Once upon a time, it was 1997, and I was young and puerile. My dad bought me a nice boxed copy of Trevor Chan's Capitalism Plus and I tried to play it for a while but my businesses kept losing money. In the intervening years I actually lost the game somehow.
Fast forward to 3 years ago. I find the same game on sale in a drug store for 3 dollars bundled with stupid ads for AOL. I decide to play it again, and the same thing happens.
Fast forward to last weekend. I'm in Micronesia and sometimes things get a little slow around here. I've got my cheap laptop but I've already played through Deus Ex and Fallout 2 dozens of times. What do I do? I play Capitalism Plus again. This time, though, I discover a help file that actually tells me what all the graphs and data the game is giving me mean.
I realize that the game is actually giving me information about 1.) Utilization, 2.) Skill level of workers, 3.) Tech status of manufacturing equipment, 4.) Supply of raw materials, 4.) output of manufacutered goods, and 5.) retail stocks on hand versus demand. None of this is obvious just looking at the game because the info is represented by these tiny colored lines with no written explanations. But by luck I stumbled onto a help file I didn't know was there. All of a sudden I realized that the reason I was always losing money was because I never produced enough of a good to meet all the demand. I kept lowering prices to try and sell more previously, but in fact my problem was never having enough product in the first place. All of a sudden, because I could actually react to this detailed information intelligently, I had an actual successful game, and I ended up playing the game all day yesterday.
The game is VERY complex, but extremely rewarding once you understand everything that is going on. There's all sorts of businesses you can run. You can open retail shops, factories, mines, farms, logging camps, R&D centers, and you can advertise. The hardest part of the game is knowing how to use all the key features which are hidden somewhere in the labryth of reports and graphs the game spits at you (for example, your basic marketing strategy is toggled through one control hidden somewhere in your business performance report) but once you have uncovered the almighty help file called "Manager" it will suddenly explain where a lot of these things are and what the information means.
Also, there's a manual on the CD, but it's in some folder and of course they never tell you that it's there. The stupid AOL splash ad just has options to play, quit, and try AOL, and you have to actually look at the CD contents and poke around to find the manual.
Capitalism Plus is the most complicated business sim I've ever played and now I really love it. I recommend it...but first you must find and read the manual, and after that you must go to the help file called Manager and read that. Otherwise you could end up not understanding the game for years.