Me and my former roommate used to play this game all the time on my vintage Atari 130XE. We played it so much that we eventually wore grooves into the floppy disc 😮 If you held the disc up to the light, you could see where the magnetic particles had worn away. Needless to say, the disc had error sectors and wouldn't boot once it reached this point
Played this with my friends as a kid often. You could play 4 humans if you had a atari 800 (4 separate joystickports) -the only game where you could play 4 people simultaneously. Good times! Nothing beats having monopoly on food, but rather let it waste away than selling your friends a single unit! Tried it later on the XL (or if it was the XE) with only 2 joystick ports and therefore 2 computer players. Still ok, but not nearly as fun.
As for the energy. I would NEVER sell to critical level. I would always want to have at least 1 extra unit BEFORE critical level because of what the blue person did. He had ONE energy unit and put in TWO items that NEEDED ENERGY. BTW. I don't understand what this guy is doing, When I have an energy plot I would almost IMMEDIATELY get the plot next to it(even if it's a mountain plot) because the connected plots help with the production. That goes for ALL the items. Connected plots help with the production.
Yeah, it's definitely the kind of game where you need to read the manual before playing it. I barely understand the intricacies of what's going on here, but I get the basic gist of it, mostly because I've played strategy games before.