There’s no real ability to undercut your competition by offering a cheaper product or better marketing, instead the different corporations mostly stay out of each other’s way so that everyone can keep making money, in exactly the way capitalism isn’t supposed to work, but does. There are AI competitors, but they don’t seem to add much beyond being a nuisance when they buy exclusive rights to build in an area I was targeting. It doesn’t help that the “campaign” is what I would usually consider a sandbox mode, while the actual “sandbox” is just the same thing but with infinite money and everything unlocked.

How much you’ll enjoy Rise of Industry is largely going to depend on how capable you are of making your own fun Perhaps if all the iron ore on the map was clustered in one corner and all the trees in another a cross country train line would make sense, but this is rarely the case. Perhaps someone better at capitalism than me can point out how much I’d be shaving off my margins delivering my mutton by zeppelin, but at the moment I’m mostly doing it because mutton zeppelins are cool, not because I think they’re helping. You see, resources are spread so evenly across the map it seems just as easy to build a new manufacturing facility near your destination as it is to set up a railway line. The only problem here is I didn’t feel enormous pressure to use them. Eventually things get a little bit more complicated, with the player getting access to heavier trucks, trains, boats and even zeppelins to haul products and set up long distance supply chains across the map.

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