Pros: Good balance, lots of little details to follow.
Cons: Graphics, sound, a few gameplay issues.
The bottom line: Capitalism II is by far the most advanced tycoon game, bordering with educational software due to its level of realism.
It is ironic that probably the best game of the tycoon genre does not contain the word “tycoon” in its name. While you may have seen every kind of a tycoon by now, short of a garbage disposal tycoon (and I’m not quite sure about that), you have never seen a game like Capitalism II. This game is so intelligent that its direct predecessors, Capitalism and Capitalism Plus, are being used by universities, such as Harvard and Stanford. The new version of the game built upon the previous games and became easily one of the most complex tycoon games out there. Combined with the subtle balance its developer, Trevor Chan is known for, the game is also one of the most addictive games on the market.

The beginning
Trevor Chan, the brain behind Capitalism II, is a relative unknown outside the hardcore gaming circles. Most insiders, however, compare him to Sid Meier, the brain behind Civilization, and Will Wright, who brought you SimCity and all other Sim games. Mr. Chan is more than that – he is a perfectionist. As I mentioned before, his first game, Capitalism, was so good that it ended up as an educational tool. Moreover, Capitalism Plus, an improved version of Capitalism, was the only game that made me stay up when I was too tired to play Civilization. He then moved into the real-time strategy niche, where he designed the highly acclaimed, if not commercially successful, Seven Kingdoms games. It is no wonder that I broke all traffic laws, only to get home as soon as possible after I picked up this game.

The first thing you notice is a 150-manual, which looks like one of those old manuals supplied with advanced flight simulators or strategy games. The manual should intimidate you. Civilization II should be compared to flight simulators, not to tycoon games – unless you master the manual first, half of the fun changes into frustration. With the exception of an index at the end, however, the manual is easy to read, and you should be done with it within an hour.

Combining simple concepts can yield a very complex simulation
Imagine you want to open a small store. A shipping company nearby imports a few items that your customers would like to get. What do you do? You find a location and build a store. In addition to increase the effectiveness, you create a purchase department for each product, and a sale department. You link those departments together, creating pairs. You sign a contract with the supplier, add to the unit price the price for transportation and your markup, in order to calculate the sale price. In order to increase the demand for the product, you create a marketing department and advertise your products.

You are doing well, and after a time you have enough money to open another store, then another, until the whole city is full of your stores, and the market for those imported goods is saturated. Once this happens, you’ll have to create your own products yourself. You know there is one more importer; this one supplying raw materials. You decide to open a factory in order to convert those raw materials into consumer products. Soon, however, the market is saturated with those products as well, and it is time to acquire other raw materials. You’ll have to produce them yourself. As a consequence, you build a farm, grow crops and raise farm animals. By this time your corporation is so big that a headquarters is required, and you hire a few top managers to help you run it. Soon, however, you’ll need more products, and even your newly opened mining facilities don’t supply them. You need an R&D department in order to research new products. After that, nothing stands in your way to replace Bill Gates as the richest person under the Sun.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Time to move to more complex issues. This game is like a fractal – you can dig deeper and deeper, only to find the same concepts at work, requiring your attention. For example, people demand products for three reasons: their quality, their brand and their price. You will have to adjust all three categories in order to maximize the demand. However, while price can be adjusted immediately, branding and improving quality require time. Both are rather complex systems themselves. You have to decide where to advertise (TV, radio, newspaper), whether to use company-wide branding or create recognizable brands for each product separately. When improving quality, you have to improve the quality of your inputs, train workers and research more efficient manufacturing technologies. That’s not all – you will have to determine the location of each of your store based on demographics, decide what kind of stores to open (there’s 16 of them, each limited to certain products), manage the payroll, outstanding debt, cash flow, and much more.

You want more? How about being able to buy TV stations and newspapers? Or, if you feel like earning a low but stable income, how about moving into real estate and acquire a few apartment buildings? Maybe you prefer something more risky. In that case, there is a fully functional stock market with plenty of other investors to buy from or sell to. And if you are into numbers, each company has more financial data available to you than your average investment Web site provides. And the companies in the game don’t overstate their earnings, either, so your investment will be quite safe.

Now calm down, will you?
After scaring the hell out of you, let me remind you that Capitalism II is a game in the first place, not the latest sado-masochistic too from your local sex shop. While the game will not appeal to everyone, it is actually easy to learn and offers the simplest possible interface, considering its complexity.

The game offers a very extensive tutorial, in the form of a dozen or so missions that gradually teach you all concepts of the game. You will start out with the most basic concepts, slowly working your way through everything the game has to offer, pretty much in the same sequence as I described in the previous section. Each mission here starts with the explanation of the concepts and the introduction of new interface, after which you will be on your own to try to implement what you learned in order to successfully complete the lesson. This approach makes the tutorial quite entertaining, and will get you an additional 20-30 hours of gameplay from the game.

You may want to choose to skip the tutorial if you played the game’s predecessors, and dive straight into the campaign, which offers another dozen large-scale scenarios, each with its unique goals, and each progressively harder. If that’s still not enough for you, there is a random scenario generator where you can create your own starting and victory conditions. Included is also a relatively easy-to-use multiplayer for up to seven players. The only thing that’s really missing is an open game, SimCity-style.

The boring stuff
This is where you get bored with the little details that don’t matter at all in this game – graphics and sound. I also added interface and controls, which matter a lot.

Graphics. Graphics is one of the few sore spots of the game. Imagine a slightly improved SimCity 2000, and you get the picture. Most of the time you will spend looking at a city that looks suspiciously alike the towns in SimCity 2000, the rest of the time you will be dug into graphs and charts. The game does require DirectX and pretty steep hardware requirements considering the graphics. The reason is what I called the most useless feature of the year. You can look at how your facilities look like. Basically, you will see a few store shelves or stationary machines (depending on the type of the facility), with a few Sims-like people walking around. You will get bored with this view after about 15 seconds, yet this single feature is the most hardware-demanding in the game.

Sound. Sound is yet another sore spot; if your are getting the impression that the development team concentrated solely on the game mechanics and not the presentation, you are right. There are a few tunes, which, however, get quite annoying after a while. They are too obtrusive, compared with similar sound settings, such as Europa Universalis II or Civilization III. In addition, unlike the majority of other games, the sound files are kept on the CD, starting it up every three minutes or so, which can easily drive you crazy after a while.

Controls. The game is controlled mainly by the mouse, but also offers enough shortcuts for those who prefer them. However, after a prolonged play, 8+ hours or so (don’t look at me like that!), the mouse cursor gets a little off for some reason. Basically, the cursor is positioned slightly aside of the spot it is really pointing to, making navigation a little difficult.

Interface. Considering the sheer complexity of the game, the interface is very simple and easy to learn. However, due to the complexity of the game, the interface is still much harder than in your average simulation or tycoon game. The main screen is a little busy – you get the main interface icons on the left, which are a little too big. They open sub-menus, which have the tendency to cover up major portions of the screen. On the bottom, you have a news console, and on your right you have the area map. Once you dig into the various statistics, it gets busy enough to require at least some experience in finances.

I’m getting a little picky
It’s the game’s fault! The game pays so much attention to the tiniest detail and is so well crafted that I can’t help myself but to get really picky. This game posed a serious challenge to me, when I tried to find some gameplay flaws. I think I found them…

First of all, the stock market is insufficient and quite useless. The primary function of the stock market in the game is to float your own shares in order to get some capital. However, as the game allows you to try to finish it by simply trading on the market or taking over other companies, I’m forced to admit that this is where the game lacks on balance. The market is highly illiquid – with less than a dozen companies at the same time, all shares are bought by investors very quickly. Because the stock prices are determined by the companies’ performance and not by the supply and demand on the stock market, after about thirty minutes into the game, it is nearly impossible to buy any shares. As a consequence, if you want to acquire another company, be prepared to pay several times the official price of the shares in a private trade. This makes the whole stock market simulation very frustrating.

Second, you will be able to acquire residential buildings and media as well. Unlike real life, both are highly unstable investments, with residential occupancy drastically changing from month to month, forcing you to monitor all your building at all time. A return of 5% followed by –15% the next month is nothing uncommon. The media investments are as bad – no matter how much you improve their quality, they always seem to loose audience until it seems that 95% of all people never watch TV, listen to radio or read newspapers.

Third, sometimes the game has problems recognizing that the victory conditions were achieved. In one such game, I was supposed to gain majority market share in certain products. After gaining near monopoly in all products, reducing all competition to one losing store and buying every single building available in the game, I was still not declared a winner. While in this case I knew better and could end the game manually, in other cases you may try to figure out for hours what it is that you didn’t do.

Lastly, the game deviates from the real world in one crucial aspect: it does not let you play dirty. Now I don’t mean that you should be able to overstate you earnings by $3.8 billion – that would be too evil. However, the option to sabotage a competitor’s facility or spy on your competitors would add lots of fun to the game. While you’ll be able to abuse your monopoly by restricting your products and raw materials, that doesn’t seem like enough to me.

Buy this game!
All the shortcomings I described here are so minor that you will barely notice them. Even with them, Capitalism II is by far the best tycoon game out there, and in the building simulations niche on par with SimCity 3000. It is very rare to find such a well-balanced game. And if you are capitalist enough to succeed in this game, you will surely recognize the awesome value of the game. At a starting price of $19.99, it is almost a sin to miss out on a game that will give you 100+ hours of entertainment.