Sea-O-Rama is pretty much exactly what I expected it to be: A thin-veneer-of-a-game in the form of a sim. It's not that much fun to play, and its got enough UI elements to gripe about (Why oh why do we have to click the 'start contract' button when the ship literally has nothing else to do anyway? Why can we not bump another contract up to the current activity if we need to? why cant we send a ship back to port if we left port and started the contract when not at port because of this janky interface?)

Gameplay is quite stark. The game doesnt really offer much in terms of exploration or unlocking stuff: You pretty much get to see all the upgrades, all the ships and everything in this game from the beginning. In fac,t the gameplay is quite bad in the sense that it makes more sense to actually have your ship's info up, while it does its thing rather than click it off to watch it sailr around the world on a line charting its destination... You can customize ships and paint them when you get them, but whats the point of doing that on a ship you have no reason to even look at?
Hehe, I totally did not supply Russia with raw materials

Sea-O-Rame suffers as a game and isn't much fun to play, but it is... strangely satisfying the way these janky sims sometimes are. You poke this you poke that and then you make some money. You then buy another ship, and then in half the time... you buy a third. and you just grow faster and faster as you spread your fleets routes out evenly all over the earth. For people who (like me I guess) who like progressional building stuff, it can be satisfying to see numbers go up and scale faster and bigger. In this way, they got things right: The auction system is actually great. I started my game on easy with the maximum amount of rivals (it was clear that the only losing condition was to go bankrupt) and its been a fun time competing for bids on whatever deal is available. The idea of your clients being reputation based factions is interesting but its not that substantial. Crew that gain experience is also interesting, as are the upgrades for your ship (which are relatively cheap, just buy them all at once for 3.5 million and have that new ship you bought just take a 50 day vacation before assigning crew to it) ship events are somewhat interesting but they are mostly just bad events and you boost morale and supply ship upgrades to stop them, and the global news events happen and end quickly and you cant really keep up with it as your fleet does what its supposed to do.

The game is in it's own right an interesting glimpse into the shipping industry. And I'd lie if I said I didn't enjoy it, or find it fun to learn about how these ships work in the real world and what they do. I just wish it were more like Fishing Barents Sea, which was both a mix of sim and also some light adventure or unlocks, or some manual sailing or piloting of the ship when you feel like it. (it's not that at all)

Playing this is very mechanical and methodical, after about two hours or so of playing you have seen everything there is to see... The only thing that really changes, is the kinds of contract based strategies and travel routes you might choose or switch towards for your destination as your fleet grows and you get new ships (For example if i had a 50 ton cargo ship and now i have a 150 ton cargo ship, i need to get three contracts of 50 tons each in roughly the same area, or i can go for a 100 ton contract and another to save on time that requires less travel) The biggest ship i have is about 500k tons of cargo space and I never put more than 200-250 on it because i simply cant go to all the routes in time (so thee biggest ships seem kinda pointless, but I get what I can can get on the auction house) I still will keep playing it until i win the whopping 10k points I set as the victory condition, then I'll never touch it again.

tl;dr Actually an okay and interesting sim but not a good game, but that's kind of what i think most people would expect as well.

Some ways this game could be improved:

+Make it so the time advance hotkeys actually work when you are in some of the menus (so you can keep your ship info screen up)
+Make it so you will automatically start contracts and not have to babysit them so that you dont waste the clock if you forgot to click it.
+Make it so there is more strategy when picking from contracts. Have more contract variety. (dont just make them all roughly the same time based on how far away they are from you)
+Make it so crew arent imprisoned to particular boats, so that when you upgrade the ship you can have them keep working on another boat (so they aren't dead weight for 5o days)

A lot of other things could be optionally done to flesh the game out more (partnerships with charter companies on top of the reputation could be interesting, and agreements with rival shipping companies not to poach their territories with certain charters, a stock market system for both your own company and or a commodity market for the goods you ship, an R&D system, and crew RPG skills or stats) with but those are pretty crucial improvements.

EDIT: ok liking this a bit more now that I've delved into the financial panels and explored financing. There are some interesting bits in the simulation that are fun to game. I have a better understanding of how different ships net different kinds of returns after playing it for 5 years (in game time), and now that the rival companies have money to spend to rival for your bid at the auction house the game has gotten a bit more interesting and fun as they blaze after your trail.

I learned that the bank simply exists to help you and charges no interest, while that is obviously broken, it makes stretching your capital with loans a fun and interesting dynamic. I've done a brief breakdown of the different ships and jobs and determined the following information (slight spoiler-y, you might just want to bumble about and figure it out yourself but:

LNGs are tricky and while they earn more, there are less ports that pay for jobs. I don't particularly like them because they don't offer as many jobs, don't have as many ports you can go to. I haven't quite gotten there yet but what this directly translates into is competition: i expect it to be very hard to find jobs for these by end game and the growth of the LNG related charterers that issue jobs will be critical. I'll definitely want to form a partnership by then, and be careful to monitor the amount of jobs for LNGS as well as the amount of LNGS the competitors are buying.

Bulk carriers are really the worst ship in the game. They are both cheap and don't net much rewards in terms of contracts. They aren't a bad way to get started. I'm torn between selling the one's i have (particularly the one that can only carry 60k) acquired randomly through the auction house out of a fleet of about 12 total ships, and just keeping them. I'm not certain how the economy will favor the different class ship types in the future so I'm going to keep them for now (more on that below)

I'm really curious about the economy of ship type prices. There is a clear established trend that but carriers are the cheapest, and LNGS and Cargo Container Ships are primo. LNGs are just slightly below that of Cargo Container ships in this default weighting. And each month that can change slightly . However, after five years that seems to not deviate too much from the default value, so unless the devs change it.. this means that these ships are the undisputable best bread winners in the game.

Below are my notes about CCS's and what kind of returns they will generate, and how the costs of ships compare to buying random ships on the auction house compared to planned financing for new ships. the math might be off slightly but I am pretty confident in the overall conclusion to justify the CCRS strategy as being favorable to anything else:

10-30K RANDOM SHIP (BULK CARRIERS AND LNG'S) FROM AUCTION HOUSE 135K (90K UP FRONT ON DEFAULT 50% LOAN) FOR GOOD CARGO SHIP RANDOM SHIP MAKES 9-25K A MONTH GOOD CARGO SHIP CAN MAKE 25-30K A MONTH (ABOUT 3X A RANDOM SHIP) RANDOM SHIP STAYS IN PORT FOR 2.65 MONTHS (FOR MAX UPGRADES) GOOD CARGO SHIP STAYS IN PORT FOR 4 MONTHS (FOR MAX UPGRADES) RANDOM SHIP STARTS EARNING MONEY FOR YOU AFTER 2.65 MONTHS (PAYS FOR ITSELF BASICALLY IN ONE MONTH) GOOD CARGO SHIP STARTS EARNING MONEY IN 4 MONTHS (PAYS FOR ITSELF BASICALLY IN ~9 MONTHS, 9 TIMES LONGER) INVESTMENT IS LOWER FOR RANDOM SHIPS, GOOD FOR BEGINNING OF GAME TO GET AHEAD OF COMPETIORS (IF YOU CARE TO DO THAT), AND GET SOME CAPITAL STREAM GOINGBUT IT SEEMS TO MAKE SENSE TO JUST ORDER SHIPS STRETCHING YOUR CAPITAL THE BEST YOU CAN AS SOON AS YOU START MAKING GOOD MONTHLY RETURNS (AT LEAST 8 RANDOM SHIPS) ALL THIS IS ASSUMING THAT THE UNDERLYING VALUES OF THE SHIP TYPES THEMSELVES ROUGHLY STAY CONSISTENT EACH GAME (MOST LIKELY THEY DO, AT LEAST IN THE BEGINING) IF SHIP PRICES DEVIATE OVER TIME IT MIGHT PAY TO KEEP AN EYE ON THEIR VALUES AND PLAN FOR THE FUTURE ECONOMY. (BUT AFTER 5 YEARS OF IN-GAME PLAYING IT SEEMS THEY DONT)IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT GROWTH OF CHARTERES CAN BE AFFECTED, OR THE COMPETITION FOR CONTRACTS MIGHT CAUSE SPAMMING 'GOOD CARGO SHIPS' TO NOT BE A VIABLE NO-BRAINER STRATEGY (YOU CAN MONITOR THIS USING THE ECONOMY WINDOW AS WELL AS THE CHARTER GROWTH WINDOW) BUT IT SHOULD AT LEAST WORK FOR QUITE SOME TIME TO MAKE IT WORTHWHILE (PLAYED USING PRIME VERSION OF THE GAME, ON EASY, WITH MAX COMPETTITORS AND MAX WIN SCORE OF 10K, CURRENTLY JUST UNDER 1K POINTS)