Agreed, JN. Well put.
Though I hope most people know what they are doing and not need the tabs as a reminder.
On the account of this game being a place to learn economics. It's not really true. If you want to 'win' this game, you should know how to burn your money and must make decisions one should never make in the real world. Im talking about an important aspect of the game, namely tenders.
Tenders give such great rewards, one should really try to win them. But to win them, you should mostly start enterprises which won't make any profit, but are very costly instead and which are not intended to have a long lifespan. So, if you want to learn economics from this game, you should play plain, but doing so will make it very tough, as you won't grow experience fast enough to keep up and thus you lose contests.
Besides, the game isn't so much about economics and more about trade, which is just a part of the economy. You can not decide on organisation structures. You can not decide on 'green' (except for solar panels) or other social aspects (except for the Nigeria project). There are no cultural difference you've got to bridge. There are no stocks or hostile take-overs. There's no real traffic business. Service sector is minimal, even though this is one of the biggest branches in today's economics. And the list can go on. It's basically only raw material (mines, farms) -> product (factories) -> retail (shops, service sector), whereby each step adds something to the price to make a profit. That's not too hard to learn and many questions go way behind this point. |
