tberton

Offworld, an economic RTS from Soren Johnson

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Well I just had a miserable game against the AI. I was playing as Robots, and I was hit as early as possible in the game by random shortages on both Power and Electronics. I was crushed by mounting debt, and never had a chance. The random shortages/surpluses seem to function only to randomly screw or reward players outside their control. I find it weird that there's options to disable the black market and auctions, but not shortages, because those are the real RNG screw in the game.

 

Other than being mad about that, I'm observing a weird trend that makes sense when you think about it, but is unintuitive for anyone used to 4X games. Because there's no army movement, you can strike at any player anywhere, instantly. Since there's a public leaderboard, you don't really want to be the player in first place, because it attracts all the sabotage attempts (and boy are they devastating, especially to my poor Robots who build more densely than most). A quiet second place feels like where you want to be. Call it the Blue Shell principle.

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That's a pretty common attribute of games with a lot of player interaction. The best example I can think of is the board game Tammany Hall. First place (as determined by points) is pretty much the worst position to be in until the very end of the game.

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I kind of wish sabotage, mutiny, etc. had some sort of distance-based delay, because laying a Solar-Powered Array in the far corners of the map costs me a lot of fuel to ship all the way back. Would make sense that ruining that source should take more effort than something close to the player's base.

 

This is not really feedback based on any play experience, though, so maybe it'd screw up the balance and make the Black Market too underpowered..

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I kind of wish sabotage, mutiny, etc. had some sort of distance-based delay, because laying a Solar-Powered Array in the far corners of the map costs me a lot of fuel to ship all the way back. Would make sense that ruining that source should take more effort than something close to the player's base.

No it shouldn't, you build in a shitty spot and you have to deal with the consequences!

 

 

I narrowly lost the Scavanger tutorial last night in a frantic sell off to try and make 400k to buy out the other company, he was quicker:(

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That's a pretty common attribute of games with a lot of player interaction. The best example I can think of is the board game Tammany Hall. First place (as determined by points) is pretty much the worst position to be in until the very end of the game.

 

It's not so much that there's a lot of player interaction, as that player interaction is devastating, and you're unable to defend yourself from it. You just can't effectively use three goon squads to protect twelve buildings from EMPS, power surges, and dynamite/nukes on the really valuable single targets. Maybe the solution is that goons should protect adjacent tiles as well, I've played a couple games where I had 3-4 goon squads up, and I got nailed by a dozen sabotages, one of which I intercepted.

 

JKO and I are having a Offworld Date on Wednesday (18th) at 8 GMT/9 CET if anyone wants to join. Skill level will be super high, so bring your A game, probably.

 

Also, this thing. How is it being set up? Exchange Steam names?

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A cool thing I noticed: An iron mine and an aluminum mine will give each other adjacency bonuses, because they're both mines. Presumably the same is true for carbon and silicon.

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JKO and I are having a Offworld Date on Wednesday (18th) at 8 GMT/9 CET if anyone wants to join. Skill level will be super high, so bring your A game, probably.

 

Crap, I just realized that I will actually be busy then, won't be able to join you. I would love to get into a multiplayer trainwreck with some other humans, do you plan to have more games later?

 

Unrelated, I've been finding the Robots are a really good race to practice with. Because they skip the water tree, they have to respond a lot less to market forces and resource availability, so there's a more (not absolutely) concrete build order to learn. I think maybe you're supposed to build your structures out in strings rather than clumps though. It gets you slightly less adjacency bonus, but it makes it way easier to protect from EMPs and Power Surges (even if goons don't intercept the surge, they block it from propagating further).

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You sound better at this game than us^^ I shall post if we are playing again (i'm sure we will, for a strategy game, this one runs nice and quick).

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So today I discovered a cool undocumented feature. Pressing 1,2,3,4 lets you take control of that numbered player. Or maybe it's documented and I just missed it. But it's neat!

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Okay, I just bought it, mostly because it's 33% off on GMG with code 23PERO-FF2GOO-D2MISS. Next time there's a game, I'll play if I've done the tutorials by then.

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This game is kind of intense. I have it on only the 2nd difficulty and I'm stressing out making decisions. There seems to be a really good beat to it when it comes to making decisions and responding to crisis.

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This game is kind of intense. I have it on only the 2nd difficulty and I'm stressing out making decisions. There seems to be a really good beat to it when it comes to making decisions and responding to crisis.

 

Yeah, I think I generally understand how to play, although not well enough to get it right the first time on most maps, but it can be so hard knowing that you have a solid economic engine, but it's going to take a while to spin up to the point that you can start affecting things with the money you're making. I had a solid electronics engine this past game, but it was hard as hell not to gut it to put something into food production when a massive shortage hit.

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Those tutorial videos helped me so much. 

  • Shift+click sells 100 units. 
  • I now understand how scientific colonies can put secondary resources on primaries.
  • Watching Soren Johnson panic a little bit in tutorial video #5 helped me understand how much I could reasonably know about what is going on.
  • Just watching some strategies unfold was helpful. 

I replayed the tutorials after watching each video and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the game now. I think I might manage to win two matches in a row on employee difficulty in the campaign! One down.

 

Edit: Nope. I am playing as scavenger and skipped the iron/steel part of the economy. They sold both the entire game and because I don't have any high-level production besides the pleasure dome unlocked, I couldn't find a high priority market that the two of us were not sharing. It looks like I should have had a steel-mill just so that I'd be sharing in that market rather than giving it all to the opponent. Economics is weird. 

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I replayed the tutorials after watching each video and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the game now. I think I might manage to win two matches in a row on employee difficulty in the campaign! One down.

 

Nice! I'm only able to bat better than five hundred on "Assistant" level.

 

However, twice now I've encountered an interesting situation in the campaign. It hasn't given me access to the Offworld Market yet, so when I get to my final opponent and they've taken some precautions not to get bought out, it becomes nearly impossible for one to get enough money to finish the other off, because both of our economies are so huge. My first game, it ended after a fifteen-minute standoff when I finally spooked and tried to buy my own stock back, but my second game, I literally ran it on "AI_Test" speed for forty-five minutes before selling every single product for $1 each got me enough money to buy them out. On the one hand, it's great that the endgame gotterdammerung is so effective, but for the campaign missions without the Offworld Market, perhaps there should be some sort of substitute? At the very least, maybe it should offer the chance to build an Offworld Market through auction after ten minutes of stalemate or so, in order that the player can win or lose against the game instead of their own patience.

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Sounds similar to my difficulties last night Gormongous. If I had played better, I think I would have eneded up in that situation. I haven't looked, but are there any videos where Soren Johnson shows how to move ahead of the opponents when we are all producing the same materials and most of the higher complexity products are locked away?

Late game, when everyone has exhausted their claims and maintaining reasonable supplies on their own, I have no idea if the NPC colony starts valuing some goods more than another (assuming there is plenty of water).

In my game last night the condition was "no black-market" so I couldn't think of a way to inflate or deflate prices that wouldn't have just evened out. I should have invested in steel, but I suspect things would have still stalled.

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I want this game so much, but have promised myself that I'd only buy one game a month and I already got Majora's Mask 3D. Two more weeks!

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I dove in on this yesterday. Went in halvsies with my dad. This could be amazing, and it could be terrifying.

 

 

e: Oh my god. "Get your assets to Mars" is perfect.

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Double postin'

 

http://www.twitch.tv/day9tv

 

Day9 is streaming OTC, and has been all day. It is fascinating to watch other people play. he seems fine with running a 200k debt, but he'll scrape to build a silicon plant instead of buying it when the price is $1.

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I'm currently disillusioned with the single-player campaign after going back to skirmishes. I like the scenario permutations like "No black-market" and the idea of being motivated by persistent upgrades, but it doesn't do a good job of teaching me how to change my strategy with limited upgrade-paths. It would be cool if campaign missions had the effect of easing me into understanding different strategies that are effective in skirmishes. Maybe I'm looking at this in the wrong order, maybe the campaign is for when I tire of skirmishes and need more challenge.

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Picked this up tonight from watching Day9 play. I'm still awful but hot damn is this an impressively fun game. Even the tutorials are nerve-wracking.

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Okay, I just bought it, mostly because it's 33% off on GMG with code 23PERO-FF2GOO-D2MISS. Next time there's a game, I'll play if I've done the tutorials by then.

 

This code has expired but I picked up 20% off on GMG using the code KPMN32-6VRM69-6INRND

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