Robot Merchant--Jack of All Trades is Rare Commodity

by Dr. J

Note: We've put together these useful play-aids for Jack of All Trades players:

• Printable galaxy map.
  
• Spreadsheet with market details.
  
• Ship Upgrades spreadsheet.

The first real computer game, Spacewar, allowed players to control one of two ships in zero-gravity combat. One of the earliest coin-op video games, Lunar Lander required players to use its retro-rockets and thrusters to get to the right landing spot and drop the ship down for a soft landing. So, one of the first feelings a player will experience when launching Jack of All Trades is a taste of nostalgia. You see a tiny ship zipping across a simple field of stars and said ship is maneuvered by means of thrusters and retro-rockets. Players have to learn to handle momentum, acceleration, and degradation via judicious use of the controls. For veteran gamers, this is old news. Fortunately, the game isn’t only this delightful taste of nostalgia. Jack of All Trades also provides a bit of role-playing, a taste of space trading, a playful sense of humor, and a modicum of stock investing.

DEFENDER LIVES?: Although there is significant nostalgia to Jack of all Trades, there is plenty of game play, too.

Unlike many space trading games, you aren’t merely trying to amass enough money to upgrade your ship and weapons (though you do so), but you are serving a role in the robot resistance and engaging in both passive and active spy missions, as well. For some gamers, the Earth & Beyond style travel between star systems will be too slow. You must jump to each system in a linear fashion. None of my pilots reached a point, as we did in later levels of Earth & Beyond where we could wormhole from system to system by skipping some.

The mechanics for quantum space in Jack of all Trades are relatively simple. The ship must be pointed away from the system’s center and must physically be far enough away from said center to allow for the jump. One needn’t “refuel” in the game, so it is possible to pop into a system, immediately point away from the center and restart the ship’s velocity so that an immediate jump can occur. You miss the chance to check the stock market and commodities prices on a given planet, but you can keep on task and stay out of trouble in that way. In fact, if you pop into a system populated with the red dots indicating hostile activity, it is probably best to turn and jump immediately. In fact, since you won’t see anything on the screen that specifically indicates how far away from the system center you have to be before jumping, I tend to hit the key continuously as I’m trying to outrace the bad guys.

MULTI-VERSE?: Travel through star systems named for celebrities (including poets like Virgil and Shakespeare, designers like Meier, Bakula, and Molyneaux, and PC pioneers like Wozniak and Gates).

Of course, the heart of the game, as you might expect from the title, is playing a trader. As a robot pilot, you captain a trading vessel and advance yourself through the game by increasing your available funds and upgrading your ship (through improvements or purchase of bigger, better ships). Initially, you own a small trader (an all-purpose shuttle) with enough cargo capacity to handle 30 units of whatever cargo you choose. It is possible to extend the cargo bay slightly (the first upgrade, Extended Cargo Bay, adds 2 units of cargo to your capacity at this level, but 9% of whatever you have on other ships that have some cargo capacity) or add to it (External Cargo adds 3 more to your expanded 32 or 18% to other ships), but if you really want to become a power trader, you’ll need to get a bigger ship.

Personal, All-Purpose Shuttle	30 unit cargo capacity
Achilles (Fighter w/ cargo)	25 unit cargo capacity
Astro Transport	100 unit cargo capacity (no cannon)
Circus Cruiser (Passenger)	0 unit cargo capacity
GI Cargo Transport	500 unit cargo capacity
Space Car	0 unit cargo capacity
T-5000 Transport	200 unit cargo capacity

Of course, the bigger the ship, the more expensive the upgrade becomes. For example, adding reaction control thrusters to enhance acceleration by 11% will only cost 600 credits for a personal shuttle, but the same feature increases with the size of the ship to 1,650 for an Achilles fighter, 3,450 for an Astro Transport, 3,720 for a GI Cargo Transport, and 6,000 for the T-5000 Transport. Going for the second strongest hull plating, Ditanium, requires 2,000 credits for the personal shuttle, 5,500 for the Achilles fighter, 11,500 for the Astro Transport, 12,500 for the GI Transport, and 20,000 for the T-5000. So, the bigger the ship, the more transport missions (civilian missions) you can undertake and the more speculative cargo you can carry. So, you can accrue credits faster. Of course, then you spend credits faster as you improve your ship. To examine all of the ships except for the large Muterran capital ships (Gun Boat and Destroyer), download the Ship Upgrades spreadsheet.

NOTE: One oddity is that your cargo moves from ship to ship as you upgrade ships. This is well and good, but it creates a logical anomaly when you move from a T-5000 Transport loaded with civilian cargo to a Saucer that only has, allegedly, 30 units of cargo space. You can actually travel about with more than 100 units over capacity until you’ve delivered the missions you’d already accepted when you had the larger ship.

I Just Want to Speculate (Trading Mechanism)

Traders can carry two types of cargo: consignment and speculative (missions designed by the game and free trade handled by the player). A consignment load means that the pilot receives a set fee upon delivering the cargo (often consisting of tons of items that have no rational purpose in such quantities—just for humorous effect) to a specific planet, but makes no up-front investment to purchase the load. A speculative load is where the pilot purchases units of bizarre cargo items to resell on other planets. The latter is a gamble because it ties up existing funds and cargo space until one can resell the loads, but the game could have been nastier and given you loads that expire or charge you extra fuel to jet around the universe. As it is, the risk is totally tied to opportunity cost—no expiration risk or fuel costs with which to bother.

JACK BE NIMBLE: The trade goods screen in Jack of all Trades offers guidance in whether the commodity is priced low or high, allowing one to buy low and sell high without detailed bookkeeping.

Plus, the game is quite friendly in the way it handles the speculative loads. If your goal is to buy low and sell high, the game facilitates this. At every market (planet), you can go through the list of commodities (everything from baseballs to saxophones with space whiskey and robodogs/cats in between) and highlight the ones in which you are interested. When you highlight the commodity, you are given a range description of the market environment on that planet for each commodity (low, below average, average, above average, high, and very high). By only purchasing commodities at low and below average range, you can always be sure of making a profit--eventually.

NOTE: Noting the famous Chris Crawford’s penchant for illustrating his speeches and writing with anecdotes and illustrations about his cats, I thought it interesting to find that you could get 'Robocats' at a below average price on Crawford I and II.

Naturally, the trade-off is tied to whether you want to make money without additional investment or with additional funds. The latter allows for greater reward in the long run, but the former is more of a sure thing and requires less effort to monitor. For example, if you are in a system like Virgil where everything is priced above average, you are almost always better off taking cargo from the “Mission Board.” Once you know the “Low” or “Below Average” source and the “High” or “Very High” market for goods, though, you’ll want to create your own cargo manifests. For more detailed information about the general market demand on all non-pirate planets, download the Trading Markets spreadsheet. (In addition, I like to track my progress off-line using the Galaxy Map available for download from Manifesto Games.

The problem with the trading mechanism from one perspective is a bank error in the player’s favor from another. The price ranges listed on our spreadsheet (or on the trading screen pictured above) stay almost the same no matter how much of one type of cargo you dump on a planet. There appears to be a small supply/demand mechanism after you’ve made several milk runs using the same cargo. This makes play easier, but reduces the challenge for experienced gamers.

The stock speculation mechanism isn’t quite as helpful. It does allow you to buy single shares (in fact, you have to click the “Buy” button to purchase every share—no round lots) and it does provide a graph of past performance. Jack of All Trades also provides a guideline to general market conditions, noting whether it is a market in “Recession” or “Expansion.” If you are a good chart reader in the “real world” stock market, you’ll find a few familiar patterns that, on the whole, tend to reflect general tendencies. But, since the game provides no fundamental information on the companies (amount of float, price-to-earnings, # of consecutive quarters with increased earnings, debt retirement, etc.), this market mechanism is pure gambling—not investing. The only way this is different than craps is that your investment isn’t tied (basically) to one throw of the dice. You don’t usually crap out or seven out during the jump from one planet to another.

GREED IS GOOD: Maybe it is in the film, Wall Street, but it isn’t in Jack of All Trades where the marketplace is decidedly chaotic and unpredictable.

Robot Rebel (Role-Playing Aspects)

Of course, Jack of all Trades would be very routine if there wasn’t a role-playing aspect to it beyond merely upgrading ships, ship systems, and weapons as one amasses the maximum number of credits. Fortunately, without time constraints, one can join the Freedom Alliance and begin one’s life of covert and overt missions at will. Unfortunately, the series of missions that you undergo are hard-coded so that the mission path for the first few missions reads something like: courier, psychological operations, rescue, armed rescue, diplomatic mission, use of force, and rendezvous with pirate.

One word of warning, though, the entire game heats up once you’ve successfully accomplished a few missions with the Freedom Alliance. Each system suddenly generates lots more pirates and the in-system space navies no longer swarm onto the pirates and take them out in they way they did previously.

LEAFLET TO ME: The second Freedom Alliance mission in JOAT is a propaganda mission where you drop leaflets on a major planet.

Where Many Muterrans Have Gone Before (Conclusions)

Jack of All Trades is not primarily about exploration. The trade routes exist, as do primary loyalties and pirate havens. Role-players who are all about advancement will find their levels/ranks/skills by advancing their ships and armament rather than their characters. JOAT even provides enough variety in the upgrade paths for one to choose a pirate/combat route over a safer merchant/rebel route.

Where the game falls short is in its pacing. Need to travel across the galaxy? There is no way to automate your trip. You must perform a hyperspace jump in and out of each system. Want to purchase 100 shares of stock? You must click 100 times. Want to load 100 units of cargo? You must click 100 times. Dealing with such simple issues would have added pleasure to the gaming experience. [Note: When selling stock, it is possible to sell all of one stock with one click of the button. You can also buy that way, but you can’t control your spending that way.]

Where the game is exceptionally friendly is in the way it handles death. “Reload Pilot” is tantamount to resurrection. No cargo is lost, your ship comes back in the same configuration, and missions remain constant. The good news is that may encourage some of us reflex-challenged folks to try our hand at bounty hunts without assuming real risk. The bad news is that without risk, some players will feel like the “challenge” is meaningless. Since some of the battles, particularly early on, were difficult for me, I was thankful for the “grace” of the current design. I know a lot of purists who will hate it. Maybe there should be a toggle to let you turn “grace” on or off.

Quite frankly, I came into the game looking for something I had tried to create in my Traveller pen and paper game campaigns. None of my trading models ever quite worked like I wanted them to function. I can honest say that I enjoyed playing space merchant in Jack of All Trades. I just got bogged down at various times because of the lack of short-cuts and the piling on of enemies near the end.

Reviewer’s Snapshot: 6 (on scale of 10)

Documentation: 4 (in-game clues okay, but needs more)
Graphics: 5 (extremely retro, but certainly functional)
Design: 8 (lots of options, but not enough short cuts)
Pacing: 5 (too much time with little happening)
Price/Performance: 8 (less than 30 cents per hour of game play)

Reviewer’s Bias: 7 (wanted Traveller--found part of it)