Financial simulations seem to be turning into a full-blown trend. Nothing makes for a better strategy game than real life, so games in this genre are ideal for the PC gaming market. Interactive Magic is throwing its hat into the financial-sim ring with the self-descriptive "Capitalism." The player is put in the role of a corporate CEO whose job is very, very simple: make money and make lots of it. This deceptively simple task is accomplished through building a financial empire based on a variety of businesses like harvesting, manufacturing and retail. But it goes far beyond just buying and selling products, because all aspects of business must be dealt with in order to succeed.
Starting out, the player is armed with ten million dollars to do with as he pleases. The game map, and the cities in it, are randomly generated. When you start a business, you must decide where you're going to be in the production pipeline. For example, if you want to go into retail you have to be able to access a supplier of products. If you want to manufacture goods, you need a retail outlet. If you're growing crops or mining raw materials, you need to have a buyer. There are seaports which import different items, meaning a steady stream of products or materials, but unless these are by your retail or manufacturing outlets you're liable to get eaten up by shipping costs. These are just a few of the considerations the player has to deal with when starting a business, but it sure does make for a complex strategy sim.
Capitalism includes 40 different products, but they all aren't available at the beginning of the game. And, some businesses require more than one product. For example, when farmer Bob milks a cow, the player can't simply buy the milk and sell it, he has to be able to bottle it, which means there must be a source of glass. But glass bottles aren't something that occur naturally, so that too must be manufactured or bought from a glass bottle manufacturer. Some products require up to three materials to be combined before the final product can be made, and some of those materials need materials. The point is that gameplay in Capitalism isn't just buy from A and sell to B. All of the steps in between are represented.
It's possible to control the entire production line if you have the money to invest. Using the bottled milk example, all the player has to do is mine the raw glass materials and raise cattle. From there it's just developing the manufacturing facilities to develop the bottled milk, then putting in an retail outlet to sell the stuff. If the player wants to invest the money and control every step, there's a neat function that can be chosen to make materials only available for internal sale. This means that if you have a glass factory, you can put the selling price at cost and only sell to yourself, otherwise competitors could buy at the same low price. Using internal selling, the player can control the line of production from beginning to end and sell the bottled milk at market price, while only costing pennies per product. And if having to deal with all of that sounds daunting, each product has a quality, price and brand rating attached to it that shows how important each of those things are to the consumer. You better make sure that your product's strength is in the highest-rated category or you may just find that no one wants to buy your stuff.
The interface used for setting up a business is very clever and intuitive. Each establishment has nine spaces available for individual business units. Starting a retail business, the player would have to set up a purchasing unit in one of the spaces (keeping in mind that each unit costs money to start), then link that unit to the business that makes what they want to sell, like a shampoo factory. Then the player has to set up a sales unit which will sell the product, unless you specify it for internal sale only. To get the goods from purchasing to sales, the spaces are connected to each other by a series of flowchart-like lines, and the player just has to connect the two units together. That's all that's necessary to start the process, but you can do much more. Advertising units can be attached to sales units and linked to specific media buildings on the map, while manufacturing units can be attached to multiple purchasing units to create products from raw materials. It's an incredible simple interface to use, but with very complex combinations.
The player also has to deal with the stock market. You can trade in any corporation - either your own or your competitors - with your own money or your company's. Stocks are the main source of capital in the game, and can become a very powerful business tool. The buying and selling of large amounts of stock can greatly affect the prices, so while it can bring you wealth wielded correctly, the buying and selling of stocks can also be used to hurt the prices of competing corporations.
Business isn't as difficult, or as boring, as some people may think it is (surviving in business is a totally different matter). Perhaps it's all those graphs and numbers people often associate with it, which this game definitely has a ton of. There are numbers and percentages for just about everything that can be measured and rated, and quite often there's a corresponding graph that goes along with those numbers. If you want to know any statistic or rating about a product, Capitalism is set up to deliver. It's very much like having your own research department crunching numbers all day long.
Capitalism is every bit as complicated and involved as any strategy game I've played in a long time. Just because it's very business-oriented that doesn't mean that it's boring or slow. There are so many variables, combinations and choices in this game, many of which I wasn't able to talk about here, you'll be wondering how anyone actually does this in the real world. If you ever wondered how you'd do at the head of your own business, Capitalism gives you a chance to find out. Look for it on store shelves in October.
