College of Gaming: Entrepreneur (part 1)

The Fantasy Business Sim.

I was wondering if there is a good modern game to talk about business and entrepreneurship. I realized that Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim works pretty well. So go grab the game or play the demo (Majesty 2 has a really good survival mission in the demo).

In any business, there are employees. In Majesty, you get your heroes. Consider each guild represents a different part of business like your warrior guild is your security or your wizard guild is your R&D. Each of your employees are your heroes. All you can do in the game is hire fresh recruits so all your heroes start at level 1. As your heroes perform their daily activities, they gain experience.

The enemy monsters are the other corporations or threats to your business. You got bloodsucking vampire lawyers, brutish ogre suppliers, sneaky rats and more. The monster lairs you can consider them to be the root of the problem. So the basic thing for a business to succeed is to get rid of these problems. So go now and play the survival mission over the Majesty 2 demo before continuing.

How long do businesses last?

Now that you've played the survival mission, I'm 80% sure that you failed. You might have lasted around the 60th day but got overwhelmed by hordes of bear men or some other nasty critter. If you didn't fail, good for you. Most businesses (90%) in real life don't make it to 10 years, and 50 percent die by the 2nd year. However by failing, you now understand some concepts of the game better.

Employee Management

Let's relate more concepts in the game before we continue. Your heroes (employees) get better at their job over time. However, they might be doing something that you don't want them to do or they aren't focused on the greater plan. So, you have to assign rewards effectively. In businesses, proper team management and resource allocation are keys to success. A thing you might notice is that the more heroes you have, the slower they gain gold and experience. In real life, more employees help but there is diminishing returns. You can only have so many janitors to keep the place clean. Yet, not having enough employees during a crisis will severely cripple you. One needs to start with a core group of people. Train them up. Eventually, you'll have new hires but those new hires will merely be assistants to your core group. So in Majesty, have 1 of each guild would be a nice start but building extra warrior guilds here and there to help in defense would certainly be a great idea.

You allot reward flags all over the map to motivate your heroes to go towards your goal. In life, you might motivate your sales force the same way by giving bonuses to those who push the product the best. However, you should be careful in regards to these rewards. Sometimes, your employees will push the product as hard as possible making this year good but next year unsellable as your retailers still have inventory of a bad product. In Majesty, placing a high defend flag for instance will make a certain type of hero - the clerics flock to that point. These heroes will stay there even though they'd be a better help defending and healing other heroes. High attack flags make dwarves, rogues and warriors just rush over there without caring that your castle is under seige. So take care that you use your heroes / employees effectively. Don't be afraid to remove that reward if it has served it's purpose.

To be continued on the following College of Gaming blog - part 2.