PC Games.EXE 1997 December

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Entrepreneur Demo (c) 1997 Stardock Systems, Inc. Introduction ------------ Thank you for trying out Entrepreneur! With all the other games out there these days, there's plenty of choices to spend your time on and we are honored that you would use your time to check out our game! In a nutshell, here is what Entrepreneur is about: Start a company and try to conquer the world via a monopoly. Entrepreneur is already played by the CEOs at companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Sun, General Motors, Nabisco, and elsewhere. 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 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. What's missing in this demo? ---------------------------- * You'll only be able to play with 3 different people in the demo. The full version lets you play 8 player games. * The game forces you to retire after 15 years in the demo. The full version has no required retirement at all making for some pretty dramatic play later in the game as special direct action cards and TV marketing campaigns start to come into play. * You only get to play with on Earth. The full version lets you play on multitudes of different maps and allows third parties to create their own maps. * The demo can only play the computer market. The full version has the ability to expand which means other markets such as the automobile industry, soft drink industry, and third party DIMs (Dynamic Industry Modules) will be able to be plugged in. * The demo version only lets you upgrade your factories to their full potential. Marketing and research will therefore be very limited thus ensuring the the AI players are able to crush you (they don't have the limitations) at anything but Beginner and Easy. * You can only be a laborer (manufacturing expert) in the demo. In the full version, you can be the Engineer or Marketer. * The demo version doesn't include much of the graphics and video that the full version includes. We didn't think many people like downloading gigantic ized demos. * Lots of little things are not in the demo that would take awhile to enumerate. The game play in the full version feels a lot faster and is more exciting because of the different game elements. You'll end up having to choose whether to try to win via marketing or through research as well as being able to supply demand. It makes for a pretty intense game! 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> In the demo, you can only build a research lab and nothing else which severely limits your ability to research new technology but still lets you see how this game mechanic work. 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 demo limits you to only positive print advertising. 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 Entrepreneur demo only includes 6 different direct action cards so you'll see them come up over and over again. The full version includes dozens and dozens of different 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 logon 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. The DEMO version will not give you access to the full version channels. Keyboard help ------------- Key Function Esc. Options Screen F1 Help Screen F2 Context Sensitive Tutorial F5 or Ctrl-W World Map Screen (main) F6 or Cltr-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 Getting the "FULL" version -------------------------- The full version will be available at most retail outlets and you should be able to get it there (if it is not available there yet when you play this demo, ask for it by name and they'll probably allow you to reserve a copy). Alternatively, if you don't live near a retail outlet that carries Entrepreneur, you can order it directly from Stardock at 1-888-STARDOCK (if you live in the USA) or 313-762-0687 otherwise. Here's the order form if you don't have a retail store near you that carries it. Send me Stardock Entrepreneur! List: $49.95 Requires: Windows 95, Windows NT, or OS/2 Warp 12 Megabytes of total system ram Mouse Sound card recommended Ship it to: ___________________________________________________________________ Name ___________________________________________________________________ Address ___________________________________________________________________ City/State/Zip ___________________________________________________________________ Country Credit Card Information: Check one: [VISA] [MASTERCARD][CHECK] __________________________________________ Expires: _______________ Card Number (if applicable) Send to: Stardock Systems, Inc. 41778 Conner Creek Ct. Canton MI 48187 Phone: (313)762-0687 Fax: (313)/762-0690 Email: sales@stardock.com Toll free: 1-888-STARDOCK Website: http://www.stardock.com Thanks again for trying out our demo version!