tberton

Offworld, an economic RTS from Soren Johnson

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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.

 

Offworld trading, it's right in the name! As far as I can tell, the prices you get for selling goods offworld are randomized upon game start, only viewable upon building an offworld launcher, exorbitant, and impossible to deplete.

 

 

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.

 

The campaign does an absolutely terrible job of teaching the main game (locking most of the buildings, messing with production ratios), it has a way of solidifying your build order, rather than encouraging you to experiment and adapt. I think it's for people who want a sense of progression, and a between-matches metagame. I also wouldn't say it's more challenging, I've been finding it a cakewalk compared to the quick games, though you can always turn up the difficulty a few notches.

 

I recently got to play a neat map which only had four iron deposits, so by my first expansion I claimed three of them, and nuked the fourth, crowning myself Iron Baron of Mars. It pretty much knocked the steel-dependent AIs out of the game, and the existence of those weakened players made for an interesting metagame between me and the remaining Scavenger.

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Offworld trading, it's right in the name! As far as I can tell, the prices you get for selling goods offworld are randomized upon game start, only viewable upon building an offworld launcher, exorbitant, and impossible to deplete.

The offworld-market was locked away. I was referring to the demands of the martian population.

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This game's tutorials are ridiculously hard near the end. Scientific is harder than some multiplayer games.

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This game's tutorials are ridiculously hard near the end. Scientific is harder than some multiplayer games.

I failed a couple of times on that one too, before realising the scientific style came down to needing far less plots than anyone else to get the full mix, and then spent my time maximising adjacency & profit.

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A tip for the tutorials: Normally planet-scanning is a race, whoever's first to deploy will get ahead of those who spend more time scanning and deploy later. However, the tutorials magically pause this clock, you can spend half an hour scanning every last tile of the tutorial maps before deploying, and the AI will wait for you.

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Can't buy it, I have school. Can't buy it, I have school. Can't buy it, I have school.

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So, I know we all get kinda tense in the final bits of a game- aka, once the Offworld Trading really begins.

 

What's funny though, is that while those give an initial edge, it dies out quickly because it only gets you really halfway through someone's stock pool. In general, other players have a good 2-5 minutes to 'catch up' before the game is pretty-well sealed.

 

The biggest trick is to get involved in trading stocks earlier and earlier.

 

I still don't have a solution to debt. I let it skyrocket, and eventually my worth is so huge my debt can't touch me. But this is only on Employee difficulty. I'd like to make it all the way to CEO and see what the 'real' game is.

 

Gah I love this thing too much. I'd say the one thing I really want, is a way to operate outside the "claims" structure- claims quickly become the standard de-jour, and as a result whatever your expansion is effectively determines how you must play, since if you can't expand you can't do jack. The only alternative to this, is going food/fuel/oxygen route, with glass as a 'backup' resource(hoping for low silicon prices). If it was possible to invest heavily(say, 2x the base resource costs) to upgrade a node to 2x efficiency, it could provide ways to operate outside the claim economy.

 

Unless there's some sort of game design reason for keeping everything to claims.

 

Also: BE CAREFUL OF WHAT PATENTS YOU BUY. I got Cold Fusion, and it nearly wrecked my game because I had to use it, and can't turn it off once you get it(makes it so water is your power source instead of Electricity).

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Gah I love this thing too much. I'd say the one thing I really want, is a way to operate outside the "claims" structure- claims quickly become the standard de-jour, and as a result whatever your expansion is effectively determines how you must play, since if you can't expand you can't do jack. The only alternative to this, is going food/fuel/oxygen route, with glass as a 'backup' resource(hoping for low silicon prices). If it was possible to invest heavily(say, 2x the base resource costs) to upgrade a node to 2x efficiency, it could provide ways to operate outside the claim economy.

 

Unless there's some sort of game design reason for keeping everything to claims.

 

For the buildings that are physically connected to your base, you can scrap the older buildings and invest in different production. That won't change what you are mining though. The last couple of games I've found myself using a combination of the hacker array and the black-market to create artificial scarcity on life-support resources that I have stockpiled. It doesn't win me the game necessarily, but it is something to do that can give me a big enough bump to buy a weak company's stock. 

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Finally got my first 'real' loss, at the 11th hour. Me and Mr. Stock were all that was left, and we were in a race to buy each other out. He had to get 460k, I had to get 320k, and I was making money faster than he was(6 Offworlds will do that), but he was starting from 100k and I was starting from 0.

 

Give me another minute, he would've been mine. But sadly, I just got my $3b check.

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After playing a couple of games where I bought the cheapest company out and inherited massive debts, I've started to buy the stocks of the high-value companies. So far it is working really well. Buying companies out has the snowball-effect I would expect it to have. This makes me think that in a multiplayer match (though I haven't played one), staying in second place until a final rush isn't a very good strategy because in my opinion, that is the most strategic company to buy out first.

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Office Depot ate Office Max and now Staples is eating Office Depot. When I heard the news, I immediately visualized that all of this was taking place on Mars.

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Minor note for anyone playing the campaign when the mini patch hit today, it seems it moved the save files to a slightly different location(I'm typing this on my iPad so the exact place escapes me atm) but you can retrieve the file and move it to the new location and keep going

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I'm not sure if there was a recent balance change, or if I just suddenly figured out the key to this game, but I took a week or two off, and suddenly I'm crushing AIs on the higher difficulty settings. Watching them, it's obvious that the AIs aren't exactly great at playing the game: their build orders are often suboptimal (and sometimes just insane), they're far too scared of debt, and they don't react to shortages/surpluses (this is a huge shortcoming). I suppose that's to be expected for an Early Access 4X, hopefully they improve.

 

Is anyone else interested in putting together an all-humans game? I'd love to start figuring out how the game plays out with more than just braindead AIs.

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So I finally picked this up, and even though it doesn't run very well on my laptop, I'm enjoying it. Is anybody interested in setting up some games? The AIs are fun, but not that interesting to play against.

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There was some discussion of a human game a while ago, but it fell through and then everyone seemed to go away. I am still totally up for some all humans games, who else is in? I suppose I'd be up for games with just two humans, but that would probably play out super weird. Worth trying at least.

 

Anyone interested should probably share Steam info to help coordinate, since a forum is not the ideal way to schedule multiplayer games. I'm Ninety-Three on Steam.

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There's actually an Offworld tournament going on right now that's all 1v1 and it seems super interesting. Definitely different, but still compelling.

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Nice, I haven't played for a while, kinda waiting for features to bake. I'm looking forward to it.

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I finally checked it out a few weeks ago after not really touching it since it first came out on early access. Very impressed with how everything has shaped up! All the polish that went into the game was really worth it in my opinion!

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I've been playing a lot this week in anticipation of the official release. This game is so good! It's been amazing watching it evolve and improve throughout Early Access. Some of the new systems, like the way the neutral colony works now and the stock system, feel so right.

 

If anybody checked it out in early access and thought it was interesting but wanted to wait, I highly recommend looking at it again. The game has come a long way.

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Does it completely rely on multiplayer or do you find the single player options to be well formed as well?

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I've only played the campaign a little bit and it's a bit jarring, because I'm so used to multiplayer, but it feels pretty fully formed and interesting. Enough to keep your attention, certainly. However, like most RTS games, I'd say multiplayer is the main attraction.

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