PC Gamer 3.15/1998-06_Disc_3.15.iso/patches/ent11a.zip/README.TXT

Text File | 1998-03-09 | 18KB | 381 lines

Entrepreneur 1.1A

(c) 1997-1998 Stardock Systems, Inc.


Directions
----------
Copy all these files into your existing Entrepreneur directory.

Example:

copy *.* "c:\program files\ent"



Some History
------------

Fixed in 1.1A over 1.1

+ On some systems, loading a saved game or continuing your last
  game could result in Entrepreneur closing if you had not already
  played a game that session.


Changed in 1.1 over 1.0

+ Completely new set of graphics (this is a major set of
  enhancements)
+ F3 key will bring up yearly stats
+ Will let you know if a new sales executive came
+ After 70 or so years, regions will begin standardizing on the
  the leader's products.
+ Fixed a bug where the game could crash the longer you play.
+ Made it easy for people to create their own markets
+ Fixed the AI but where the AI got a ton of money starting out.
  We weren't initializing a variable.
+ SDS/AI enhanced so that each computer player has markedly
  different strategies.  AI much smarter.
+ Fixed bug where second level marketing campaigns were
  no more effective than first level.
+ Tweaked some of the cost values to make the game pace a little
  faster.
+ Enhanced the networking to be yet more effective on high latency
  systems. Now can handle lag times of over 10 seconds!




Some last minute notes
----------------------

OS/2 USERS: IF YOU HAVE INSTALLED THE DEMO VERSION, YOU MUST
REMOVE IT BEFORE INSTALLING THE FULL VERSION!

Copy protection: Entrepreneur requires you to have the CD-ROM
in the drive to play a single player game, however a single
CD-ROM can host up to two other players in a multiplayer game.

- Included on your Entrepreneur CD:

  readme.txt  - this file!

  walk.txt    - a walkthrough for getting started playing Entrepreneur.
                You will also find help in the game by pressing F1 or
                F2 on the various game screens

  setup.exe   - this is the install program for Window95 or NT, run this
                if you have autorun disabled.

  install.exe - this is the install program for OS/2 users - run to get
                entrepreneur installed on your system.

  entdemo.exe - demo version of entrepreneur that does not require the
                CD to play - give this away to your friends! Windows
                users can also install the demo from the main install
                program.

Introduction
------------

Thank you for buying Entrepreneur!  With all the other games out there
these days, there's plenty of choices to spend your time and money on,
and we are honored that you have chosen to buy and play our game!

In a nutshell, here is what Entrepreneur is about:

Start a company and try to conquer the world as a monopoly.

Entrepreneur is already played by the CEOs at companies like Microsoft,
Apple, Oracle, Sun, General Motors, and Nabisco.  That is, they are doing
the same sorts of things that appear in Entrepreneur - making product,
crushing competitors and trying to control perception.

Why should only CEO's at multi-billion dollar corporations get to play this
game?  Now you too can play it!

There is a full Adobe Acrobat version of the manual (that goes into a lot
more detail than this does) available at http://www.stardock.com.

There is also a walk through includes in this archive called "walk.txt".



Object of the game
------------------

The object of the game is to get a monopoly level market share in a market
that starts out with considerable competition.

To win:
    If there are 2 players remaining:    70% of the market
    If there are 3 players remaining:    65% of the market
    If there are 4 players remaining:    60% of the market
    If there are 5-8 players remaining:    55% of the market

The winning conditions go into play after the 5th year and is evaluated on the
last day of the year.  So having 90% of the market in June means nothing, it's
how much you have at the end of the year that counts.  Your market share resets
itself at the beginning of the year.





How to play
-----------

You start out the game with a single office (or "campus") and a single sales
executive (the little guy who says "Yes?" when you click on him).  You gain
more sales executives at the beginning of the year if your company has grown
significantly the year before.

<Sales Executives>
Your sales executives make sure your product is available in the region it is
in and for a radius of 2 regions outwards.  The more sales executives you have
in the area, the more market penetration your stuff has.  There is a limit to
this of course so eventually your products are everywhere and putting more
sales executives in a region won't do much good.  Just remember, being there
is half the battle, spread them out early on.  Your office site can also sell
products to the region it is in and if you build sales offices, they can sell
them in greater radius's out (the more you upgrade the sales office the further
away it can sell).  To move a sales executive, you left click to select it and
then right click on an investigated region to send it there.

<Regions>
You can't sell to any region you want.  You have to do some market
investigation on it.  To do that, select the region and the click on the
"investigate region" button.  The further away the region is from one of your
offices, the more expensive it is to investigate it.  You can build more
offices by clicking on the "build" button but each new office costs more than
the last one. The key thing to know about regions is to know what their
desires are and try to make sure your product is strong in those traits.
Example: You research Great Britain and click on the "region" button on the
bottom.  If it has a long green bar by any of its traits, that means they
really care about that trait.  Winning the game usually depends on staying
ahead of your competitors in the traits that people care about.  Each game
is different and different parts of the world will care about different things.

<Your Office Site: Factories>
When you click on your site, you'll see different buildings.  To begin
manufacturing, you have to hire employees.  Do that by clicking on the
building and then moving the slider over.  At first, you'll only want to
hire a few people until you match demand.  Double click on the buildings to
go inside of them.  On the factory screen, you can see what the demand for
your product is and how many you are building each week.  You'll want to
make your supply (your build rate) be pretty close to demand unless you
have enough inventory to cover the supply for awhile.

When your demand begins to exceed supply and you can't hire anymore people,
you can raise the price which will lower demand but bring in more money per
unit (similarly, you can lower the price and increase demand).  Once you have
enough money, you can build factories and later manufacturing plants which
will vastly increase your ability to build large quantities of product.

<Your Office Site: Research Labs>
The Research Lab is where you enhance the attributes of your product so it
will be more competitive in the market. When you have enough money, you
can click on the blank space on the upper right hand side of the site screen
and upgrade to a research lab (for $8 million).

The Engineering screen is easily the most complex of the screens in
Entrepreneur. There is a lot of data to digest on this screen.  You can return
to the office site by double clicking on the engineer points button on the top
right of this screen.

The basic concept of the engineering screen is to improve the traits of your
product.  Your product is made up of different components with each of them
adding different levels of quality to your product.  For example, in the
computer market, the CPU is the most important factor in determining the
performance of a computer while the video card adds some but not nearly as
much to the overall performance of your computer.

To improve a trait, first make sure you've hired engineers, next move the
sliders on the bottom to the right.  The more you move the slider, the better
that trait will become but the longer it will take to get there.  There is
considerable overhead in starting up a project so the longer the bigger the
improvement, the greater the efficiency.  Of course, keep in mind that a 5
year project won't do you any good until the 5 years are up by which time you
could have the best product but be out of business.

The Sliders
As you move the sliders, you'll see a red color grow behind that slider and
others.  This represents where research is occurring.  Different traits are
related to other traits in different ways.  It was decided that instead of
having the related sliders move to the left as you moved the one you were on
to the right, we would assume you would want to try to keep the traits of the
others the same.  However, if you move the other sliders to the left which
have red on them, your research time will decrease.  Normally, it is the price
of the component that will tend to want to increase.  If you increase the cost
to manufacture, you usually can bring down the time to research.  Similarly,
in the computer market, you can improve ease of use on your OS by decreasing
the performance requirement on it.

The Research Queue
No one wants to have to keep coming back to the screen every few minutes so a
research queue was created.  As you improve your product, you add it to the
research queue.  You can remove products from the queue as well as move them
up or down in the queue.

Space
In most markets, there is a limit of how much stuff you can cram into the
container.  Sure, you'd like the make the world's most powerful computer
and stuff it into a laptop sized container but in reality you can't because
of the size of the components.  The bar across the middle of the screen
represents the space of your product.  There are 3 colors (actually 4 if
your components use up too much space) to keep in mind.  The red color on
the left is how much space that particular component is using (if any).
The yellow is how much space the components together are using.  The green
is how much space the product's container (the case in the PC market) has
available.  If you want to decrease the size of your container, you'll need
to put some research into minimizing the space of your components.

Other Traits
In some industries, you can also modify the actual container the product is
in by clicking on the actual product.  In the computer industry, for example,
you can click on the computer itself to change what type of case it uses.
The smaller the case, the higher the aesthetics value is.  Look on the left
side of the screen to see how your product is doing overall.

<Your Office Site: Marketing>

With marketing, you can enhance the perception of your products or, in the
case of the full version of Entrepreneur, damage the perception of your
competitor's product.

The way the print advertising campaign unit works is that you hire marketers
on the site screen and then you can create marketing campaigns.  When it
is done, a little newspaper unit will appear at your home site.  If you left
click to select it and then right click on a destination, it will move there
and improve the perception of a trait that you chose when you created it.
Make sure your product is available in the regions you send your marketing
campaign to!

In the full version, marketing gets a lot more interesting because you also
have negative marketing campaigns in which you select a specific opponent to
trash.  It makes for very interesting gameplay!



Direct Action Cards
-------------------

The point of Direct Action Cards is to try to bring in dynamic elements without
increasing the complexity of the game play.

No game or simulation can simulate 100% what the real world behaves like.
Entrepreneur is a corporate conquest game that tries to favor action over
having too many "realistic features".  For example, in the real world
companies routinely try to lure away key executives from their competitors.
This has a devastating effect on the competitor since "brain drain" is major
reason for a company to lose its competitive edge.  But in a game or simulator,
how does one go about simulating this? Do you have a game screen that takes
you to a special "Trip to Seattle on the corporate jet?" or a list box listing
all the different gifts and signing bonus's you could give to a potential
executive to get him or her to leave your competitor?  And if you did put all
this into a game, would you not then open the door to others features that many
would consider just as relevant such as buying up other companies, government
grants, lawsuits, patents, etc.?

Entrepreneur's answer to all this comes in the form of Direct Action Cards.
In a nutshell, here's how they work:  Each card allows you to do a specific
task in the game.  To use that card, you must be the market leader in regions
that have special resources (the regions with the resource icons on them).  At
the top of the card, you can see what resources this card specifically needs.

The types resources the card requires to use will depend on what type of action
the card does.  For example, exploiting child labor would require you to be the
market leader in a red $ region which signifies that it is a very poor region
of the world.

You begin the game with 3 Direct Action Cards.  At the beginning of each year
you will receive a new direct action card up until you obtain 7 (after which
you won't get any more until you have used some).

At the beginning of each year, the regions with special resources that you are
the market leader in go into your resource pool.  When you have enough resources
to use a card, it will light up and allow you to use it.

Be careful how you use the card, however.  If you're in the lead, for example,
you probably don't want to use cards that your opponents will get afterwards.

If you're losing, your best bet is to try to pick on the winner if possible.


Multiplayer play
----------------

<STARDOCK.NET>
Many games will boast that they can play on the Internet but most of them
require you to jump through a lot of hoops to get an Internet game going.
Entrepreneur has Stardock.net which is probably about as easy as you can get
to find Internet games.  Just log on to the Internet, start Entrepreneur, and
click on "Stardock.net".  From there, you will be able to talk to other players
and join games.  You cannot join games in progress.  Games that are grayed out
are games that are in progress.

The left side of the screen shows all the people in your particular channel.
If you are very new at Entrepreneur and the "Lobby" channel is relatively full,
you might want to go to the "Beginner's channel".  Please keep in mind that
it's no fun to be creamed by an expert.  Many Internet games have become
"un-fun" because experts will pretend to be new at the game and slaughter a
newcomer.  If you've become an expert, you'll be able to find other experts
in the other channel.

Dealing with Latency
Lag time or "latency" is the amount of time it takes for your computer to send
data to another computer and get a signal back.  If you are using a modem, a
typical ping time is about 300ms.  But sometimes, the Internet will just
"Freeze" up for a few seconds.  A few seconds is an eternity in an Internet
game.  If things get bad enough, the music might start to skip or things may
slow down to a crawl (or even freeze).  Don't worry, your computer is not
"crashed".  Just hit the Pause key to stop the game and let it catch up for
a second and then continue.  The further someone is away from you physically,
the higher the chances of lag time.  So before you begin to play people who are
on another continent, be aware of these things.  You can greatly reduce these
affects by playing the game at "Normal" or "Fast".  Do not play at higher
speeds than that unless you are very comfortable with your connection speed.
Also note that Computer players tend to actually send out more data that human
players.  This is because, well, humans are a lot slower than computers at
making moves.  The computer players are thinking and acting all the time.
They don't forget to hire those workers to keep up with demand or to keep
researching regions.  So if you have 3 or 4 human players, get rid of the
AI players if you can (again, unless you are pretty comfortable with your
connection).

Please keep in mind that Stardock.net is a public forum where people from many
parts of the world are on at the same time and are of different ages.  Please
keep in mind that there are real people behind those names.  The anonymous
nature of the Internet tends to make people forget that courtesy and kindness
are still important traits.


Keyboard help
-------------

Key            Function
Esc.            Options Screen
F1            Help Screen
F2            Context Sensitive Tutorial
F5 or Ctrl-W        World Map Screen (main)
F6 or Ctrl-S        Site Screen
F7 or Ctrl-P        Production Screen
F8 or Ctrl-M        Marketing Screen
F9 or Ctrl-R        Research Screen
Tab            Send message to other players.
Pause            Pause the game
+            Speed up game
-            Slow down game

Technical Support
-----------------

Stardock offers free technical support for Entrepreneur.

The best way to contact Technical Support is to send email to [e-mail]

Voice Technical Support is also available from 9AM-4PM EST at [phone]

Please be sure to have include all system information with any problem report.