Spice Road

A game where you explore new regions to exploit and build trade routes between your settlements and the outside world. It's not bad but I think the game's biggest flaw is the citybuilding. Every settlement needs to have its buildings individually placed, but the game would be so much smoother if you just had a button to click to build the desired building for each town. This is because you will build the same buildings for the same settlements dozens and dozens of times by the time they game ends. Eventually clicking into each town to individually place the buildings or check the towns stats becomes cumbersome. I really wish this was handled in an outliner or something because the game is pretty solid, but this aspect made it unbearable.

A qwerky little eco management game that i gave a shot. I would say get it on sale regardless if you are heavily interested or not, as it might not be your thing at all from the get go.

Copying from Roboczar as he summed it up nicely and its worth repeating
"First things first: This game mainly caters to the kind of player that is interested in logistics and supply chain economics and is only really a city-builder or Civ style game in the loosest sense. You are building a network of trade nodes and attempting to meet various scenario goals or self-created goals (in the sandbox mode) as opposed to fighting battles or growing population. The main challenge is building an efficient and profitable network of trade cities given the resources on the map."

Id recommend watching a few videos before buying. However, i enjoyed my 10-17hrs of game time with it and i mainly played it as my study break game as its not an emotionally investing game.

Looks simple but it is quite a complicated and interesting economic strategy game under the hood, definitely worth it for the price.

Gameloop consists mostly of analysing prices, scouting,settling near resources and trading between the settlements and outside world for a profit.

A bare-bones city builder/economy game with some elements of warfare.
Also, it's got opium dens and slavery, so that's different.
And if you're not yet convinced, you can level up the wells where your people get their water. Yeah, the wells.

There might be a game here, but not one you can watch or enjoy. Height of foolishness was 'Watch your convoy', the one seemingly with 10 camels that you cannot see or the whole mess being a blue blob that moves across the 'high' level map. At first I didn't even know I had people until I noticed 'miniscule' vertical lines moving around (aimlessly).

A good indie strategy game to recommend trying. The major downside is the primitive graphics, but the amount of things you can do and the replayability makes up for this flaw. This is surprisingly a deep game. I've played for over 30 hours and every new mission introduces new things, new concepts, and new challenges.

Its a small game but its a good game. It works without flaws. It has a well thought gameplay.
And it gives enough challenges and motivation vor 30 hours of gameplay.
Graphics is somewhat simple but for me it was absolutely ok because the gameplay was fun.

I find these raving positive reviews about this game highly suspicious.
This game is very small on content, feels like a simple flash game.
And it still looks more like an early beta game, even though it is advertised as a finished product.
Beware.

TL:DR;
Uneccesary 3d graphics, most engaging action is holding the speed button, extremely boring title.

Review: 5/10 at best
Game is really boring, and boredom kicks in way too soon.
You basically put buildings, watch them go up and it changes some numbers around.
All while holding speed button, which makes it feel a bit like idle game.

Nothing to do here, really, except perhaps unlocking easy achievements.

Some of the other reviews give this game a thumbs down for not being SimCity; I give this game a thumbs up primarily for not being SimCity. It tries to do something different, and while it could use a TON more polish and mechanics that add a bit more depth and variety that keep it fresh for a longer period of time, the game is different enough that it scratches a managerial itch of mine I have trouble finding good ways to scratch.

Unlike a lot of trading games that demand you manually perform boring, routine transactions yourself, Spice Road automates nearly all the routine tasks. That said, this is where it starts to run into problems, because it has the Final Fantasy XII problem of automating the simple, routine actions, but then not adding in anything else for you to actually do once you've set up the routine.

That said, to counter one of the complaints about the game made by some of the other reviewers, there's nothing particularly wrong with being able to hold TAB and speed the game up until things happen. The game's base speed is a super-slow-motion, so that you can make tons of decisions in a relatively short span of time within the game, then, once all your orders are done, you just hold TAB until you're ready to take more actions (such as waiting for more money to come in to build the next building), and hitting F4 even explicitly exists as a "fast forward until the next building gets built" button, although I rarely bothered using that instead of TAB.

The interface in general is rather lacking, however. It's great that things are automated, but at the same time, it's extremely hard to understand what's actually going on behind the scenes. You can be told, for example, that a goods workshop consumes ore and tools, plus hires 10 workers and pays a salary to them, in order to craft goods... but then it doesn't say HOW MUCH ore is used to make how many goods. Control over your city basically runs on seeing a HUD that has green lights when things are good, and which turns yellow, orange, or red when you need more of something, but beyond that, the game makes it very difficult to reverse-engineer anything about what's going on below the surface. This often matters while playing, because you can have a city that produces tons of food or goods, but still have a yellow food or goods indicator because your city is trading away all the goods because some off-map trading node will pay more for your goods, and your merchants will trade away their own lunch and starve if it makes them an extra dollar of profit (then blame you for starving).

In most cases, it almost doesn't matter at all, however. Outside of the "Isolation" mission, the only thing you really need to do is look at what's making profits, and look at the price indicator on the world map. The only thing that actually seems to matter is the price of different commodities, so if something is expensive, you just try to build more of that thing.

I find the supply chain dissappointingly short. Basically the only thing that you use to actually manufacture secondary goods is ore. You need food, ore, one kind of "recreation" good (alcohol -which is for some bizarre reason not grown in the same place as food and vice versa in spite of anything you can brew almost definitionally being edible-, opium, and tea), and one luxury good (and one of the luxury goods can be manufactured through ore, so that's not even necessary). This basically means that you need ore and food, and the rest is just fluff that you exploit solely to drive up profits. Ore is used to make tools (needed to run almost everything), goods (needed in freakishly large quantities by your population), weapons (needed by soldiers for combat), and artisan (artificial luxury goods). These make you all the money you will ever need, and beyond that, you just need access to food and a recreation resource. (And you can easily trade for the latter, although you need enough food that there will be problems if you solely rely upon importing food.)

Likewise, there's a halfhearted attempt at having "inns" that allow for "tourism", but you basically just set down more churches and saloons and they generate money even if you have no other resources to exploit, which makes the other resources even more meaningless.

Beyond this, there are cities, where you invite nobles to your city to buy more things you can sell them for a profit, but which make increasing demands upon your city's infrastructure to the point that once you set down the palace and actually turn a town into a city, then unless you have leveled-up buildings, then you cannot build more infrastructure to meet needs fast enough. (Build a palace, and it demands more security, so you build more barracks or a fortress, but then it needs more repair, so you build repair yards, then it needs more population, so you build apartments, but then you need more healthcare and recreation, so you build a hospital and casino, but then you need more population, so you build apartments, but then you need more religion, warehouse space, and water, so you build a cathedral, 3 more warehouses, and more wells, but then it needs more security and population...) You can level up your buildings to make them more efficient, but the problem is that the high-tier buildings you get in cities require geometrically more experience to level up, and since you need to keep building more and more of everything, you never get the chance to level those things up. Because of this, there's basically never any reason to have a city except to satisfy arbitrary mission objectives for one. If you CAN build a city, then you're obviously making money hand-over-fist already, and therefore don't NEED a city to make any more money. (Cities are generally just giant pits you throw money into, anyway...)

This brings us to the common failing of so many management games, which is that difficulty exists only in the earliest stages of a mission, and once you start making ANY profit at all, there's almost no reason outside of some catastrophically stupid self-inflicted blunder you would ever stop making money. There is almost no way to feel a challenge in this game outside of finding out that the first town you blindly put on an unexplored map was placed near no resources, and you are forced to reset. (Expect to make one blind guess-and-scout short session focused purely on exploring the map, then reset once you know where everything is for every mission.) Combat does hypothetically exist, but it's a bit of a joke. Build four barracks, set them to attack a town, and speed up time until you defeat everything. Even if outnumbered, you can wear them down with attrition and replacing dead guards is cheap.

One other commodity is slaves. Slaves are abysmally badly represented, and are basically just a "population recource" you find and exploit like ore mines or farms. Slaves grow infinitely, and once in your slave huts, are just population that eat 45% as much and never cause any problems or change society in any visible way.

Graphics are also... bad. Like N64 graphics bad. I presume the developer bought them in some sort of medieval asset pack, because some of the graphics don't quite match the function of the building. Apartments are clearly castle keeps, while slavers and silk weavers live in treehouses for some reason. The world map is just made of colored semicircles and arrows gliding around. I play management games that are practically just spreadsheet management games, however, so I don't particularly mind graphics, and the game has minimum specs low enough to run on a graphing calculator. Just... don't expect to use it to wow your friends.

It's ultimately worth buying at least on sale for its novelty, but it desperately needs deeper mechanics to make it interesting for more than just grinding out the achievements. It's a city manager where there's far too little to actually manage.

Dear reader,

Below please find my unenthusiastic recommendation for Spice Road:

The concept is interesting for about 7 hours.

What kills this game is the repetitive click-fest (even with the game on pause) to build several practically identical towns, as every building has to be built individually. If you see screenshots of enormous towns for this game -- yeah. Every single building has to be placed individually, and if you have 6 or more towns that becomes a new clicking game of itself, which I don't enjoy.

The game is not nearly as deep as I had hoped from some of the reviews.

Worst of all, the tutorial "storyline" is mandatory to access all the buildings in sandbox. I would rather do away with the tutorial altogether, but forcing me to play it did show some interesting scenarios in the process. It also guaranteed I would not have an adequate comprehension of the game BEFORE my 2 hour request Steam for a refund period.

So yeah -- the game is okay. It could certainly be better. It could certainly not force players through the tutorial and still allow for varied challenges if the developer had wanted to provide more options to the sandbox mode. But instead, sandbox is inextricably tied to the amount of the tutorial the player has accomplished.

There is a technology tree, which allows access to buildings and building upgrades, but points for the technology tree only occur in the tutorial storyline as levels are completed. Hence the tree is merely a means of blocking sandbox access to the full building menu until all the whole storyline is completed.

Once you start to win, once the wheel begins to turn, there's practically nothing to stop you. But getting to that point can be an interesting challenge.

I would only recommend this to die-hard tycoon fans.

This game is a pure indie gem.

It scratches the trading itch Railroad Tycoon III had left and the Port Royale series failed to take over with very nicely designed game mechanics. Add to it a bit of citybuilding and strategy and... voila !

It is very replayable.

Business simulation game with much attention to detail and an RPG element thrown in. Probably kind of dry and complicated for most (myself included) but the RPG part is interesting and the art is nice. Better then most indie games I've played, professionally done, very original.

I play offline a lot and so my actual time played is not accurate. I have around 6-12 hrs.

This game is almost casual. Almost. Play is quick and clean. It is more an abstraction then a sim - and it is well done. Totally worth the price tag.

"~5/10" According to My Own Ratings.
It's an interesting game. Rather ugly even for a merchant/management one. But the main problem is that you can't really play the sandbox mode without going through the whole (boring) campaign mode. The sandbox mode is unlocked from the start, but everything is locked there.

So far, I couldn't find out if it has anything new at all.

I tried the sandbox mode, found it a bit annoying that I couldn't figure out how to unlock the new buildings, read the in-game help, it didn't help at all. So, I assumed it would take some illogical sequence of steps and went to campaign mode to check how it's done... it's exactly how I expected it to be in the first place. And when I hopped back into sandbox mode, the option had magically appeared. I thought I didn't pay enough attention the first time, so I tried some more and that's just how it is. The options are missing from sandbox mode or locked until you do the campaings to unlock them.

It's a deal breaker for me, since this kind of game usually requires an extremelly well thought campaign missions to make them worth playing.

If you have never tried any games that even remotely resembles this one, you may enjoy it a lot. If you have, you might want to play them instead. I'm still trying gather the patience to go through the (so far extremely boring tutorial-like) campaing missions to see if this game has anything new at all. I haven't seen a reason to be hopeful though.

Logistical and economical Simulator.

AI opponents are meh. Easily defeated.
So treat this as a multiple city builder with trade routes game. Not a trade war game.

If you like that kind of game, get it.
If you don't, then of course, stay away :P (Unless they actually do something about the AI in sandbox)
Which leads me to Sandbox mode, which would be the main reason to keep playing after the campaign.
It's lacking.
- Crappy Opponents
- No victory.. ever. (?)

I crushed the 5 AI opponents i had, and then just stared at my cities (that were fully built) earn me a gazillion coins. Nothing to do, and no victory in sight. Sure i get that it's sandbox mode, but atleast give us the option to win it :/

That killed the game for me.

Fun playing the game, sandbox a let down. (There might be additional stuff added to sandbox mode at a later time. So if this review is old, you might want to have a look at that.)

6.5/10 (Worth it on sale)

A very pleasing game. The graphics are adequate, although it's not that important here. It feels well designed, without bugs, super fast (loading, opening) and super light. The sort of things you sometimes get from indie developers.
I put is on the same shelf as Mount & Blade and Banished.

The graphics are cheap and cheesy but the systsem requirements so low this game will probably run well on a George Foreman grill.

Spice Road reminds me of Railroad Tycoon -- optimizing finances and spending a good bit of time interpreting spread sheet data -- logistics. But where I got tired of Railroad Tycoon rather quickly, this game keeps my interest by having a bit of Civilization (the Sid Myers series) thrown in. The ability to train guard units and send them out alone or embedded in caravans really rounds out the game nicely. In the future, I hope there are more types of military units than simply "Guards," or some small expansion of combat. There are many types of buildings to put in your cities and choices to be made about when to level them up which also helps this game be more compelling than simply optimizing spread sheets.

The depth of game is quite good. Don't be fooled by early missions; there are like 20 missions for a good reaon -- it takes that long to learn the basic game. There is a lot of subtlety here which is key to keeping any game interesting after multiple play-throughs. After 2 missions you might think it is simple, but after 8 you realize it is anything but simple. After 12, the possibility of Buyer's Remorse begins to permanently fade.

I was hoping to learn a bit of history when I bought this game, and in that arena, I have been disappointed. I have not come away with a deeper understanding of who the major players of the area were nor what their cultures were like, but the game is still an enjoyable change of pace for thinking fans of strategy games. Adding a few sentences of historical context to each of the mission descriptions would go a long way for history buffs.

Still it is fun to engage in the virtual construction of opium dens, slave markets and monastaries with consequences for the choices you make. You can choose war or peace with NPC factions and pay protection money or fight NPC bandits. Limited finances will make you constantly choose carefully what to build next. Choices, choices!

Some complaints I have: When I start a new town and send out 4 scouts, I often leave 2 on auto-pilot and give 2 instructions on where to go. Later on, I can't easily tell which ones I'm controlling. I get the impression that if you ever take a scout out of auto-explore, it just patrols back and forth to the point you set, wasting time, not exploring after the first round trip. (Not sure if I fully understand its AI yet.)

Worse, the caravans and guards remove the fog of war, but don't fill in the resources, so I can't tell if a patch of ground has been explored for resources by scouts or not. Put it all together, and I feel quite out of control when it comes to exploring for resources. I need more information and more control. It is frustrating when resources are suddenly revealed long after you thought you had scouted out an area... long after you chose where to place your city in that area.

I'd like to see a path when I mouseover a scout -- his planned route of where to go next. Or maybe an icon showing whether he is on auto-pilot. I'd like the ability to return a patrolling scout back to auto-exploration. I'd like to see two different types of fog: one that lets me know if an area has been explored by scouts or not. Maybe a caravan can remove the fog of war, but the area still has a grey tinge until explored by a scout?

I'd like the scouts to look a little less like the caravans. A medium blue oval is sometimes hard to distinguish from a medium-small blue oval. How about adding some bumps to the caravan icon or something?

The list of commodities in the profit/loss view is not alphabetized, making you read the entire list every time you want to find "weapons" or "food" or "ore." On the other hand, at least there is a long enough list to make the game interesting.

Occasionally you will take out loans, but when you repay them, you must repay your largest loan first which can make it hard to get out of a hole once you get a little stuck.

All in all, Spice Road definitely has its charms. It is stable, smooth, coherent, and consistently entertaining. Despite discussing some specific short-comings, I expect to get a couple hundred hours out of this title. I got it on Steam sale for $11.99, and that price seems about right to me. I would hesitate at $20. I am hard to impress, but give it 6.8/10 in its current (Nov 2014) form -- a worthy entry in any Steam library of strategy games. New patches still coming out -- should improve over time.

I bought this game when it was in early release -- anyway, a few months ago. Played the campaign through and enjoyed it immensely. Fairly quick learning curve. Fun to play.

I can highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys logistics & economical strategy games.
It reminds me a bit of some of my old favorites, such as Railroad Tycoon 3 or Capitalism 2.


To the people who say this is an easy game, they didn't give it enough time.
If you put it on hard, some of the scenarios in the first act even can be difficult. I'm sure it will increase the challenge in later acts as well.

It isn't just "put down some buildings and watch numbers change". That would be like saying the Civilization series is just building units and sending them to fight.

You have to think about:
- where to place camps
- when to upgrade
- which buildings to build RIGHT NOW, vs which to build later, vs which to never build.
- There are a variety of considerations to deal with: limited budgets (this is the main restriction), competing factions taking up good spaces if you aren't fast enogh, bandits taking out your caravans, etc.

With a limited budget, you really do have to think about what your next moves should be.



Cons:
- The campaign maps are static. Meaning if you have trouble and restart the mission, you know exactly where the resources are: you already found them in your last game. If you aren't exploring blind, you can get a big advantage by grabbing the best spots much earlier (since you know where they are now). To the dev: I'd suggest randomizing resource placement on the campaign maps to combat this.

- Once you get rolling and have a decent income, it isn't that difficult for the rest of the game. Maybe this changes in the later missions or sandbox mode. That said, there is still room for thought; you could just brute force build a bunch of stuff with your good income, but you'd maximize profits better by considering what to build when. (Perhaps later on when competition is more fierce this will be different.)



Review Caveats: I'm only through 6 campaign missions so far, will update if anything changes after playing through more.