Pure capitalism, unchecked would be horrific for the people but quite fun for the robber baron. This is an idea I had for a game called Corporate Machine. It could be offline or online but I think the online version would be a million times cooler so I will describe the online version. The layout of the game is similar to Sim City or one of those Farmville type games but the game starts with a fully built city. Everything runs in real time while the player isn't on and most actions take a long time to pan out making it hard for someone who plays a lot to get too far ahead.
When the game starts, different businesses trade with each other to make products to sell for profit to AI citizens. All of these businesses are originally controlled by AI that will look for the shortest routs and cheapest prices in order to make their product faster or cheaper and earn more money.
There can be many instances of the game at once, with a new games spawning each day and each game lasting from a few days to a few months depending on the instance. An instance opens and a player can join in at any time and buy a business to make profits then upgrade that business or buy a new one. Players compete to monopolize everything or have the most money at the end of the time limit.
The player would chose a section of business to specialize in like food, clothing or electronics. After choosing a specialization they can buy any business that falls in to that specialization so if you picked food you could buy slaughter houses, restaurants or farms. Some of these would cross over with loose connections like farms being bought by clothing and food specialists. Business will send out trucks to another business to pick up materials to make a product to sell, or send to a business that sells to citizens. Each specialization has it's own end business that sells to the AI, who will buy from the business that is offering the cheapest end product.
Each player would have a persistent character that will gain
experience and money to give them a slight edge in their next game. You
could upgrade yourself to have faster workers, efficiency of certain businesses,
smaller buy fees and larger sell fees. There can be instances for separate tiers of players with different rewards for winning.
All buildings start out as the nicest version when taking health, comfort and quality in consideration. These things are detrimental to your sole goal of profit, so as you upgrade your business if becomes more soulless, unhealthy and cheap. So you upgrade your mom and pop TV repair shop to something like a Radio Shack, then it resembles a Best Buy and finally some mutant Walmart. All of the industries would end up with the same end output building after upgrading and would then compete to monopolize everything and try to end the game early for more points.
The employees would start as unionized high paid workers and as you upgrade them they would go down to minimum wage, then be illegal workers, then slaves and finally intelligent robots (but with souls so they feel a million times more sorrow then a human slave.) Every part of the game should try to follow the theme of greed except for one important part, the system the game uses to make money.
The game would be truly free to play and only have advertisement in lobbies or other non-game environments. A player could buy the game for five dollars and have no ads at all. Players could buy clothes for their persistent character or make their businesses look cool/funny but nothing you could buy in game would actually help your progress. The contrast of the greed displayed in the game and the desire to bring the game to people freely and not try to nickle and dime them would add appeal to the game.
So it is kind of like Sim City meets Monopoly with an online RTS edge. I'm looking for someone to help me make this real, it would be a truly unique game that could end up being very popular. It could be done easily on a PC, Android or iPhone.
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