Offworld Trading Company from Mohawk Games

Is that the CEO ai? :)

Haha, I wish!

@Chappers don’t be! Honestly, my head will turn to mush when we’re playing!

Sounds like a combination of two things:

  • Auto-buying resources for life support is paid with debt, not cash.
  • Proceeds from power sales will be primarily used to pay off debt. They’ll only give you cash if you’re at 0 debt.

So you probably had an power surplus. Before you fixing the food production, you were paying more for auto-buying food than the power sales were bringing in.

Aww, the blue and purple snake are friends!

-Tom

When you were not producing food, your debt was increasing because you were not satisfying your life support requirements (so the food deficit was incurred as debt). Your farms were automatically turned off because they were not profitable, which is to say that the water you would have used to make a unit of food was more valuable than said unit of food.

By turning your farms back on manually, you were opting to lose money on the water → food conversion in return for producing enough food to satisfy your life support requirements.

Mathematically, in a situation like that, the better outcome was likely to sell your water and use the cash you earned from doing so to manually pay off your debt. Probably.

Ahh, this is something I forgot which makes sense. Life support is power, water, food, oxygen and… fuel(?).

There are no friends in 1v1 dude.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense now. I recall switching some water pumps in and perhaps optimising water production to help in this regard, eventually pulling myself out of that death spiral. I think sometimes I get a bit overloaded with the amount of things going on! I try not to pause but when something like this happens I want to try and work out the why before resuming so I can learn from it.

Can somebody explain to me why my greenhouse farms weren’t auto-supplying in this instance:

Oh, good one! I was having the same thing yesterday with my glass factories, which were quite profitable

Is it because you don’t have enough money to buy more water? trying to learn myself.

You will use debt to buy your life support needs, but you need to use cash to buy resources you lack for production, correct?

@Zultar will know :)

Yes, you need cash to auto-buy resources. Auto-buying is just a UI convenience; it doesn’t change the rules of the game.

So auto-buying life support doesn’t go on your debt?

In the shot you linked, if you auto-sell Glass, it should produce enough revenue to fund the water and silicon you need to make Glass and Food.

He’s lacking o2 to produce the glass, right?

The auto-buy of life support going to debt is just what your hq needs to survive. So say you need 0.5 water and 1.0 food for life support of hq. That is getting bought with debt. Does mousing over a hq show the needs like a colony?

Ohhh okay, yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Yes, I’ve been trying to watch the colony more recently to get an idea of their needs.

@SorenJohnson Would switching out one of the farms for a Electrolysis Reactor work to get the glass production going? Actually maybe switching both over to reactors.

And when can I pre-order 10 Crowns??? ;)

Edit: or no, because you still need water hmmm

Yeah, what’s happening in this shot is just that geggis has run out of cash, so can’t purchase either the water to make food or the oxygen to make glass. If I was in this position I’d likely just set food to auto-sell then sell down the glass I have on hand. This would turn food/glass production back online and allow me to start stockpiling cash/glass for the push to HQ 4.

Reactors would probably be a better idea than Farms. You should still make enough money to buy the Oxygen, but it’s usually better to supply your own inputs. If you just keep doing this, eventually the cost of Water and Silicon will rise enough to get you in trouble.

Finally beat the manager ai in a 1v1 skirmish.

The best part of it was the 280k I made from the Offworld Market. I didn’t have one :), but mutinied his a couple times. I waited too long and he took where I wanted to found and I thought I was toast, but hung on and finally beat the bastard. Was surprising because he was Scientific and was at HQ 5 when I was still back at 3.