Are there any good deep multiplayer business sim games for iPhone? Like Zapitalism.

I don't mean casual games like Lemonade Tycoon or Sally's Spa. I wanted something that is multiplayer and with more meat to it.

There was this AWESOME business sim game I used to play with my friends on the PC religiously a decade ago, and it was so much fun that we still all talk about it to this day... Zapitalism.

It's a quirky turn based game where each player owns a store, goes to different parts of the island or negotiates with the wholesaler to try and find products for cheap, and then sell them for a profit. The trick is, your friends don't know what price you'll be selling any particular product for any one week, so whoever undercuts everyone else usually gets the bulk of the sales. On the otherhand, if you manage to monopolize one product by buying up all quantities of it from the wholesaler, you can charge a much higher price for it.

The first player to a million dollars wins.

Each player can choose a character as the CEO for their store, and each character has their own quirks/super powers of sorts.

You have to keep track of your store's reputation. You can do cool things like pay off local pirates or head hunters to sabotize your rival's stores, steal their product and such. But if you get caught, your store's reputation plummets and you get fined heavily by the government.

You can bribe govt officials to try and get building contracts or to buy stocks or bonds in specific products you sell. But it can be expensive, and really bad for your reputation if you get caught.

And there was a ton more meat to the game. You could invest your money in the stock market, you could market your store and take out ads when you have good products and think your price will under cut the competition.

You decide how much you want to pay your employees, how well maintained you want to keep your store, and if you want to make charitiable contributions. If you pay them well, they are happy, and your reputation is high but your profit margins are lower. If you pay your employees too little compared to your competitors, they may go on strike and ask for sometimes ridiculously high pay increases each week, and each week you decline thier new offer, is another week where your store is not making any money at all, and it's reputation is falling.

And the best part of all is the occasional building permits that pop up. Everyone has to bid on the building permits since they only give them out to one store and don't come by too frequently. It's a secret auction. So sometimes players offer ridiculously high bids to try to get a building permit. And each time they win one, they can double their store's capacity and thus are able to buy twice as much product from wholesalers and offer twice as many goods for sale.

Such a game, that game in particular, would work perfectly on the iPhone especially over wifi and bluetooth so that you're competing with real people.

So of the 80,000 or so games out there already, is there any such game being offered on the app store? Some business simluation that is easy to play but still very meaty, multiplayer so that you actually have some nice rivalry going on against real human opponents, and offers you the chance to outbid competitors or to sabotize their operations, or out market them.

 

Judging from the lack of repiles, I take it the answer is no.

How about any solid multiplayer politics games? I would think out of 80,000 apps, some one would have emerged fill these niches.

 

That's a shame. It would seem like someone would opt to try and fill that niche given how overcrowded every other genre in the app store is.

 

Yep. And I already have Sim City, and it's not a great port to be honest. Plus it's lacking multiplayer so there goes that.

 

I would but I don't know the first thing about coding. Nor do I have the rights to port Zapitalism onto the iPhone.