Beta 1.3Now Available


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The famous game of Stardock, softwarehouse of Object Desktop Professional, is now available in Beta 1.3

The Stardock Introduction for Entrepreneur

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE...
The latest sales reports from western Australia have just arrived and the news is not good. The competition is trouncing our product line, and morale at the home office has never been
worse. But taking the company through rough times is why they pay you enough to buy and
sell a small country. Will you dedicate more funds towards researching the next generation
technologies? Is there enough money to bury our competitors with a swift and decisive
marketing campaign? Should you bribe your government connections to secure a lucrative
contract? Or will you go for broke and try to "accidentally" firebomb your opponent's
inventory? In the world of Entrepreneur, anything's possible and there can be only one victor.

BUSINESS IS WAR
Start a company, conquer the world. Entrepreneur is a real time multiplayer or single player
strategy game in which you must build a global corporate empire while competing against
ruthless opponents. Create new technologies, manufacture them faster than your oppponents, and try to make sure your marketing can fend off the nasty rumors your competitors may spread.

WIN THE BATTLE
Conquering the world means out dominating your competition through superior marketing
skills, exceptional technological prowness, and overwhelming manufacturing might. As CEO,
you must battle your competitors and bring your products to every corner of the globe at a
faster, cheaper, and at a more reliable rate than your competition.

BUILD AN EMPIRE
Entrepreneur is a game of global corporate warfare. The game play is cut-throat and deadly.
Marketing, research and production pay off but if it doesn't pay off enough, you can always
call in favors from your underworld friends to "take care of business".

WHATEVER IT TAKES
Play against some of the most cunning computer opponents ever seen in a strategy game or
compete with others from around the world on Stardock's free on-line Internet service (that is
built into the game).

Read Here About Beta 1.3

Entrepreneur 1.2 (c) 1997-1998 Stardock Systems, Inc. Directions ---------- Copy all these files
into your existing Entrepreneur directory. Example: copy *.* "c:\program files\ent" Some
History ------------ BETA 5 of 1.3 = 1.21 Changes in 1.3 over 1.2 + Each market has its own set
of cards in a .DIM files + New Demographic: Sales. You can see where people are making
their money + The graphs screen can be access from double clicking on your central office on
the site screen + The "rank" demographic now is more accurate by taking in the time it takes to
get full market penetration and updates itself weekly + Cards can be disabled in the .DIM file
by making their rarity = 0 + Site screen has region information in it + Production Screen gives
a detail profit/loss report + Production Screen now has an accurate time to build report +
Updated graphics for the Direct Action Cards + Updated graphics on the main screen + Sites
are cheaper to build + Buildings are cheaper but can't hold as many people. + Direct Action
Cards are cheaper to use + Sales building limited to ONE building. + Game now compares
markets on drive of all players and creates a common list. + Compatible with the Expansion
pack > Fixed High score overflow, maximum scores now chopped in half. (stardock.net will
only accept 1.3 or later for high scores) > Fixed AI getting too much money on start up.
Changes in 1.2 over 1.1 > Multiplayer didn't work reliably in new markets + "Faster" is as fast
as you can go in Multiplayer games now. > AI was hard coded to change prices by an integer
amount. Now it is flexible based on the market. + Music settings saved between games. +
Maximum start up funds set to 50 million + Several new Direct Actions (these are pretty
significant) + AI can use new Direct Actions > End of year status report mislabeled >
"Economy" resource renamed to underworld > crime resources = underworld resources +
Stardock.Net will show your rank if you're using 1.2 (or a + if you are unranked) >
Stardock.Net will now ONLY let you get a high score if you are using 1.2 or later. > Saved
games of automobile market didn't save correctly. Fixed in 1.1b over 1.1a (all these are OS/2
only issues) > Floating point problem on some machines, notably non-Intel machines > Game
tended to hang on exiting on some machines on OS/2 Fixed in 1.1A over 1.1 + On some
systems, loading a saved game or continuing your last game could result in Entrepreneur
closing if you had not already played a game that session. Changed in 1.1 over 1.0 +
Completely new set of graphics (this is a major set of enhancements) + F3 key will bring up
yearly stats + Will let you know if a new sales executive came + After 70 or so years, regions
will begin standardizing on the the leader's products. + Fixed a bug where the game could
crash the longer you play. + Made it easy for people to create their own markets + Fixed the
AI but where the AI got a ton of money starting out. We weren't initializing a variable. +
SDS/AI enhanced so that each computer player has markedly different strategies. AI much
smarter. + Fixed bug where second level marketing campaigns were no more effective than
first level. + Tweaked some of the cost values to make the game pace a little faster. +
Enhanced the networking to be yet more effective on high latency systems. Now can handle
lag times of over 10 seconds! Some last minute notes ---------------------- OS/2 USERS: IF YOU
HAVE INSTALLED THE DEMO VERSION, YOU MUST REMOVE IT BEFORE
INSTALLING THE FULL VERSION! Copy protection: Entrepreneur requires you to have
the CD-ROM in the drive to play a single player game, however a single CD-ROM can host
up to two other players in a multiplayer game. - Included on your Entrepreneur CD:
readme.txt - this file! walk.txt - a walkthrough for getting started playing Entrepreneur. You
will also find help in the game by pressing F1 or F2 on the various game screens setup.exe -
this is the install program for Window95 or NT, run this if you have autorun disabled.
install.exe - this is the install program for OS/2 users - run to get entrepreneur installed on your
system. entdemo.exe - demo version of entrepreneur that does not require the CD to play -
give this away to your friends! Windows users can also install the demo from the main install
program. Introduction ------------ Thank you for buying Entrepreneur! With all the other games
out there these days, there's plenty of choices to spend your time and money on, and we are
honored that you have chosen to buy and play our game! In a nutshell, here is what
Entrepreneur is about: Start a company and try to conquer the world as a monopoly.
Entrepreneur is already played by the CEOs at companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Sun,
General Motors, and Nabisco. That is, they are doing the same sorts of things that appear in
Entrepreneur - making product, crushing competitors and trying to control perception. Why
should only CEO's at multi-billion dollar corporations get to play this game? Now you too can
play it! There is a full Adobe Acrobat version of the manual (that goes into a lot more detail
than this does) available at http://www.stardock.com. There is also a walk through includes in
this archive called "walk.txt". Object of the game ------------------ The object of the game is to
get a monopoly level market share in a market that starts out with considerable competition. To
win: If there are 2 players remaining: 70% of the market If there are 3 players remaining: 65%
of the market If there are 4 players remaining: 60% of the market If there are 5-8 players
remaining: 55% of the market The winning conditions go into play after the 5th year and is
evaluated on the last day of the year. So having 90% of the market in June means nothing, it's
how much you have at the end of the year that counts. Your market share resets itself at the
beginning of the year. How to play ----------- You start out the game with a single office (or
"campus") and a single sales executive (the little guy who says "Yes?" when you click on him).
You gain more sales executives at the beginning of the year if your company has grown
significantly the year before. Your sales executives make sure your product is available in the
region it is in and for a radius of 2 regions outwards. The more sales executives you have in
the area, the more market penetration your stuff has. There is a limit to this of course so
eventually your products are everywhere and putting more sales executives in a region won't
do much good. Just remember, being there is half the battle, spread them out early on. Your
office site can also sell products to the region it is in and if you build sales offices, they can sell
them in greater radius's out (the more you upgrade the sales office the further away it can sell).
To move a sales executive, you left click to select it and then right click on an investigated
region to send it there. You can't sell to any region you want. You have to do some market
investigation on it. To do that, select the region and the click on the "investigate region" button.
The further away the region is from one of your offices, the more expensive it is to investigate
it. You can build more offices by clicking on the "build" button but each new office costs more
than the last one. The key thing to know about regions is to know what their desires are and try
to make sure your product is strong in those traits. Example: You research Great Britain and
click on the "region" button on the bottom. If it has a long green bar by any of its traits, that
means they really care about that trait. Winning the game usually depends on staying ahead of
your competitors in the traits that people care about. Each game is different and different parts
of the world will care about different things. When you click on your site, you'll see different
buildings. To begin manufacturing, you have to hire employees. Do that by clicking on the
building and then moving the slider over. At first, you'll only want to hire a few people until
you match demand. Double click on the buildings to go inside of them. On the factory screen,
you can see what the demand for your product is and how many you are building each week.
You'll want to make your supply (your build rate) be pretty close to demand unless you have
enough inventory to cover the supply for awhile. When your demand begins to exceed supply
and you can't hire anymore people, you can raise the price which will lower demand but bring
in more money per unit (similarly, you can lower the price and increase demand). Once you
have enough money, you can build factories and later manufacturing plants which will vastly
increase your ability to build large quantities of product. The Research Lab is where you
enhance the attributes of your product so it will be more competitive in the market. When you
have enough money, you can click on the blank space on the upper right hand side of the site
screen and upgrade to a research lab (for $8 million). The Engineering screen is easily the
most complex of the screens in Entrepreneur. There is a lot of data to digest on this screen.
You can return to the office site by double clicking on the engineer points button on the top
right of this screen. The basic concept of the engineering screen is to improve the traits of your
product. Your product is made up of different components with each of them adding different
levels of quality to your product. For example, in the computer market, the CPU is the most
important factor in determining the performance of a computer while the video card adds some
but not nearly as much to the overall performance of your computer. To improve a trait, first
make sure you've hired engineers, next move the sliders on the bottom to the right. The more
you move the slider, the better that trait will become but the longer it will take to get there.
There is considerable overhead in starting up a project so the longer the bigger the
improvement, the greater the efficiency. Of course, keep in mind that a 5 year project won't
do you any good until the 5 years are up by which time you could have the best product but be
out of business. The Sliders As you move the sliders, you'll see a red color grow behind that
slider and others. This represents where research is occurring. Different traits are related to
other traits in different ways. It was decided that instead of having the related sliders move to
the left as you moved the one you were on to the right, we would assume you would want to
try to keep the traits of the others the same. However, if you move the other sliders to the left
which have red on them, your research time will decrease. Normally, it is the price of the
component that will tend to want to increase. If you increase the cost to manufacture, you
usually can bring down the time to research. Similarly, in the computer market, you can
improve ease of use on your OS by decreasing the performance requirement on it. The
Research Queue No one wants to have to keep coming back to the screen every few minutes
so a research queue was created. As you improve your product, you add it to the research
queue. You can remove products from the queue as well as move them up or down in the
queue. Space In most markets, there is a limit of how much stuff you can cram into the
container. Sure, you'd like the make the world's most powerful computer and stuff it into a
laptop sized container but in reality you can't because of the size of the components. The bar
across the middle of the screen represents the space of your product. There are 3 colors
(actually 4 if your components use up too much space) to keep in mind. The red color on the
left is how much space that particular component is using (if any). The yellow is how much
space the components together are using. The green is how much space the product's
container (the case in the PC market) has available. If you want to decrease the size of your
container, you'll need to put some research into minimizing the space of your components.
Other Traits In some industries, you can also modify the actual container the product is in by
clicking on the actual product. In the computer industry, for example, you can click on the
computer itself to change what type of case it uses. The smaller the case, the higher the
aesthetics value is. Look on the left side of the screen to see how your product is doing
overall. With marketing, you can enhance the perception of your products or, in the case of the
full version of Entrepreneur, damage the perception of your competitor's product. The way the
print advertising campaign unit works is that you hire marketers on the site screen and then
you can create marketing campaigns. When it is done, a little newspaper unit will appear at
your home site. If you left click to select it and then right click on a destination, it will move
there and improve the perception of a trait that you chose when you created it. Make sure your
product is available in the regions you send your marketing campaign to! In the full version,
marketing gets a lot more interesting because you also have negative marketing campaigns in
which you select a specific opponent to trash. It makes for very interesting gameplay! Direct
Action Cards ------------------- The point of Direct Action Cards is to try to bring in dynamic
elements without increasing the complexity of the game play. No game or simulation can
simulate 100% what the real world behaves like. Entrepreneur is a corporate conquest game
that tries to favor action over having too many "realistic features". For example, in the real
world companies routinely try to lure away key executives from their competitors. This has a
devastating effect on the competitor since "brain drain" is major reason for a company to lose
its competitive edge. But in a game or simulator, how does one go about simulating this? Do
you have a game screen that takes you to a special "Trip to Seattle on the corporate jet?" or a
list box listing all the different gifts and signing bonus's you could give to a potential executive
to get him or her to leave your competitor? And if you did put all this into a game, would you
not then open the door to others features that many would consider just as relevant such as
buying up other companies, government grants, lawsuits, patents, etc.? Entrepreneur's answer
to all this comes in the form of Direct Action Cards. In a nutshell, here's how they work: Each
card allows you to do a specific task in the game. To use that card, you must be the market
leader in regions that have special resources (the regions with the resource icons on them). At
the top of the card, you can see what resources this card specifically needs. The types
resources the card requires to use will depend on what type of action the card does. For
example, exploiting child labor would require you to be the market leader in a red $ region
which signifies that it is a very poor region of the world. You begin the game with 3 Direct
Action Cards. At the beginning of each year you will receive a new direct action card up until
you obtain 7 (after which you won't get any more until you have used some). At the beginning
of each year, the regions with special resources that you are the market leader in go into your
resource pool. When you have enough resources to use a card, it will light up and allow you to
use it. Be careful how you use the card, however. If you're in the lead, for example, you
probably don't want to use cards that your opponents will get afterwards. If you're losing, your
best bet is to try to pick on the winner if possible. Multiplayer play ---------------- Many games
will boast that they can play on the Internet but most of them require you to jump through a lot
of hoops to get an Internet game going. Entrepreneur has Stardock.net which is probably about
as easy as you can get to find Internet games. Just log on to the Internet, start Entrepreneur,
and click on "Stardock.net". From there, you will be able to talk to other players and join
games. You cannot join games in progress. Games that are grayed out are games that are in
progress. The left side of the screen shows all the people in your particular channel. If you are
very new at Entrepreneur and the "Lobby" channel is relatively full, you might want to go to
the "Beginner's channel". Please keep in mind that it's no fun to be creamed by an expert.
Many Internet games have become "un-fun" because experts will pretend to be new at the
game and slaughter a newcomer. If you've become an expert, you'll be able to find other
experts in the other channel. Dealing with Latency Lag time or "latency" is the amount of time
it takes for your computer to send data to another computer and get a signal back. If you are
using a modem, a typical ping time is about 300ms. But sometimes, the Internet will just
"Freeze" up for a few seconds. A few seconds is an eternity in an Internet game. If things get
bad enough, the music might start to skip or things may slow down to a crawl (or even freeze).
Don't worry, your computer is not "crashed". Just hit the Pause key to stop the game and let it
catch up for a second and then continue. The further someone is away from you physically, the
higher the chances of lag time. So before you begin to play people who are on another
continent, be aware of these things. You can greatly reduce these affects by playing the game
at "Normal" or "Fast". Do not play at higher speeds than that unless you are very comfortable
with your connection speed. Also note that Computer players tend to actually send out more
data that human players. This is because, well, humans are a lot slower than computers at
making moves. The computer players are thinking and acting all the time. They don't forget to
hire those workers to keep up with demand or to keep researching regions. So if you have 3 or 4 human players, get rid of the AI players if you can (again, unless you are pretty comfortable with your connection). Please keep in mind that Stardock.net is a public forum where people from many parts of the world are on at the same time and are of different ages. Please keep in mind that there are real people behind those names. The anonymous nature of the Internet tends to make people forget that courtesy and kindness are still important traits. Keyboard help ------------- Key Function Esc. Options Screen F1 Help Screen F2 Context Sensitive Tutorial F5 or Ctrl-W World Map Screen (main) F6 or Ctrl-S Site Screen F7 or Ctrl-P Production Screen F8 or Ctrl-M Marketing Screen F9 or Ctrl-R Research Screen Tab Send message to other players. Pause Pause the game + Speed up game - Slow down game Technical Support ----------------- Stardock offers free technical support for Entrepreneur. The best way to contact
Technical Support is to send email to support@stardock.com Voice Technical Support is also available from 9AM-4PM EST at (734) 762-0687 Please be sure to have include all system information with any problem report.

CONTACT AUTHOR:

Stardock
http://www.stardock.com/

@Macarlo, Inc.
@Macarlo's Shareware & Web
OS/2
Java Lobby Member
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