It's closest kin aren't games like Railroad Tycoon or Patrician, but board games like Catan and Power Grid. But it will only really succeed in its ambitions if it can be that real-time board game that Johnson intends. Offworld will have a short single-player campaign designed for repeated play, and it sounds like it will be a place to try OTC with training wheels while also experiencing unusual and asymmetric scenarios you won't find in skirmishes. When you're losing, you can retreat into a solitaire management game while waiting for a better player to come and buy you out. It's a very different feeling from trying to claw back into an RTS game using a doomed army of tier-1 cannon fodder. Maybe you're not going to win, but there's a certain satisfaction that comes from sorting out your raw-materials situation and building a profitable business. In Offworld, it's easy to feel like you're still making progress even when the game is going against you. In a typical RTS, once you've lost an army and fall behind on expansions, you're acutely aware of how hopeless thing are. It helps that, unlike in most RTS games, you still have a lot of things you can do when a game of OTC isn't going well.
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It was very easy to go on a run of 4-5 games in a row, because a loss always left me feeling like I knew how to do better, and a victory left me feeling energized. In general, you can't be rushed-to-death at the start the way that's an ever-present threat in traditional RTS games, and neither do you linger for long in a losing game.
Part of that is down to the length: a game of Offworld Trading Company is a 20-30 minute sprint to wealth and power. A bad CEO will die a thousand deaths before finally getting the axe (represented in the form of a terse "thanks for your services" note from the board, along with a golden-parachute).ĭespite that, OTC left me eager for more rather than wiped-out after each game. When you're at risk of being bought-out, you can see what percentage of the buy-out price an opponent currently has in cash-on-hand. This can all make OTC an emotional wringer, especially because you can usually see when your opponents are doing well: their stock price goes up, making it harder to knock them out of the game with an ownership buyout, and you can also see the amount of stock they own in other players' companies. Every few minutes, a black market opens where you can buy harmless bonuses like extra claims or productivity boosts, or labor agitators who can temporarily seize control of a production site on your behalf, or a wildfire power surge that will knock out an entire colony's production centers. But in the laissez-faire, cutthroat markets of Mars, you also have to keep an eye peeled for underhanded dealings. In the laissez-faire, cutthroat markets of Mars, you also have to keep an eye peeled for underhanded dealings.Īll that tension comes from the above-board, free-market part of the game.
Alternately, if you're watching the price soar past $500 per unit of electronics, and you're sitting on 400 units, you're about to make a killing, but if you wait too long to make your sale, someone else could dump their electronics and kill that price spike before you ever get a chance to capitalize on it. If someone who mines most of the iron on Mars notices that you're building steel mills, they might stop selling that iron in order to force you to buy it at an increasingly ruinous price. While you can always look around the map to see what your rivals are building and doing, you never really know what people might have stockpiled, or when they might start flooding a market. This all contributes to a persistent sense of paranoia during a game. If that happens, you have to pay whatever those goods cost on the open market, where sometimes a little hydrogen and oxygen are the scarcest commodities in the universe. Since each player's colony and factories require basic inputs however, focusing on valuable finished-goods like electronics and glass means that you might end up running short of water, food, and power. The goal in OTC is to make sure you bring the most expensive goods to market when the price is high, before other players can make the same play.