One pump on the edge of town. A price sign you set yourself. And three streets away, a competitor doing the same.

Petrol Empire is an idle tycoon about the fuel trade. You set the price per litre, you watch what the neighbours do, and the queue at your pumps tells you whether you got it right. Earn enough and you buy the competitor out. Buy out enough competitors and you start buying the tankers that supply them, the terminal those tankers fill at, the refinery behind it, and finally the oil field where it all begins.

Then you move to a new market and start again — with everything you have learned.

A price war by the litre

The heart of this game is a number with three decimals. Customers compare your price with the pump down the road, and they react more sharply the more choice they have. A cent too expensive and you see it in your revenue immediately; a cent too cheap and you sell a great deal for nothing.

Four fuels, each with its own audience and its own margin: Euro 95, diesel, Euro 98 and fast charging for electric. The purchase price moves with the world market, and that world market has a will of its own.

Seventy markets, no two alike

From New York to Mongolia, from the North Sea to Madagascar. Seventy playable regions, each with its own layout to match where you are: a river cutting the city in two, a coastline, a bay, a delta, an island, or inland with no water at all.

Every region has its own competitors, with names that fit the area, and a character that changes how you play:

• Oil country — close to the source, you buy cheaper
• Industrial region — freight on contracts, customers care less about price
• Retail market — plenty of choice on the street, customers react sharply

Every round has to take you everywhere. Finish a market and it locks until you have played all the others — and the world market is the final one.

From the pump to the oil field

Your empire has six layers and twenty businesses, and you work your way backwards along the supply chain:

• Bank — your first purchase; every ten upgrades opens the next layer
• Retail — roadside shop chains
• Logistics — fleet, depot, pipeline
• Refining — where crude becomes fuel
• Upstream — drilling fields, offshore, shale
• Downstream — petrochemicals, aviation fuel, bunkering, trading

Every business has its own upgrades, and every upgrade raises your bank level. At level seventy the door to your next life opens.

It keeps running without you

Put managers on your stations and your chains and it carries on while you are away. Hire a CEO, a CFO and a COO and it carries on without you clicking anything: the COO buys upgrades on its own, the CFO brings your interest down and your credit up.

Up to fifty-six managers, and they work in every region you play.

The world pushes back

Twenty-six world events shove the oil price around — an OPEC decision, a sanction, a storm at sea, a drilling permit. You can see them coming and plan for them.

Closer to home, eleven kinds of thing go wrong on your own forecourt: a tank leak, a power cut, roadworks at your door, a strike. Do you service daily, weekly, monthly or yearly? That is a real trade-off between ten percent of your daily revenue and the odds of your pumps standing still.

And you are not playing alone

• Leaderboards for prestige, net worth, litres sold and world points
• Clans with their own chat and a weekly tournament
• Friends, private messages, a world chat and a room for every language
• One hundred and thirty achievements to tick off

In your language, in your currency

The game speaks thirty-one languages and counts in thirty-eight currencies.

One account, on Steam and beyond

Sign in with Steam and you are in. Would you rather carry on from your phone, or in a browser tab at work? Link an email address to it and it is the same account — the same save, the same diamonds, the same leaderboard. Your save lives in the cloud, so you pick up wherever you left off.

In short

• 70 playable markets, each with its own map, competitors and character
• 34 competing chains per map to buy out
• 20 empire businesses across 6 layers, from the bank to the oil field
• 14 upgrades for your station, 12 for every chain you take over
• 4 fuels with their own audience and margin
• 26 world events and 11 incidents on your own forecourt
• 130 achievements
• Managers, CEO, CFO and COO — it runs while you are away
• Leaderboards, clans, a weekly tournament, friends and chat in your own language
• 31 languages, 38 currencies, cloud saves