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COMERCIO COSMICO
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COMERCIO COSMICO ("COSMIC COMMERCE") is a revolutionary title, one of the first
"sandbox" games ever! What this truly means is... we simply never finished its
implementation, so it still lacks a proper ending. =:)

Even so, it's fully playable and quite entertaining. The core concept is a
strategy/management game within the solar system, loosely based on the trading
parts of the classic game "Elite", thus the gameplay should be fairly intuitive.
You may assume you won the game if you accumulate a few thousand credits without
any pending debts, and you lost if you are bankrupt and cannot proceed anymore.


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FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS
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The original game design discussions included plans for the following features:

* Sporadic mission offers for special delivery, smuggling or a VIP rescue (with
associated rewards and risks);

* Randomized events such as ship damage caused by meteorite collisions, pirate
thievery, or occasional opportunities to attempt exploring drifting "ghost
ships" encountered along the way;

* A background story, gradually revealed during the game, that may involve
political conflicts, a rebellion for colony independence, a global effort to
avoid some iminent cataclysmic disaster (for instance due to a large asteroid
or solar storm), or even the discovery of an alien artifact (controlled by
either a rebellion faction, escaping prisoners, criminal organizations, or a
planet government, with distinct consequences on each case). All story events
are semi-random, organized as possible "branches" from the main story, often
generating additional missions and creating new opportunities for profit, as
long as the player can correctly predict their influence on market prices and
take advantage of these opportunities accordingly.

However, none of these planned features above were implemented due to lack of
time (we were involved in too many other simultaneous projects). Because of
this, the current release only contains the basic core functionality.

Nowadays we have no intent to revive this project ourselves. Even so, any kind
of derivative work based on this game is allowed and encouraged! If you would
like to further extend this game, create a new variant to be released as a new
"mod", or simply implement a different game (even a commercial release) reusing
any of these concepts, you are welcome to do so. In such case, you are just
expected to give us proper credit, that's all.


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CREDITS
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"Comercio Cosmico" was designed and implemented by Eduardo Ito and Einar Saukas.

English version (with minor improvements) by Einar Saukas.
