The original Merchant Prince from QQP was from the early 1990's and put you in the role of a powerful Venetian trader during the Renaissance. The game was about exploration and trading, with a generous helping of the backstabbing Italianate politics of the era. It was perhaps one of the very first computer games to feature trading as a core mechanism, and the engine was uncomplicated but
surprisingly robust. It had an expansive list of commodities whose buying and selling prices varied by distance and commercial activity. A detailed simulation of Mercantilism? Maybe not, but it solidly presented basic economic theory.
It was a temperamental title, and rather rough-edged at release. The re-issue a few years later
(Machiavelli: The Prince) was much more stable and became a very successful game.
Fast-forward to 2001. We've now seen everything from complicated business sims to exhaustive variations on the political theme. Does the Merchant Prince model still hold up? By and large, yes.
Running a trading company, your first concern is getting some cash. To do this, you need to buy merchant units that will carry your cargo from place to place.
Each of the merchant units is a tradeoff between price, carrying capacity, and speed. Galleys are fast ocean ships, but only carry two 'things'. Camels, good for surviving desert storms, carry eight but move much more slowly.
You send these units into the great unknown to find markets for your goods. Credit to the original designers for conceiving of an alternative to the boring black 'everything' that most other games use for unexplored territory. Instead, you have a parchment-style map of the world showing what people believe the coastlines to be, and the approximate locations of fabled cities. As you explore, this dissolves and reveals the true terrain - a very nice way to handle the mechanism.
Once these units encounter a city/trading center, you sell the products they carry and buy something else (hopefully ending with a profit). Usually this involves a lot of flipping back and forth between report screens showing the prices/quantities for goods (sorted high to low, and handily showing the values for every location you've visited). You must also judiciously calculate the distance and travel risk between points. Sure, you can buy silk cheaply in the distant east and sell it dearly in Venice or Genoa, but taking it to Baghdad or Antioch gives only slightly lower profit, and far less danger from the ocean storms around the horn of Africa.
Commodities range from fish to silver, beer to spices and even religious relics. Cities tend to offer and demand historically accurate products, with African locations offering ivory and gold while far eastern cities have spices and silk. In the 'randomized map' scenarios, of course, these get all mixed up, which can provide a bit of an unpredictable challenge. Since there is always the risk of bandits or pirates, there are also guards who may be hired (at the cost of a cargo slot) to significantly increase the likelihood that precious cargoes reach their destination intact. For those of us whose previous history had been text-based trading games where keeping a notepad (or a concurrently running spreadsheet) was de
rigeur, Merchant Prince/Machiavelli streamlined the process a lot.
As the game develops, you will no doubt find yourself with a surprisingly huge merchant force. Micromanaging this might be a daunting prospect, if not for some handy interface shortcuts. Groups of units can be linked together, so they all go to the same place, load up with the same commodity, and all head on to the next destination (up to a sequence of four waypoints, for complicated routing).
Of course, not every city you encounter is open to you; mercenary companies can be hired to use force of arms to open their markets. You may also build roads for well traveled routes. They are expensive, but their addition to the safety and efficiency of land caravans will quickly pay for itself.
Of course, one complication of the widespread commerce of this period was disease. You will learn to hate the popup that advises you of a plague outbreak. When a city is 'plagued', your units have a chance of contracting the Black Death and dying if they trade in that location. Unless you have a huge pile of funds to replace the attrition of units, this quickly destroys your carefully balanced network of profits, as units are forced to either find less convenient marketplaces, stand idle, or return to their origin city with the goods unsold.
Trading units also carry the plague, and a single outbreak usually ends up with several connected cities being affected before the disease runs its course. (This is usually a good time to stock material in warehouses, if you have the cash.)
Once you are comfortable and achieving sustainable profits, you will have enough money to meddle in church and civic politics.
In one of the more blatant comments on Renaissance Catholicism (not to suggest it's not accurate, however), your participation in the Church is that you may buy cardinals whose votes contribute to your chance at being the next pope. Alternately, you can buy the votes needed to make you Doge (the Venetian mayor, in effect). Once you achieve either of these positions, you can use the temporal and secular powers of the offices to screw your enemies and rake in the cash.
Can't afford to buy votes and build yourself up? Tear someone else down; that's an equally useful tactic. Buy a slanderer (they're cheap) and watch your enemy's popularity fall, or perhaps an arsonist to burn a few of an opposing factions warehouses. Usually, the important positions only become vacant with the death of the previous officeholder. This is also not a problem, since assassins are also available in the Venetian 'dens of iniquity'. Their rates to 'deal with' a Pope or Doge are considerable, so they are much more frequently employed against the cardinals or advocates of a faction. In fact, few turns go by without a cardinal or five 'accidentally' consuming a quantity of arsenic - this tends to happen with greater frequency when a critical vote is coming up. It's an ironic application of the "do unto others" philosophy, but it makes for a fun game.
Holistic was given the mandate to 'update' Merchant Prince, and it is a complicated and risky task to update a popular older game. On the one hand, there's a strong air of 'if it's not broken, don't fix it'. But old games are almost never as much fun to play as everyone remembers, so on the other hand it's invariable that some things will need fixing - the 'minimum' acceptable standards for a commercially viable game have moved up several notches. Where does a developer end up between these contrary stools?
Unfortunately, I think the conservation motive won out to an excessive degree with Merchant Prince 2. As much as I enjoyed
Machiavelli: The Prince in the early '90's, I was a bit surprised to be playing almost the exact same thing again in 2001. Oh, I expected similarity, but this was startling. There is almost nothing of consequence different between the older versions and MP2. Certainly, there is a graphic upgrade, bringing it almost up to the already-dated level of Civ2 (without the animated sprites), but otherwise all the quirks and difficulties left from before are unfixed. The dialogs are the same old hard-coded 2d buttons (with a maddening tendency to swap the "ok" and "cancel" values from right to left depending on the dialog). The map screen interface has icons that are pretty, but worth little, and in some cases are downright baffling.
Reporting screens are still brutally minimalist, giving the player an unacceptable level of information for a modern game. We've seen far better treatments of waypoint handling, economic analysis, and business modeling in recent years. What was cool at that time is now frankly depressing. The mechanics of group handling, the resolution of combat and random events like storms and pirates, combat, all remain remarkably unchanged.
There is the rudimentary technology tree, a new option in MP2 which limits unit construction to what has been developed technologically. This has almost no apparent impact on
gameplay, save a slight slowing the development of trade networks until one has the chance to buy the biggest units. (There's no real doubt or delay to the tree itself, it's just a matter of accumulating the necessary amounts of money.) Basically, the mechanisms on which the game rests are all the same. That in itself isn't a big deal, but I'd expected better. The systems that were cutting edge ten years ago simply don't have the same bang anymore.
I confess, the sense that this was shoved out the door to make a quick buck persists. One particularly game killing bug bears warning about: when you go to shut down, MP2 asks if you want to save the game. If you say yes, that save file is useless. Because, you see, that the game's state IS saved - precisely. The problem is that when you are in shutdown mode, the game advises you that the 'other' sides need to finish their
turn(s) before the turn can end. So each of the other players finish their actions for the turn, and the game kicks out to the menu where you can quit. Reload that saved game? You get a popup saying the other sides will finish, and then your turn ends. No way out. I'm not going to belabor the point further, suffice to say that the number of crashes to desktop, the lack of true windowed play, all combine to give a very negative picture even of the code-port to windows - ostensibly the reason for the game's production.
I really enjoyed the Merchant Prince games, and they held a special place next to Monkey Island, Populous, and Master of Orion as some of my formative computer-gaming experiences. But I was disappointed that the resurrection of this noble title wasn't taken as an opportunity to seriously update the franchise ala Railroad Tycoon 2, Civ 2, or a number of classics whose descendants achieved serious and lasting credibility in their own rights. Instead, MP2 is little more than a simple porting of the game to a more Win9X-friendly code, and apparently not an impressive version of that. Let's be candid: this is fundamentally the same game that we saw in its last incarnation. The fact that the system itself is fun is more a testament to the brilliance of the original design, than a credit to the folks that supposedly brought it 'up to date'. Merchant Prince 2 feels very much like a missed opportunity to me.
If you like to comment on this review, please post
a message at the forum.
Reviewed by
