Your share prices were running parallel for the most part too, good job! And well done with the mutinied Offworld Market! Most of my recent sabotage attempts have been thwarted with goon squads and it’s bloody annoying.
Thanks. I’d pop his goon squad with a circuit overload and then hit it with the mutiny once the defense timed out. I happened to have a spy on one of tiles next to it, so I could see his goon squad.
@SorenJohnson or @Zultar how do holograms work with AI opponents? Do they pretend they don’t know what is under there? I’ve used them a couple times and they don’t attack the building.
Spy? That’s something I’ve not seen. And good idea popping goons with less beneficial sabotages! Very clever.
I’m not sure when the spy was added. You can place a spy (from black market) on a rival’s building, and there is a radius around it where it can see things. I stuck one on his initial geotherm plant, and kept attacking it since he wouldn’t defend it.
Oh god, that sounds amazing.
Yes, I love taking plants early on, pushes power prices up and eats into my debt.
At one point he was in D+3, but managed to find his way back to A. Such a fun game to play, and very satisfying to beat that ai. That might have been what saved it for me, he was paying off that debt so it didn’t completely go out of control, so was behind on amassing money for the buyout.
Last night I had a Scientific that was $250k+ deep with an A bond rating and seemingly using the black market! There was Cook the Books but it was only at 5K so I don’t think it had been used much. That said, I’m not sure how it works exactly. I couldn’t escape C at $160k so I’ve no idea what was going on there. We had roughly the same share value too.
If you look at the replay, and see what his total value is. It is based off the ratio of debt to total value:
https://offworldtradingcompany.gamepedia.com/Debt#Rating_Formula
Thanks, I need to give that a good read. I get very confused with numbers which is all the stranger given how much I enjoy OTC.
The AI doesn’t see through Holograms, but they are basically not supported in Single-Player. In other words, the AI doesn’t have any logic to try to guess what is and is not supposed to be a Hologram. (My reasoning is that either it would be bad at it or it would be good at it and players would accuse it of cheating.) Holograms and Spies are intended for Multiplayer.
Okay, that makes sense. Wasn’t sure if I was throwing money away or not, but it was leaving my patent lab alone. :( Does that mean mine glorious victory wasn’t fair since I used both a hologram and spies? Still felt good :)
I would say every hologram you used was a handicap, and every spy you used cost you the fair black market value in raw cash, so thine glory doth appear righteous indeed.
Oh god, that explains why I haven’t seen either of them until today! Not played much MP before. Hologram gets mentioned in the tutorial, right? I feel like I know about that one.
@Chappers had two hidden Offworld Markets on our last game! Mine weren’t hidden, they just weren’t there :-P
After watching some high level players on Youtube i’ve totally change the way I approach OTC and finally won my first 4 player game vs. 3 AIs at one step below Employee. I found watching these players win much more useful than getting a guide for very basic level gameplay.
Interestingly to me is that all they cared about was income, not inputs. They essentially all but ignore building requirements - some of the guys had in fact no clue what they were and didn’t even care - and only just focused on producing the ‘right’ good and selling it on the market. Almost all of them ran 0 debt economies. They all but ran entirely on cash. Even if they didn’t win the end they would come in second.
The only problem with this in 1on1 games is that the market is much less hungry for goods by comparison. It doesn’t work quite as organically. But watching Robot players make nothing but food and water and win was eye opening.
There is an option that you can enable ‘show net revenue’ or something like that, that will show the net revenue of building types on the build menu. Also pressing X will show net revenue of buildings on the map. That can help figure out if something is losing you money to make, or what to move into that is more profitable than what you are currently making.
I think using adjacency as much as possible (so triangles of buildings, or doubles), and retooling when it is advantageous to do so are the big thing. On the structures chart after the game you’ll see people having large numbers compared to the number of claims they had, because they would keep tearing down things and going into new industries.
Adjacency is absolutely huge. Two adjacent buildings producing the same thing produce as many units as three non-adjacent buildings while consuming the input resources of only two. That can make non-profitable industries perfectly workable and is before you tack on any optimizations.
Trashing unprofitable buildings and replacing them with more profitable ones is also potentially a tremendous boost (and is why Nanotechnology is such a great patent), with the only downsides being that you do still have to pay construction costs on each tile you rotate out of and that the tiles you rotate are doing absolutely nothing while the new structures are getting built. Rotating too heavily or too frequently can do far more harm than good if you’re not thinking about the consequences.
The big revelation for me was that it didn’t seem like people cared too much about following the ‘build path’ of the company you picked. So if you needed silicon, aluminum and glass for your faction, i would dutifully make silicon, aluminum and glass my go-to resources. Then i’d get stuck with no money and no more claims, and the resources i’d have picked were deprecated to <10$ and i was kind of up a creek and no way to fix it.
Instead these guys would just pick a high end resources and just make it, even if they had no prerequesites. Like, only have Chemicals and Steel, or Chemicals and Food, and pretty much just buy everything else they needed. In fact they never even saved resources ever and if they wanted to get something, they’d just auto-sell until they had enough money to buy it. Really different play style. Even more annoying was how little they seemed to understand what i though were crucial bits of information about prerequisite resources, ect. They just didn’t care at all.
Once i just started auto-selling everything that was profitable or had a stable value, it’s like the game clicked and everything opened up as a viable strategy. It’s like the only crucial bit of information that’s absolutely essential is the table of current resources values. Everything else is kinda just gravy.
This works as a basic plan. But you can absolutely take advantage of it. If they need steel to upgrade and aren’t making any, start making and buying steel. They’ll be forced to buy at a higher cost, at which point you can sell down your stockpile for a profit (or upgrade for much less than they did).
The same principle applies to anything anyone has a demand for that they are relying on others to supply: if you have a monopoly on supply, you can really profit from that.
I did something like that to the ai today. The map (seed 61780) from the 2nd game between McMaster and rothdathetruculent was interesting and I was curious if a scavenger dropping in the crater in the se and using the 3 initial claims to grab the 3 alum tiles (the only alum tiles on the whole map) could win.
Just beat Employee AI 1on1. The only things were I paused occasionally to min-max sabotage.