There are a few problems with the game's implementation of transportation networks that keep them from being self-running.  The first issue is that you can specify that a vehicle should wait for a full load before beginning its route.  This makes sense as there is no reason to pay the costs associated with a delivery route when there is nothing to deliver.  However, trucks will sit at a loading bay while waiting for goods to become available, blocking access to your other trucks.  This can be a huge issue, especially when working with seasonal goods, as you can be horrified to find a huge queue lined up outside of your depot waiting for one truck to load one item that won't be available for a few months.  This brings me to the second issue, traffic jams.  Trucks that are stuck waiting to enter a depot will queue up along the road leading to the depot.  In addition, the game has other cars running around the roads for aesthetic purposes, but these cars can get stuck within your truck queues.  Should the line become so long it blocks an intersection, then traffic going the other way will become blocked at the intersection.  All of a sudden nothing is moving and it can take you some time to unlock the jam and get traffic, and your shipments, going again.  Sure, traffic may be an issue in real transportation networks, but a traffic jam can keep your trucks stuck for a month or more of game time.  When was the last time the shelves of your local store were empty because the delivery truck took a month and a half to arrive at the warehouse?  Why can't trucks waiting for a load of goods available in two months be parked to the side?

Retail outlets are available for each product group - grocery stores to sell agricultural products, clothing stores for clothing, etc.  As with the production facilities, you are given feedback as to the demand for the products a store sells before placing it.  Once placed, a store operates automatically, selling goods that it obtains from storage facilities subject to local demand.  You can raise and lower prices for individual goods as a percentage of an unspecified baseline price.  Raising prices lowers demand but increases profit, while lowering price increases demand at the expense of margins.  For the most part, you can safely leave prices at the standard level, adjusting them only when you are having inventory issues.

Demand for product in the game is further divided into four seasons.  You'll find demand for winter wear high in winter and non-existent in the warmer seasons, and the opposite holds true for outdoor furniture.  Some resources are seasonal as well, with farm products subject to a growing cycle that results in a once yearly harvest.  If you are making seasonal goods in a factory, then you might want to shut production down in the off-season or switch to a different product.  This is easy enough to do in the game, but unfortunately there is no way to specify that this be done automatically.  If you have a large industrial base, it requires a fair amount of micromanagement to ensure that none of your factories are sitting idle and eating up cash without producing product.

Industry Giant II can be played in three different modes: campaign, multiplayer, and endless game.  The campaign game provides a set of scenarios with varying, timed victory conditions.  The scenarios are divided by difficulty, so that you can play through an easy, normal, or difficult campaign with a different set of scenarios in each.  No matter which level you select, the goals are pretty aggressive, so the easy campaign is not really all that easy, and the normal campaign is challenging right from the get go.  A better progression of scenarios of increasing difficulty would have been nice, as it can be frustrating to players new to a game to be stuck playing the same scenario over and over without any feedback as to what he or she is doing wrong.

The multiplayer mode puts you in direct competition with other players or AI opponents, and provides for a more exciting game.  In the other modes of play, you enjoy the luxury of being a monopoly and the sole supplier of any goods you choose to produce.  The multiplayer game provides for a more realistic business simulation, as companies rarely have the luxury of operating in a vacuum.

The endless game, unlike its name implies, can end.  It allows you to select from a list of maps, specify a starting year (affects available technology and products), and select a set of goals to accomplish.  If you accomplish the goals, you win the game.  Whether you win or lose, you can continue playing and this is where the game essentially becomes endless.

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