Some of the other reviews give this game a thumbs down for not being SimCity; I give this game a thumbs up primarily for not being SimCity. It tries to do something different, and while it could use a TON more polish and mechanics that add a bit more depth and variety that keep it fresh for a longer period of time, the game is different enough that it scratches a managerial itch of mine I have trouble finding good ways to scratch.
Unlike a lot of trading games that demand you manually perform boring, routine transactions yourself, Spice Road automates nearly all the routine tasks. That said, this is where it starts to run into problems, because it has the Final Fantasy XII problem of automating the simple, routine actions, but then not adding in anything else for you to actually do once you've set up the routine.
That said, to counter one of the complaints about the game made by some of the other reviewers, there's nothing particularly wrong with being able to hold TAB and speed the game up until things happen. The game's base speed is a super-slow-motion, so that you can make tons of decisions in a relatively short span of time within the game, then, once all your orders are done, you just hold TAB until you're ready to take more actions (such as waiting for more money to come in to build the next building), and hitting F4 even explicitly exists as a "fast forward until the next building gets built" button, although I rarely bothered using that instead of TAB.
The interface in general is rather lacking, however. It's great that things are automated, but at the same time, it's extremely hard to understand what's actually going on behind the scenes. You can be told, for example, that a goods workshop consumes ore and tools, plus hires 10 workers and pays a salary to them, in order to craft goods... but then it doesn't say HOW MUCH ore is used to make how many goods. Control over your city basically runs on seeing a HUD that has green lights when things are good, and which turns yellow, orange, or red when you need more of something, but beyond that, the game makes it very difficult to reverse-engineer anything about what's going on below the surface. This often matters while playing, because you can have a city that produces tons of food or goods, but still have a yellow food or goods indicator because your city is trading away all the goods because some off-map trading node will pay more for your goods, and your merchants will trade away their own lunch and starve if it makes them an extra dollar of profit (then blame you for starving).
In most cases, it almost doesn't matter at all, however. Outside of the "Isolation" mission, the only thing you really need to do is look at what's making profits, and look at the price indicator on the world map. The only thing that actually seems to matter is the price of different commodities, so if something is expensive, you just try to build more of that thing.
I find the supply chain dissappointingly short. Basically the only thing that you use to actually manufacture secondary goods is ore. You need food, ore, one kind of "recreation" good (alcohol -which is for some bizarre reason not grown in the same place as food and vice versa in spite of anything you can brew almost definitionally being edible-, opium, and tea), and one luxury good (and one of the luxury goods can be manufactured through ore, so that's not even necessary). This basically means that you need ore and food, and the rest is just fluff that you exploit solely to drive up profits. Ore is used to make tools (needed to run almost everything), goods (needed in freakishly large quantities by your population), weapons (needed by soldiers for combat), and artisan (artificial luxury goods). These make you all the money you will ever need, and beyond that, you just need access to food and a recreation resource. (And you can easily trade for the latter, although you need enough food that there will be problems if you solely rely upon importing food.)
Likewise, there's a halfhearted attempt at having "inns" that allow for "tourism", but you basically just set down more churches and saloons and they generate money even if you have no other resources to exploit, which makes the other resources even more meaningless.
Beyond this, there are cities, where you invite nobles to your city to buy more things you can sell them for a profit, but which make increasing demands upon your city's infrastructure to the point that once you set down the palace and actually turn a town into a city, then unless you have leveled-up buildings, then you cannot build more infrastructure to meet needs fast enough. (Build a palace, and it demands more security, so you build more barracks or a fortress, but then it needs more repair, so you build repair yards, then it needs more population, so you build apartments, but then you need more healthcare and recreation, so you build a hospital and casino, but then you need more population, so you build apartments, but then you need more religion, warehouse space, and water, so you build a cathedral, 3 more warehouses, and more wells, but then it needs more security and population...) You can level up your buildings to make them more efficient, but the problem is that the high-tier buildings you get in cities require geometrically more experience to level up, and since you need to keep building more and more of everything, you never get the chance to level those things up. Because of this, there's basically never any reason to have a city except to satisfy arbitrary mission objectives for one. If you CAN build a city, then you're obviously making money hand-over-fist already, and therefore don't NEED a city to make any more money. (Cities are generally just giant pits you throw money into, anyway...)
This brings us to the common failing of so many management games, which is that difficulty exists only in the earliest stages of a mission, and once you start making ANY profit at all, there's almost no reason outside of some catastrophically stupid self-inflicted blunder you would ever stop making money. There is almost no way to feel a challenge in this game outside of finding out that the first town you blindly put on an unexplored map was placed near no resources, and you are forced to reset. (Expect to make one blind guess-and-scout short session focused purely on exploring the map, then reset once you know where everything is for every mission.) Combat does hypothetically exist, but it's a bit of a joke. Build four barracks, set them to attack a town, and speed up time until you defeat everything. Even if outnumbered, you can wear them down with attrition and replacing dead guards is cheap.
One other commodity is slaves. Slaves are abysmally badly represented, and are basically just a "population recource" you find and exploit like ore mines or farms. Slaves grow infinitely, and once in your slave huts, are just population that eat 45% as much and never cause any problems or change society in any visible way.
Graphics are also... bad. Like N64 graphics bad. I presume the developer bought them in some sort of medieval asset pack, because some of the graphics don't quite match the function of the building. Apartments are clearly castle keeps, while slavers and silk weavers live in treehouses for some reason. The world map is just made of colored semicircles and arrows gliding around. I play management games that are practically just spreadsheet management games, however, so I don't particularly mind graphics, and the game has minimum specs low enough to run on a graphing calculator. Just... don't expect to use it to wow your friends.
It's ultimately worth buying at least on sale for its novelty, but it desperately needs deeper mechanics to make it interesting for more than just grinding out the achievements. It's a city manager where there's far too little to actually manage.
