Entrepreneur
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
I'll readily admit that most gameplayers find economic simulations about as exciting as Jack Kemp, but the idea of a simulation that lives and breathes in real time does have intriguing possibilities. Add unorthodox AI, a cutthroat environment, engaging events, and lackluster graphics, and you have a pretty good idea what Entrepreneur is about.
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The game is played on a world map divided into dozens of sales areas. You and your competitors (from one to seven, in single- or multiplayer mode-the latter via LAN or Stardock.net) share a single goal: to control a winning percentage of the world market on a given product. You begin with a small manufacturing base-a garage, in fact-and gradually expand it into a factory, adding recreation centers and offices for sales, research and marketing.
Meanwhile your opponents are doing the same, and that's why research is vital in Entrepreneur. You'll need to hire expensive engineers and make decisions about what features to research for each part of a product, and marketing is essential. A marketing campaign can be click-dragged into a map area where it functions like a high-powered sales team, promoting your product or, if you've developed a negative campaign, wounding your opponent.
Comparisons to Capitalism Deluxe are inevitable. Both products play in real time, and both demonstrate a startling lack of visual imagination. However, Capitalism Deluxe offers a more open-ended approach to corporate competition, with a stock market and multiple products featuring their own distinct production/distribution chains. There's no stock market in Entrepreneur, and although there are several potential products to choose from at the start of each game-each with its own spin on marketing, production, and research-you have to choose one and compete in a single-product universe. It's certainly less realistic, but for some players the more tense, claustrophobic atmosphere (especially if you set the game to run at higher speeds) lends an extra dash of excitement.
With its recent 1.3 upgrade, Entrepreneur adds several new products (including-shades of Microsoft-the Web-browser market). There are also plenty of new world maps, and most importantly, double the number of Direct Action cards. These function as player-generated events that run the gamut from sudden research breakthroughs to bribing government officials into declaring an opponent in breach of child-labor laws. You begin a game with three, and acquire one for each year thereafter.
All industries have their own set of Direct Action cards, and each card requires some combination of five resource types that are randomly available in different map areas. If you have the largest market percentage in an area at year's end, you accrue one token of whatever resource the area commands. Complicating matters further is the fact that less than half of all map areas actually contain resources. In multiplayer mode, it's as if a wicked session of Diplomacy was dropped into the middle of Wall Street Report.
Entrepreneur's computerized opponents shouldn't be patronized, however. The AI is very good: it's not a single set of rules but a large grouping of sets, each with its own killer strategy developed by different testers. As a result, you never know what your electronic enemies are going to do from game to game.
Capitalism Deluxe may deliver the goods as far as creating a detailed, realistic corporate environment, but Entrepreneur is the more exciting game-equally strategic but more intensely competitive.
