Industry Empire

I'm going to call this an unpolished gem.

If a complex economic sim, with lots of production chains in a non-competitive environment sounds good to you, then you may find some enjoyment here.

The economic simulation is robust. For example, if you produce only one commodity, that will quickly satisfy the demand of all the towns on the map and the price for your goods will crash. Producing a diversity of goods will not only keep demand at a reasonable level, it will also grow the towns so overall demand will increase as well. Good incentives to invest in multiple production chains.

It is buggy on modern OSes. But I found that running it in Windows 8 compatibility mode really helped.
It still crashes on occasion, so save frequently!

Pick it up on sale. <$10 I'd say is worth it

IMPORTANT

Some people can't get the game to work at all. Running it through the games own .exe file worked for me but I don't imagine everyone will be as lucky.

Review:

This doesn't feel like a finished game, maybe from the early 2000's with the micromanagement and clicking of the first sim city at 1/10th of the complexity. Simple things like truck routes (the only way to transport resources anywhere) locking the use of the truck for anything else instead of queueing truck missions. No easy way to get an overview of your resources, even using the "resources" menu won't truthfully express the available amount for selling. There's a lot more bad to say about this game, but getting all the achievements has already taken enough time.

It's a cute game which, if finished properly with an UI that wasn't 10 years outdated at release, would be a fun experience. As it stands it's a drag that opposes you at every move with little to no reward for your effort.

I've played it so much only 'cause I was curious about what will be unlocked when I leveled up.
Indeed, the game is boring and repetitive, making you settle for only few things:
- pass the time to accumulate raw material,
- transport raw material to processing factories,
- sell the products to cities.
- invest the earned money to buy more boring farms & factories.

So, actually, you will find yourself hunting for the best deals in the market and accepting the orders, which will be completed automatically if you have the required anount of products and sufficient related trucks for delivery.
If it weren't for the "autocomplete order" option, the game would have been A PUNISHMENT.
The loading & unloading is non-existent, there are only some boring trucks which go from point A to B without fun.

The game feels dry; It's like a text-based RPG. The only time when you interact with the map is when you buy land or when you hunt the yellow bonus items. Everything else is dead (including the slow cars and the useless train tracks).
Weather is useless.

Replayability = zero.
Grinding = huge.
Gameplay = none.
Discovering the new content unlocked with each level = exhausting.
Most interesting = the matrix of links between raw material, basic products, complex products and high-tech products. It's among the nice things I've noticed in this game. Sadly, this is the only nice thing...
Price worth = definitely not the full price of 20 $. Maybe around 4 $...

I am a very big fan of tycoon game, I think I had my hands on nearly all of the major games in this genre, Transport Tycoon Trans openttd simtowertownantcity2345 RT2 RT3 TM industry giant transport Giant Gold CapitalismII RTC ANNO1404 Simutrans CS locomotion Patrician Tropico A-Train CitiesXL CitiesSkyline, and this game really has a lot of potential.

Pros:
1. A Really Really Really rich set of goods to process and sell
160 goods, beating a lot of games by light years, only came close by Capitalism, but has a lot more dynamics
2. Decent production chain
It becomes as complex as, if not more than TrainMaster
3. Very well balanced
you cannot sell one type of good forever, it will crash the market, you have to feed the cities the 160 goods in varity to let it grow and consume all you productions to make profit

All in all, a very different taste of flavour from many other business tycoon games, very rich economic simulation, with tiny bit of transportation simulation. This is a nearly unbeatable game logic.

Cons:
All that was of merit in the game logic, is comprimised by execution.
1. Known Game crash at launch issue, with scarce information.
saw a lot of forum post complaining about crash at launch, I had to reinstall a few times, then completely restart steam to get into game, definitely has to do with graphics, I got a prompt for some kind of factory graphic reset before first successful launch.
2. Random crash in game, with scarce information.
Game sometime just crashes for no apparent reason, when you are about 1 hour / 1year game time into the game. reload will sometime crash at same point, doing something different avoids the crash.
3. too few maps
From what I see, only 6 scenario and 3 maps (could be only 6 maps may be they reuse the map? Idk I am not interested in scenario I simulate, I only enjoy simulate)
4. tedious micromanagement
This is to many people a con, not that I frustrate a lot about, after all I see the reason behind it to be forcing player to pay attention to individual buildings. I think it is unfair to actually say the micromanagement is tedious, the production phase actually allows you to automate(with configurable time + volume option, never seen in other games), at the sacrifice of holding up one of your vehicle per operation; but the selling to market phase, there is no automation. Come on, after all sales is the most important part of Business! If all things can truely be automated, it will add a lot of satisfaction to the "hands off" experience, though might bring away some joy of micromanagement, you know we are all lazy.

Bought at steam sale, about 7USD, thats a deal.
Know what you are buying, you only enjoy this game if you are patient, and like to see things running, and love business simuation.

I bought this game very early on and have been patiently waiting for the developers to patch it up to an enjoyable level ever since. And all of this time, I've been nothing but supportive and hopeful, waiting for this to occur. But now, I've finally thrown in the towel and decided it's time to call this donkey for what it is.

All you really have to do is go to the forums and you'll quickly see other peoples' reasons for dissatisfaction with this game. But speaking for myself, the worst aspect of the game is that has an economic model that creates orders/demand for you to start a business, then dries up those orders to ZERO unless you open other businesses (with different products) to develop the surrounding towns to create more demand for your original product. Sound ridiculous? It is. For example, you go from building a successful egg producing business to suddenly, zero demand (due to no one in the world eating eggs anymore because their town is too small, apparently). It takes all of the positive, enjoyable parts of the game, wads it up, lights it on fire, and throws it out the window. Have you ever heard of a business game "on rails"?

I don't know if I've ever even written a negative review on Steam. But, my level of frustration and disappointment in this game has led me for this to be my first. Is this the worst game ever made? No, but it completely misses the mark of creating an enjoyable progression of building your business to be what you want it to be (which to me, is the point of game like this, Railroad Tycoon, etc...). This game is SUCH a missed opportunity and the developers seem to be oblivious and completely disengaged. Not a good way to run your uh... business. So, save yourself the frustration and do not buy this game.

I absolutely love games this like even when most do not. Sadly, this is one of the worst simulation games I have played espeically for the price. The game is clunky and hard to build. Selling items isn't automatic and just becomes annoying after awhile. I tried the campain which was lacking any substance and didn't give me the desire to contiue to play. Simply put, I'm horrified that I spent money on this game and beg steam to give a refund.

Game is still unfinished.

0 automation !

Vehicles management is really bad
a) one vehicle per one job that will occur once per month
b) veichle put on one job can not participate on another job

Selling
click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

Fill factories with raw material
click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

This game has been greatly improved with the latest patch so you can mostly ignore the bad comments about buying land and the markets crashing in terms of selling your goods, though you still have to watch out not to flood the market but then i think thats a good thing as its more realistic.
At the end of the day its probably not as good as other strategy management games like Tropico etc, but its not bad either. i think what it mainly lacks is a proper campaign. there are a few scenorios etc but really it could do with a bit more structure in terms of achieving targets, though tech research and skills perks are a nice touch.
Overall though if its on sale and you're a sucker for these types of games give it a whirl, there are worst things to play.

When negative reviews outnumber positive ones, I avoid the game like it was spoiled fruit. This time I went against the majority and bought the game. They have listed so much wrong I thought can't be true.

I should have taken the $30 and bought a hammer to hit myself in the head with. Frustrating, mega-micromanagement, and no hope for fixes to the basic mechanics of the game, Next time I buy the hammer, You should spend your money elsewhere

I like the concept of a business simulator. When I was younger, I played a game called Capitalism and Capitalism II. Both games taught me the basic concepts of busines, supply and demand, logistics and the importants of training/research. In that game, one had to use your mind to come up with some strategies. However, Industry Empire lacks in several of those areas.
Dislikes:
The game does not seem like a game, rather than a grind. The concepts are easy to master.
In order to level, one simply has to play long enough and sell enough "goods" to an infinite market.
Once you get enough $, you can buy more land to build another building to shorten the time to the next sell.
The game has a severe lack of features. For instance, you can change the speed of the simulation, which is good considering time is the biggest adversary. Unfortunately, the game notifies you when one of your storage buildings is full. Which is good, except it puts the game back down to a crawl. There is no option to disable the mandatory slow down of the time.

Bottom line: The concept is good. Perhaps a younger player can get some value out of it. If you are looking for a shallow business sim/korean grind feast, look no further!
If you want somethign deeper/more complex, please let me know when you find one. :)

Where to start.

Well the game has potential, but it is potential that will never get fullfilled.
You will only see one maybe two patches for this game ever.
You will not see any DLC or expansions.
Why?

Rondomedia, they dont work on there games once released you see, they release it, recode and release it under a new name.
A few names should always be remembered and avoided, Excalibur, Rondomedia etc, they are all hand in foot and only produce these very overpriced, rehashed and buggy games that would not be out of place on Facebook or Mobile.

This one is on of there better ones, it is ok, but usual bugs, terrible visuals really terrible, and bad sound etc but still there best game yet!

Lets mention optimisation, your fan will work overtime, mine goes crazy, i can play the big titles with no problems, this game has terrible graphics ingame yet your fan will think its playing the latest top end game.

Bugs, your game will crash for no reason to desktop every now and then, probably due too the optimisation, its not just this title too, its all there titles.

Charging this current price is scandulious. Worth maybe 7.99 at the most.

this game is staggeringly awful.
I thought hey, I'll be the first to try it out, and it's only $30.. how bad can it be?

It is poorly constructed, poorly animated, the gui commands are counter intuitive, the industrial economic model flat out doesn't work.. and you're forced through endless lesser industrial types in order to get to what you actually want to build..

It's horrible. Run away!

The game itself is a very good idea and should really inspire more simulation game. At first, it made me think of the old capitalism game. The graphics are OK (it's a sim game afterall) but there is one major feature that gets the game almost unplayable. To make money, you have to select orders you want to fulfill then send a car to deliver it. The problem? it takes a few operations to get that done and you'll spend most of your play time doing that. Most orders are small, not repeatable and there is no may to automate it (it would be easy to simply click on a ressource with: "deliver to order when ready").

In fact, you won't spend much time building your industry empire. You will be rage clicking the orders to make a few coins and that will take all the space. If there was a a patch released to automate it with bigger orders, i would rewrite this review. But for now, i can't recommend it.

Forget all the negative reviews.

The game is fine, however some of the features are a bit boring (micromanagement)

Overpriced but enjoyable for people who like business simulators !!

Do not buy the game. It has a faulty interface. none finished features and a horribly broken micromanaging system

Its not worth the price. Stay far far away

They will also do everything they can to prevent negative press on their forum sites.

Watch out for other games from the same people. Industry Manager is one. It seems like they are reskinning their games and release them as a new game to avoid all their negative reviews

This game plays like the heart and soul of Industry Giant 2 and Transport Tycoon. You build industry around a map after buying land and produce in a 'unit per hour' style to then sell to cities which, depending on population, have needs. You build truck hubs to send out trucks to pick up goods and deliver all over the map. Even if you've found this style of gameplay fun, there are some significant drawbacks to this particular title.

The actual method of getting goods to market is not the smoothest method either. You'll find yourself doing extremely mundane tasks with a lot of clicking - and there is no simple 'deliver per month' that would make bringing things to market more automated and streamlined. This is only set up between your own factories.

The actual manner in which your vehicles take things to their orders is unsatisfying. Undetailed vehicles, no sense of loading and unsatisfying sound effects mean that the thing you'll do over and over seems to reap little reward. There's no ching or money or roar of engine, no sense of big loads or interesting vehicles. In this regard, it falls short of previous, older, non-3d titles.

The method of land purchase, itself, is a little obnoxious. If there were tools to help you fill in gaps or 'snap to road' and 'snap to non buyable land' options, it would be a little less so - but with large footprints, winding Freight Tycoon style roads and rigidly blocky buildings, you'll find yourself with an ugly landscape rather quickly. You point and click to form a shape. If you've ever played Cities XXL and built a farm - the manner is identical, but for the ability to snap to lines and fill in spaces. This, agan, is sorely missed, costs time and leaves gaps.

Furthermore, there is little sense of border in some buildings. To make roads between them, you'll often be clicking on invisible (Indeed, also 3d) footprints as you select and build roads to create alleys and access roads.

To progress through the game you start with a few buildings, earn money and level up. This releases more buildings and products - that cities, too, will begin to pick up as they grow. To make a city grow you have to supply it with as much as you can. This means you'll be taking large numbers of orders.

The different menus you have to go through to send a truck, the inability to rename vehicles or places to create senses of locales or purposes (Especially helpful as your plants specialize in products), you'll come to know them as 32, 44, 1 and 3. Not only unpersonal, but it continues to take away from an immersion of the game. A simple option to rename would have helped. You wont see the load capacities of trucks when you send them out - you have to actually select the logistics depot, go to purchase a new vehicle and determine it from there.

A truck will then leave, 'touch' its source destination to instantaneously load, get stuck behind a vehicle going slowly (ala Freight Tycoon without the passing or upgrading of roads), and then 'touch' its destination to deliver it. The sound effects are ala Windows 95 System Sounds than an actual game, and the little details that make the sight and sounds of these games, the sense of a day to day operation, seem lost.

I've tried playing this quite a bit, and it still suffers from a crash to desktop every couple of hours. More importantly, the more I play this, the more I not want to play this. I want to go back to other titles to get a sense of satisfaction that they, as a game, give. Though newer and in 3d, this game is both expensive and lacks a sense of basic heart, soul and effort that others have tried to give. I don't recommend it.

As a sidenote, the graphics are clean enough when zoomed in - but this is a view you will be rarely using. Zooming out, they very quickly become pixelated and seem rough.

Broken and tedious with a clunky interface.

Among the bugs I've encountered so far: Tutorial won't advance, Can't get milk resource (thus disallowing everything you can make from milk) and a random clash bug. Since I've played for 6 hours, that's 1 bug every two hours.

The graphics are the latest 2004 has to offer (minor complaint)

The interface is reptition and click heavy. You'll find yourself doing the same tasks over and over requiring far too many clicks to do the simple things (like sending a truck on a delivery)

The sandbox mode, "Freeplay," allows for just 3 different maps. But I suppose that since there isn't much to this game anyway, that's more than enough.

Anyway, as far as game play goes, you build your buildings, connect them with a road building tool that takes a lot of getting used to, make sure the buildings have enough workers, power and water... then flip through the market looking for good prices that you have enough resources to fulfill... And that's about it.

is this game any good : YES
why ? well because i am part of the target audience for the game.
do you like settlers ? or anno...or the new FACTORIO ?
do you like simcity ?

the game is a huge block of content. You start as a lowly poor boss that fills in couple orders of goods a week. The game keeps pushing content towards you. the more you advance; the more you get buildings to produce more ressources to fill more orders. Its one of those game you can just look at the automation and be like this is nice. im saying if its your type of game then get it.. if not dont bother because youll just try to spoil my fun but ill be busy playing settlers or this

I cannot judge the actual quality of the economical simulation, if you don't mind the game slapping you accross the face, you may proceed and play it. The problem is that Industry Empire isn't fun to use/play. I admit I didn't go as far as actually finish the whole tutorial (played half an hour), big flaws emerged far before it ended.

Claiming a land requires drawing a free polygon within which you can construct only rectangular based buildings. This system implies messy placement, clumsy space optimisation, lack of "snap into place" that'd have actually helped the player play the game (maybe the devs thought using square/hexagonals cells was so 90s... I dunno). Drawing the roads is a nightmare, without any clear indication whether they effectively connect or not with the building. Again, free placement, no hint, no idea what you're doing right or wrong.

The GUI doesn't completely work either. I suspect some bugs, but it also doesn't work on from the ergonomy standpoint. What's the use of both a Reset button and a Cancel button where the Reset button actually Cancels everything you just did? And do we really need scrollbars on which you cannot click to page up/page down?

During placement, say during road placement, you can select buildings on which you missclick without even leaving the placement tool. Now what?

The game looks and feels like a pain to play. I would recommend playing Banished again. Good UI, solid, fun to play. It might not be as rich as this one but it works just fine.

I can't just have a clear opinion on the price tag, but it feels like 30€ is a bit too much for what we end up with.

Hours Played Disclaimer: I accidentally left the game idle overnight during the tutorial, so the hours played is inaccurate.

I am writing this, and I am still very early game in freeplay mode. Keep in mind I have played city and business sims before.

IE offers an extensive tutorial that will introduce you to its mechanics. This game seems to be very detailed and nuanced in terms of its gameplay mechanics. You not only make larger choices about where to place buildings, but you hand-pick the number and type of trucks needed to deliver your goods; different trucks transport different goods. You will also need to maintain your vehicles as time goes on. Also, you can actually determine the shape of the land you purchase for development, as well as the location of buildings within a given plot.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they are serviceable and get the job done. So far, I haven't run into any bugs or problems of note.

I'll update this impression once I get more gametime under my belt.

Update: The various information panels available are acutually useful and helpful. As vets of the genre know, this is not always the case with this kind of game.

Your primary source of income will be from fulfilling orders for various products. You will need to deliver the products on time in order to avoid a penalty for late delivery. The game ends if you run out of money. However, you can get a limited number of loans (six, I think) from the bank.

It looks like the game has two gameplay modes: freeplay and scenarios. At launch, there are six different scenarios for you to choose from, which place in charge of varying industries at different stages of development. While the scenarios seem somehwhat interesting, I think most gamers will want to go for freeplay option.

Overall, I recommend this game. I know there are concerns about the the developer's past releases, but I decided to take the plunge, and I am enjoying myself so far.

Update 7/31: Still enjoying the game overall. Pick-up and delivery of goods are made instantly once a truck arrives at a given destination. It looks like the early game is limited to farming, and you will gain access to diffirent techonologies and industries as the game progresses. The game can drag a bit at regular speed when waiting for production of various goods to hit a desired level, but you can speed-up time to compensate.

One minor issue I have run into is the awkwardness of knowing how big the next plot you're going to buy needs to be in order to accomodate a given building. Right now, you have to go into the Buildings menu select the building and look at it's footprint; then you have click on the Land menu and draw out the plot based on your memory of said footprint. This isn't so bad when you're placing one or two buildings, but it can become a bit of a challenge when you're doing more. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is annoying.

If you want to mine, you can order a geological survery that will tell you the size of given deposits in an area, and I wish there were something similar available for setting up water plants. There doesn't appear to to be a water table that tells you what areas of the map have more water than others, and this is a feature I really liked in the latest SimCity. Currently, it seems like you can just plop a water plant anywhere, and it will produce the same amount of water.


Workers become available instantly when you build residences and request a given number, so there's no gradual build-up of the population like in other games. This may not be realistic, but it does allow you get facilities up and running sooner since you don't have to wait for workers to become available once requested. Their travel to and from work is not simulated either.

I still haven't encountered any major bugs or crashes. I'll update these impressions again soon.

Update 7/31 #2: Okay, after playing the game for a while on Freeplay, I would still recommend this title for fans of the genre. If you are trying to choose between IE and the latest Sim City, however, I would go for Sim City, as it's prettier and, perhaps, more streamlined and refined in some of its gameplay elements. Some folks have been reporting lag spikes and sluggish gameplay. I really haven't had any problems in those regards. All of the game features I have tried have worked as one would expect.

The bottom line IMHO is that this is a competent entry into the city building genre, but it could use a facelift and some subtle improvements to make it even better. Perhaps the price tag should be a bit lower given these issues, but this is a generally robust simulation that seems to offer a solid foundation for some good fun. If you're on the fence, wait and see if and how the devs respond to suggetions and complaints.

This is primarily a first impression review, but is unlikely to be updated.

First off, the game runs slowly on my rig. I don’t have a powerful graphics card, but the screens lead me to believe I’d be ok (I can run many more visually appealing games on mid-low settings, like Anno 2070 and Sleeping Dogs). On the lowest settings the game still runs kinda low and the software cursor is often choppy.

I did encounter a bug in the tutorial where one of the dialogues that didn’t have any apparent requirements (no click here, etc) did not advance. I was able to skip it and complete the tutorial.

The game itself presents to be a more complex SimCity (not that always online crap, I'll never play it so I can't compare), it looks very indepth and in many ways looks like it's trying to deliver exactly what I want.

The game requires lots of micromanagement, which isn’t on its own a bad thing. I prefer games that give me lots of control over what needs to be done. There is a strange lack of automation however. For example, when I built a chicken coop, even after I assign workers to it, I have instruct it to start producing chickens, which is its only function.

Transporting goods between buildings and to contracts is similar. This makes more sense and does allow you to program the route so it repeats. However, I was unable to find a way to queue tasks. I had one farm truck and contracts to two different cities. The game did not allow me to start both tasks as I had only one truck. Preferably, it would set the tasks in a queue and available, unassigned trucks would go.

I entered Freeplay and balked at first at the lack of freedom (no industry buildings, no research options) until I learned that you level up through completing orders and your level is saved to your profile (so future freeplay games will start at a higher level). I played for a bit but became bored at how slow the progress was.

I ended my play session when I realized one order that I had set up game days ago was never delivered. Nor were the other two contracts I had just set up for delivery. Supposedly there is a way to track a trucks motion, but when I was looking for it, the game began to run very slowly and I had reached my limit.

PROs
*Very complex looking game
*Has a leveling system where your actions make your more efficient

CONS
*Poor graphical engine (this may be unique to people on lower powered systems)
*Buggy and/or sometimes unintuitive
*Lack of effective automation

Final thoughts: I guess it is less of a simulation game and more of a literal sandbox, meaning you are a kid in an actual sandbox playing with your Tonka truck, You have to find the sand, dig the sand, and put the sand in the truck, and push it in the direction you want it to go. This is fine with one truck, but with 10?