a chemical factory which takes in petrochemicals after being refined from crude oil.

It's one big happy mess of chains, and they are extremely detailed and complex, all weaving through each other. Calculating exactly how much of everything you need, how many companies you need to create it all, how many employees to hire, and a pretty vast research tree to further expand your empire is fun.

Here's the thing though. Once you pick up the basics, it is ridiculously easy to make a crapton of money. I can start up a company and be done with the entire research tree in an hour. The most basic products are hilariously profitable, especially if you scale up. Most of the research on cost cutting is useless, because the costs of creating your products is so low compared to how much you can sell it for.

The pricing and demand is archaic and unintelligible and doesn't follow economic principles. There's no way to change or influence demand. Oh I'm the only one selling cell phones? I'll jack up my prices and people will still buy it, because demand is literally always the same. There's no flowing of demand to related goods because there's no supply of a certain good. You know exactly how many you will sell every single day, no matter what happens.

Quality is a joke and I can't find any reason to sell more than 1 quality on anything. What I was imagining was that to combat the AI you would flood the market with cheap quality crap and take away their demand, but from what I can tell, it doesn't work that way and the AI doesn't sell enough of any good to meet demand anyways.

Research doesn't scale at all. If you have 48 scientists, they give you a set amount of research points and you can scale this up to infinity with no extra costs or opportunity costs. Then when you're done you fire them all and move on.

I do love the economies of scale on production costs. If you only want to produce ONE of something, well the infrastructure and costs of producing that thing are huge...but if you start producing ALOT of that something, the production costs drop, which relates to real life economies and is awesome. Problem is, the costs of goods means almost nothing.

The game defaults to the best pricing immediately, and you don't even need to do research or figure out tastes and preferences of your customers. You just keep jacking up prices until your product doesn't sell, then set it there and move onto another product, because the demand is always constant and never changes.

The comnplex industries are fun to swim through and figure out what you need...then there's software industry, which literally has no supply chains for almost all of it's products. You just set up a software company and bam they produce games and you sell them and everyone's happy. I have no idea why that is in the game. All the other industries are cool to mess around with and are realistic.

After you are making money hand over fist, what is there to do? There's no governmental regulations to battle, customers and brand to control and market, no rumors and gossip to spread, no corporate lobbyists to bribe and control new laws that hurt your competition, no global influence to shape the world, no anti-trust laws to break. There are events but I think half of them are broken and don't really do anything. There always negative as well. There are challenges, where people come to you asking for things, but you outpace the money you can see from that in after setting up one complex industry chain.

On top of that, every game I've created, at some point the demand completely destroys itself. At one point the game slowed down while paused, I was setting up chains in excel, and I come back to there being no demand for any of my goods. It's happened every single game and I'm pretty sure it's a bug but I can't tell, maybe it's a hard mode? The only thing that's ever let me live through it is investing in vehicle industry, because the production is in the single digits and this bug slams the demand for all products into single digits, which allows vehicles sold to meet demands.

The AI leverages the hell out of itself when it recognizes your completely outpacing it, forcing itself out of business fast when it can't keep up with all the loans and selling itself off to the market. I laughed when an AI sold more than 50% of itself to keep up with me, which I just immediately bought it's company.

So what do you do after an hour of gameplay? Well, if you're like me, it's to create a complex weave of companies and products through one warehouse. Creating spreadsheets to determine EXACTLY how much of every single product I need daily. When you have 20 products flowing through one warehouse, with the change in amount of every single product at 0, everything working perfectly, it's so satisfying. It's the only thing I've found fulfilling in this game.

As is, I cannot recommend this besides as a foray into understanding game mechanics and a glimpse of what I think will be the future of industry games.

Hopefully the devs continue to work on the game, improving the memory leaks and the crippling late game demand bugs, improving the AI so that it's an actual challenge, and maybe fixing how demand and pricing works. I remain hopeful. For now I will plug away at my spreadsheets, awaiting the day of the perfect industry game.

Very fun and detailed economy simulator! If you liked Industry Giant 2, Transportation Tycoon Deluxe, or the Anno games, you'll enjoy this.

In contrast with similar economy simulators, it's much more realistic about the difficulties of expanding production and expanding into new markets. Very fun and relaxing if you're into this style of game.

Time killer. Worse the value.

Ok, let`s see, this is not an angry NO because I would say it is fairly priced, more of a disappointed NO, but it can improve since most negatives aspects are balance an AI, not the underlying core mechanics

SHORT VERSION: go and buy CAPITALISM 2, it is an actual challenge, has better AI, better balance, good enough interface (!), marketing and advertising actually matter, R&D is better handled, CEO pick matters, stock market matters, etc., you get the picture...

LONGER VERSION:

- This is not a simulation nor really even a game, this is a "supply chain demonstrator", there is no challenge, there is really no way you can loose if you are half way competent and can do basic math, like 2 is more than 1, that`s enough

- In this game it is impossible to over expand, there is no risk involved your decisions, to go full vertical integrations is always the right decisions, no matter what

- The AI is close to no existent, a maximum of 4 competitors can be on your map and they basically do nothing but sell a couple of products on and on, this means no competition which means no price war which means insane profits (100% markup is easy to achieve) which, again, means no risks

- The stock market and marketing are there but you can ignore them, the same is true for Banks and loans, you won`t need them, it at least gives me hope they can tweak the balance and change this, since the mechanics are already there

- R&D is just "time", there`s nothing else involved (other than the setup money costs), no experience gained, no specialization, nothing, your R&D guys can crack any problem equally and with ease given a little time, your company can do anything and everything at once, from drilling oil to manufacture cell phones, which means it has no personality an, again, no risk involved in doing something new an unknown

- There`s almost no mechanic dealing with retail, I guess given the title of the game it is not the focus of it, but maybe a couple of options here and there wouldn`t hurt, like should you invest in your own retail chain or not

- You pick a CEO at the start and, as far as I can tell, you are stuck with him forever at no cost, salary or anything else is not discussed or negotiated

- The UI is not terrible but is lacking obvious options, like the ability to store building profiles to copy and paste into new buildings and not having to setup everything manually every time

Overall, my main criticism it there is no risk built into any decision in this game, it is just there to show how a supply chain works at a very basic level

It is somewhat sad that CAPITALISM 2 is still the standard after this many years, I guess there is not much market for economic simulators

On the positive side, the art and sound are good enough, with a Sims vive to it, and many gameplay mechanics are already there if they choose to work on patching a little challenge into this thing, I hope it does good enough to justify improvement, but I can`t recommended it in it`s actual form

played the old game this is based off of and have to say i love this new game upgrade wow.. hope it keeps going ...keep up the good work hours off fun.. hope you keep upgrading the game...

Its not amazing, the AI isnt good, but it works. Purchased the game on release day having read no reviews, and it works, it didnt crash, nothing game breaking appeared.

Having purchased too many "early access" or beta releases of games that never get "finished" and in reality were just s..t its nice to buy a game and it appear to have been bug tested to some extent. Dont buy this game thinking your getting a time sink because youll get bored at some point by its simplicity and ease to win, But for around a tenner its not hard to get 10-20 hours of play out of and enjoy,

Great!
Build / Research / Produce / Sell
Takes a little getting used to but I like it!

Right now I have to finish other games, (Steam and it's sales... you know ;) )
but this one is certainly one I'll come back to have fun playing
Thumbs up!
:)

If you liked Capitalism 2 there is a good chance that you'll like this game. Think of it as a modern take on Capitalism 2.

What's great is that you can approach product manufacturing in any way you want to. For example, I made a product that required aluminium and plastics. Aluminium I could easily mine myself but plastics required a more complicated production chain that I couldn't afford. I simply placed a daily order for plastics on the global market, problem solved.

In the long term my reliance on external resources meant that 1) I could only produce as much as I could buy the raw materials for and 2) my margins were slightly lower since I could product plastics at a lower cost myself. So once I had some more money, I took out a small loan and set up a production chain which included a refinery and a chemical factory to produce my own high quality plastics. Ultimately I was able to produce higher volume and higher quality products, at a lower cost.

I love this kind of complexity in a business simulator, and I can see myself getting many hours out of this game. There are loads of industries and products to manufacture and sell, from automobiles (even electric cars) to biochemicals, fashion, home electronics, food, and even video games.

As a final thought, I did read through both the positive and negative reviews before I bought the game. I have to admit that I haven't encountered many of the issues mentioned in the negative reviews. That said, there are still balance issues in the game. For example, on a medium difficulty map it takes several high workforce factories just to meet the demand for one product. This seems odd given that there are 200 products that can be produced in the game. For any competitive strategy to really be relevant in this game factories should be producing much, MUCH more.

If you're uncertain as to whether you should buy it, keep it on your wishlist and watch the forums to see if the devs give this game the post launch support it clearly needs.

At this point I'm about 3 hours in, I'll post an updated review after I've spend more time playing the game.

My verdict is certainly in.

If you've played Capitalism 2 and liked it you'll probably like this. It's very similar in concept. I'll say this:

Capitalism 2 was better on the finance side. Way more in depth with bonds, stocks, etc.

THIS is way more in depth on the PRODUCTION/LOGISTICS side. Like, unbelievably deep.

I like it.

The game is too simplistic to be taken seriously as a "tycoon" kind of game, I refunded mine.