Space Bucks is Sierra's new game of galactic empire building. Yes, I can hear the groans now û "Oh no, not another Master of Orion clone!" Well, you'd be right; it's not another MOO clone. This time around, the empire you're building is purely business-based, and is focused specifically on transportation lines (rather like setting up a galactic railway empire). The background fiction to the game, rather reminiscent of the old Universe games, sets the story well: in the future, mankind has reached the stars, met other races (five of them), and propagated. For some reason, one of the races disappears, taking the secret to faster-than-light travel with them. Galactic civilization nearly unravels, but after forty-some years the secret is found. You are the president of one of four companies which have sprung up to reconnect the far-flung worlds of the galaxy.
You start the game with one ship based on one planet. From there you start negotiating for exclusive star port access rights with planets in nearby systems. While your company does represent one of the races, your business empire is not tied to that race; you can negotiate with and build your trade routes on any race's planets. Alas, all is still not well in the future, and racial tensions do play a role in the success you'll have with planets. For example, humans will have a tougher time signing a deal with a Secanii planet (the two races have often warred) than with a Tesarian one (Tesarians introduced humanity to the galactic culture). While all of this cross-cultural tension sounds nice, I've yet to see it overtly represented in the game. When I am the only company negotiating for port rights I've yet to get rejected at all, let alone on the basis of race. Perhaps it's because an isolated planet is desperate for any contact? Sometimes when I have competition in my bidding I'll lose out, but the game doesn't inform you just why you lost; be it racial conflict, your safety record, or just that your bid was too low, you never find out.
When you negotiate for port access, the citizens of a planet will demand certain things depending on their development level and some random chance. They will always ask for a quarterly rental fee, although the amount they name initially is often far above their minimum acceptable bid. They often also ask that you guarantee delivery of a specific type of good every year. According to the manual there is supposed to be a display showing "the number of units of that cargo you are contracting to deliver" [pg. 45], but even the designers' own screenshots show no such number, and there are none apparent in the game. More advanced societies may also demand that you build a certain facility within a specified time-frame; often these are very expensive facilities, and are not negotiable. The planets low on the development scale demand very little, but also provide very little; the more productive and highly developed planets often demand enough to bankrupt a small company. If you agree to provide certain items, win the port contract, and then fail to provide those items, you will displease the planet and eventually lose your port rights (an event which will hurt your reputation and overall company valuation).
Once you've successfully negotiated access to some ports, you start setting up your routes. Any single route can reach up to six planets. One limitation I don't care for is that the last planet has to be in range of the starting planet. You can't just have your ships move between the endpoints. Each planet along the route will offer up a selection of raw goods and passengers, with more highly developed planets producing more. A big part of your job is setting the cargo load-out for your ships for each leg of the journey. Your decisions will be based on what and how much the shipping planet produces and what the receiving planet wants (how much isn't an issue; if a planet wants a good, it will take all it can get). You'll need to decide whether a ship should take whatever goods are available at the time it arrives in port (and perhaps leaving without a full load), or waiting until the planet produces enough to fill your holds (and idle ship earns no credits). As the game progresses you will want to build advanced industries at your star ports to process raw materials into goods that will cost more to ship. You have to build all these industries; apparently any advanced production the planet does by itself is consumed by its own citizens.
Even though route management is probably the core of gameplay, I found it often awkward to deal with. When building a route there is no way to delete a planet from the list, short of replacing it with another one. Another problem is that you cannot insert a planet into the middle of the route unless you're using it to replace an existing planet. Any time I fiddled with an existing route I found it best to clear it out and start over again. Since routes can't be longer than six planets, this wouldn't be a problem, except that you'll usually want to adjust your ship's cargo load-out for each leg of the route; that can get tedious. Moreover, the only way to adjust cargo is to go into the route builder, where it's all too easy to either accidentally modify your route or to use the Exit button instead of the Accept Route button (thereby canceling any changes you made to the load-out). In the main galaxy maps, all your routes are displayed in your company's color, and there is no way to differentiate between them; worse, there is no way to click a particular route's leg to find out which route the leg belongs to. In fairness, this would be hard to do; routes can share legs or even be duplicates, but it's still difficult to click on a ship, go to the route builder screen, and hope you have the right route.
A major flaw in a transportation game is that there is no way to force the transshipment of goods. Say you have a route A to B to C (Planet C being too distant from Planet A to go there directly). If Planet A produces chemicals that you want to get to planet C (a human planet which can turn chemicals into the "medical supply" Specialty Good), but Planet B also wants chemicals (but only for internal consumption), well too bad; if you ship them from A they'll go to B. Planet C is out of luck. Maybe this is meant to make the game more challenging, but for me it only made it more frustrating.
If your ports and routes are the skeleton of your transportation empire, your ships are its muscle and organs. You can buy from the existing ship designs (more of which are offered up for sale as new engine technologies become available), outfitting them with the latest in weapons and shields, or you can design your own. This design-your-own option is disappointing. It is basically the same as buying ships off the rack, except that û in addition to weapons and shields û you are given a choice of engine and hull types (note: as more engine types become available they will be put into new, standard designs automatically). As I understand it, the ship design option used to be more extensive but was cut down in the final version; as it stands now, however, I would have preferred it had been cut out entirely and the effort put into it used to improve the route building. Further, while you can opt not to equip your ships with shields and/or weapons, the only savings involved come in the up-front cost of buying the ship. I would have appreciated getting more for cutting out this equipment, either in the form of increased space for cargo or in reduced operating costs.
Other things you can do to affect your company's standing is to make tweaks to your relative pricing and maintenance levels. If you lower the cost of shipping goods on your line, more planets will be interested in dealing with you no matter your record, but you'll bring in less money; on the other hand, if your record is good, you might try charging more for your services so you can get more money. You may also wish to increase the percentage of credits you put towards maintenance. The standard level is putting in only 50% of what you need to keep your fleet and star ports in top condition; you'll save money, but run the risk of breakdowns and a reputation as an unsafe company. Putting the maximum necessary into maintenance is expensive, but will give you a top-notch fleet (but doesn't absolutely guarantee perfect operation û accidents do happen).
Being a major corporation, you'll probably find yourself involved in either banking or the stock market at some point. Both are represented in the game in basic but eminently useful forms. At the bank you can choose to move funds from your non-interest-bearing checking (operations) account into a variable-rate savings account, or you can request a loan (at a hefty interest rate). One feature I wish had been an option is the Auto-loan: if at any point you run out of cash, the bank will automatically extend you a loan to cover the difference (this is most likely to happen at the end of each quarter when your operating costs and rent are assessed). I wish you'd been given the option to sell off assets when this situation arises instead of incurring a loan, especially since doing this too often will cause the bank to declare you bankrupt and close you down.
The stock market is another way to raise cash and your best legitimate way of harming your opponents. You can issue shares for sale (at 85 cents on the dollar of share worth), but be careful you don't issue too much; your competitors may be the ones to buy up your stock, and if anyone gets 51% of your company they'll shut you down. Of course, the flip side of this is that you may get the chance to do the same to the competition!
If you're feeling a bit unscrupulous, you can initiate covert actions against your competitors. These range from creating local scandals to hiring pirates to target other companies' ships. Covert actions can be costly; there are up-front cash costs you'll pay to the shady characters who perform the actions, and the threat of fines and sanctions if you're discovered. You may also invest in corporate security in order to protect yourself against such threats.
A variety of random events will keep you on your business toes. These can be both positive (helping your standing) or, more often, negative (hurting it). You may win a poll for safety ratings (which can supposedly help you in negotiations with some races, although this is again another subtle feature not immediately obvious in gameplay), you can get sued, you can suffer any of a variety of disasters like industrial accidents, ship malfunctions, or pirates. Most of these just happen to you, and you have to ride them out. With pirate attacks, however, you are given the option to fight, flee, attempt to pay off the pirates, or give up your cargo and passengers and hope they'll let you go. Each option carries risks, and none are a sure thing. As with the other options, fighting is handled automatically; after all, you are a business mogul in a distant corporate office, not the captain of the ship. Also, war may break out in a region, and it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to risk your ships in a battle-zone (warships will be less flexible than the pirates; they tend to shoot you directly).
The best metaphor I can come up with for Space Bucks is juggling: there are not a lot of different things to do, but it's all too easy for things to get out of control quickly. You spend most of your time tweaking routes and cargo load-outs, a process that can get tedious. You can add new ports and more routes to your empire, but this is only the equivalent of adding more balls to your juggling routine, not of increasing its detail. Dealing with manufacturing, the bank and stock market, and random events do add a few things (bowling pins and knives?), but there still aren't a lot of different things to do (as in, say, Sim City or Capitalism). Despite this, you have to watch these things very closely, and it is easy for things to go critical very quickly. At the beginner level I played (and quickly lost) four games before I'd gotten a business that was even barely stable (and I was at the bottom of the pack). Maybe I just don't have a nose for business, but my attention wasn't strongly held. Beginning business sim fans might get more out of Space Bucks than I did, but I suspect advanced gamers will want to stick with a more detailed game like Capitalism.
