💾 Archived View for mirrors.apple2.org.za › archive › apple2.caltech.edu › games › ecomaniacs.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 04:06:58.
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EcoManiacs
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by Ed Olson
release 1.0
Overview
In EcoManiacs, you manage a business which is in competition with another business in a city. In a Sim-City-like environment, you control the building of stores, factories, and warehouses while regulating the price of the product and wage for the employees.
Installation
EcoManiacs uses a custom OS. Use shrinkit to unpack the EcoManiacs archive to a 3.5" disk. If you have a hard drive, boot the disk by typing either "pr#5" at a applesoft prompt, or by setting your startup drive to 5 (in the control panel) and rebooting. If you don't have a hard drive, just put the disk in the drive and boot.
Controls
As you start up the game, you will see a title screen. Once the game has loaded and waited a second or two, click the mouse button. You will see the main game screen. Down the left are various statistics on your company and on the left there is a map depicting the buildings that comprise your city.
Your businesses buildings are blue. The computers buildings are red. The green buildings are the homes and apartments of the citizens.
When you start the game, the computer automatically buys a store and a factory. Your buildings are in the top left corner of the screen. The store can be readily recognized by a large window and the factory by it's smoke stacks. There are no warehouses on the screen yet, but they look like factories without smoke stacks. Note that you must have at least one store in order to sell products. The more stores you have, the more products you sell.
On the far left of the screen there is a menu. It shows the price that you are charging for the product and the price that the computer is charging. To change the selling price of your product, click on your price and type in a new price as prompted.
You can also change the wage that you are paying your employees. You change the wage by clicking on the wage and typing in the new wage as prompted. Note that happy workers make more products. Also note that there are 25 workers in a factory and 4 workers in both a store and a warehouse. You must pay all of your workers the same wage.
The amount of money that you spend on advertizing can be changed by clicking on advertizing and typing in a new amount as prompted. More advertizing increases the need for a product and your market share.
You can build more buildings by clicking on build and following the prompts. Buying a factory costs $1200. The more factories you have, the products you produce in a turn.
Building a store increases the number of products that you sell. Keep in mind that this is not a linear progression; having five billion stores is not going to help you as much as it is going to cost you in wages.
Warehouses are buildings that store products that you couldn't sell. If you do not sell all of the products that you produce in a turn, the products are destroyed. Therefore, buy warehouses to store unsold products. Each warehouse can hold 1000 products.
All buildings cost about $10 per turn to maintain. Also, buildings can be abandoned, if you cannot afford to pay your workers or to maintain them. Note that you get no money back after you abandon them.
To produce a product, you must buy raw materials and the cost of these raw materials may change subtly during the game. The cost at the beginning of the game is $5 per product.
Strategy
This is mostly up to you, but here are a couple pointers:
o Try to sell all the products that you are making. If you aren't, try lowering the price or increasing advertizing. Storing products doesn't do you any good.
o Try your hand at viscious marketing techniques. When monetarily ahead of the computer, try stockpiling. How? Increase your price so high that no one will buy your product and produce a lot of them and store them in warehouses. Then, drop your price through the floor (yes, at a loss) and the computer won't be able to compete without incurring a loss itself. Since you're ahead monetarily, you should be able to last longer, right?
PROBLEM: I'm losing lots of money.
Try decreasing your wage or increasing your price. Or, if you're not selling any of your products, you should decrease your price. Try to stay competitive with the computer on pricing.
PROBLEM: I'm making money, but not as much as the computer.
Try playing with your price in increments and decrements of one. Do the same with wage and advertizing and see if you can tweak your profit margin a little.
Strikes
Workers go on strike if you don't pay them enough. Forcing a strike is one way to save money, but note that no business transactions (production/selling) take place when a strike is in progress.
To get out of a strike, increase your wage. Workers may not return to work right away or you may have to pay them more than you were before they went on strike.
Winning or Losing, as the case may be
The game ends when either the computer or you go bankrupt. The computer will warn you when you are critically low on money. But if you set your wage to $300 (james), you may go bankrupt without any warnings since your expenses would be so incredibly high.
Money
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Shareware
This game is shareware. I ask for $8, but more is fine. :) You can send checks to:
Ed Olson
654 E. 103rd St.
Bloomington, MN 55420-5415
USA
This game was a lot of work, so do feel guilty for stealing this. Ok? Just kidding. If $8 is _really_ a problem (i.e. my mom just died and we can't afford her funeral), send me e-mail and perhaps we can work something out. (Yah know, I think I need a GS/OS reference...)
Ed Olson
eolson@nyx.cs.du.edu
Comments are always appreciated!