What's the appeal of trading games?

[Damned Registrations]

Transcendence by George Moromisato has a decent space variant of trading, I recommend trying it if you like trading. Trading is not the main purpose of the game. It is a supplement to earning credits to buy equipment, but a very thought out one, that you want to be good at to do better.

You can succeed as main fighter or main trader or both, there is supply and demand, market saturation, black market, different trading syndicates/corporations, different currencies, asteroid mining and much more.

Transcendence is an awesome game. Shame he basically abandoned it, all it really needed to be perfect was some more content and a chance to swap into bigger/more alien ships for the endgame.

 

[Johannes]

Trading is there mostly to give you a motive to travel. Whether that's fun, depends on how interesting traveling from A to B is, with combat and other hazards.

 

[laclongquan]

I like Patrician 3 a lot too, but I always had trouble controlling the sea battles. If that part worked better it would outstanding.

Patrician 3 sea battles are fun. Some players can do only that, selling captured ships for fund to repair and upgrade their ships. No trading~

And even if you dont like it, you still need to do it whenever it become unescapable, because even a mediocre player can do better than autocompletion.

Port Royale 2 battles are no better, IIRC~ No worse, thank the devs, so there's that.

 

[Old One]

Patrician 3 sea battles are fun. Some players can do only that, selling captured ships for fund to repair and upgrade their ships. No trading~

Oh yes, I did that quite a lot. It's more entertaining than simple trading, that's for sure. You're basically a privateer.

Still, I could never click and mouse fast enough to control multiple ships, so it was always my ship alone (with any escorts serving only as minor distractions and cargo mules) against whatever fleet I was attacking. Not terrible, but it could've been a lot better.

A Patrician game with really great naval combat could be a top ten all timer for me. I love everything else about it.

And BTW, I love good trading games for the trading. There's something innately satisfying about buying some cargo, then travelling around until you find a place to sell it for a profit.