Energy Island Corp.
In Energy Island Corp, you manage an electric grid on small islands. When you arrive on an island, there is only few inhabitants and no electric facilities.
It’s your job to build a robust electric grid which can support the development of the island in every domain: tourism, industry, residential, commerce, …
Every day starts with a preparation phase. You can construct new buildings, buy raw materials and manage different aspect of your grid.
When you’re ready, the clock starts and you can see in real time, minute by minute the electricity quantity you produced and the electricity being consumed by the city.
It’s important to produce enough electricity to match the demand and avoid power outage. On the other side, producing too much electricity will damage all your electric grid and waste a lot of money.
- Make your own energy mix: Solar panels only produce when sun is up, oil generators are expensive to run, … Each primary energy has its own characteristics, you must mix them to find the better balance.
- Manage raw materials supply: Some buildings need resources (oil, coal, …) to run. You must buy them at best price, and build infrastructure to store them.
- Watch electricity production / consumption: Managing an electric grid is hard. Electricity is hard to store, consumption vary between consumption peaks and low demands periods. Adapt yourself and manage your grid with information you get from the production / consumption chart.
- Seasons cycle: Daytime is longer during summer, consumption rise during cold winter, adapt your electric grid and provide a stable electricity supply in all conditions !
Game Discussion
Steam User 4
Casual fun, pretty realistic sim of power generation, transmission and consumption patterns.
*Edit: Oddly for a game about energy generation, there is no nuclear power plants, geothermal power plants or gas fired power plants. Wish the developer would add more to this fun game.
Steam User 2
Highly recommend this game for anyone with no knowledge of the energy industry, as renewables grow in importance. Good cheap game, someone with industry knowledge would get 5+ hours solidly. I've worked on the financial side of several energy projects. Finished campaign in around 4 hours, played a bit with sandbox.
Pros: The energy mixes and peaks are well modeled, strategic options between renewables and non-renewables are realistic. I like the administrative building to modify demand curves, highly relatable. Level of complexity is undergraduate 101 course level, fun and nontechnical. Graphics are fine.
Areas for improvements:
Biggest qualm: Better maintenance automation! Your facilities avg 75% uptime. Your ability/willingness to micro (on/off depending on demand) determines how much excess capacity you need to build out, to a much greater degree than any strategic choice. And when you get to 15+ sources, like the final map of the campaign, it becomes a chore. Maintenance needs to have conditional automation, otherwise the lategame is not fun. If you leave your renewables to your technicians, your peak capacity may need to be 4x peak demand. It's 2024, everyone knows my diesel genset does not need to be running at full chat at 2am.
Campaign map has limited diversity with power needs, but in the end it's still about building more capacity while being balanced. Resource / regulation diversity is fertile soil.
Generally don't like to comment on balance, but wind power is OP (if willing to micro), so limits other strategic options.
The financials UI are barebones, and only show system-level profit/loss. You will have to run your own cost per kWh calculations.
Weather characteristics between maps are unclear. The campaign map to close down coal seems extremely windy.
Steam User 0
Although the number of campaigns is small, I enjoyed playing it.
1. Do I have to repair everything?: Prepare a lot of repairmen (at least two buildings, each fully upgraded) and select enable in the building options and leave it alone. Buildings with 0% maintenance will be repaired and operated quickly, so the power supply is surprisingly stable.
2. Dams can fill the reservoir with water if they are turned off, but they will start operating before the desired water level is reached after repairs are completed. Until a patch that can improve this is released, try to push the dam's power generation priority back. Also, the relationship between the two parameters of the dam is: approximately 3.5*(max power)=(water reserve)+40.5.
3. Wind power is OP. Solar-related power generation buildings are inefficient. Therefore, use wind power as the main power and generators, coal power, and hydro power as auxiliary power.
4. Other: Game needs an auto-speed option or hotkey. / needs a screen zoom-out function so that I can see the entire map. / Building upgrades should all be visible on one screen. / We need a results sheet that shows daily stats (total income, total expenditure, wood usage, coal usage, factory income, etc.). / The text could be bigger. / Some buildings need more explanation, and it's hard to tell how efficient some features are. / Is it really necessary to only allow one building/upgrade per day?