Nice. Always happy to buy Offworld dlc.
Very cool. Please add in-game microtransactions to buy resource boosts or powers to use against opponents.
Capitalism ho!
Is your wallet your only road to victory? ;>
hard pass.
If I cant buy a hat or something, I don’t see the point in multiplayer.
@BrianRubin I see you have this listed as Wanted on Steam. For shame spame game junkie! How do you not already own this? ;)
Never mind I was on the new dlc page. :) All Hail the Space Lord Rubin!
Still waiting on the Switch version.
New dlc is out, and if you bought in to the founders thing it is in your library. Some of the best gaming money I’ve spent. Thanks again @SorenJohnson.
Gosh yes. Completely agree!!! I actually feel guilty for all the value I have extracted from the Founder’s Edition.
This game will go down as one of the greats.
So I’ve been on an Offworld Trading Company binge this weekend (god I love this game) and just started a fresh campaign after shaking the rust off with several skirmishes and the Io/Jupiter’s Forge tutorials/challenges. I just came across this with Ezra Hoang. I thought I’d taken a screenshot but for some reason it didn’t work.
Basically I was able to research patents without a Patent Lab. The UI even said I needed a Patent Lab and there was a little lock over the Patent Lab icon in the bottom left of the screen. The green queue arrow next to the patent (in this case Nanotechnology) came up. I was even able to queue Hacker Array actions without actually having one. I cancelled the actions/research because I didn’t want to exploit a possible bug. Is this a bug? If not then everything seemed to point at it not being possible.
Can anyone recommend a basic strategy video for this game? I really, really love the concept of it, but when I try to get into it there’s so many places where I don’t know where to start. Like should I borrow? How much? When? That sort of thing. Please and thank you!
Okay so a few things that helped me immensely:
(Some of this you may know already, and if I’m off with any of this please correct me folks!):
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Space bar pauses! There’s a lot to take in but there’s also a lot in the UI that you can easily miss if you’re under pressure to play. Pause and have a good look at the tooltips and UI.
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Founding in the right place with the right faction is key. Know each faction so you can effectively found your HQ(s) and prioritise resources, patents etc. This took me a lot longer than expected so it’s worth trying to dabble in the skirmish mode with different factions. Early on I got so used to playing Scientific that I was terrible with everyone else. Don’t be me! OTC is all about being adaptable.
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Don’t try to cover all the resources. Just produce what’s profitable and be willing to switch things out if there’s a substantial gain.
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Just behind the stock price is a dim graph which shows you the trajectory of a given resource so that’s super handy for seeing upward and downward trends. It’s one of my favourite UI elements!
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The construction bar to the right of the stock values shows little numbers on each building icon which show you how much profit each building will generate factoring in construction costs (minus bonuses and optimisations). When coupled with the graphs you can get a pretty good idea on where the market is going and where the money will be.
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Z is really useful for seeing through buildings to see what the underlying resources are. They’re easy to forget or miss when an underground nuke has blasted them. Super handy when you get the Slant Drilling patent too.
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X is my favourite hotkey because it shows the profit ‘per tick’ of all buildings, including bonuses and optimisations.
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Construct the same buildings adjacent to each other to maximise adjacency bonuses. 50%, 75%, 85% (and more?) are possible and incredibly efficient. Add in optimisations and Adrenaline Boosts and you’re looking at all the money.
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Debt isn’t bad, provided you don’t start tanking hard! I’m comfortable around -$60K-70K, but much more and I start considering paying down which you can do in chunks by pressing the Pay Debt button. Shift + Ctrl + LMB will auto-pay down debt and maintain the current level but at the cost of money in your pockets. Getting caught in a debt spiral is bad so always make sure you’re making as much bank as possible to offset this.
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Edit: it’s worth mentioning too that black market abilities are purchased with cash, while auction items hit your debt (my terminology for this is bad).
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Auto-selling I find useful for giving you a steady flow of cash for resources that are in demand rather than manually selling constantly. You can do this by pressing Shift + Ctrl + LMB on the minus button. Shift + LMB sells in chunks of 100. Shift + Alt +LMB bulk sells the lot. I use these hotkeys all the time.
As for videos, I’ve not watched many but found with a few tips here and there I was able to slowly wrap my head around it. I’m crap with numbers and juggling real-time stuff but somehow Offworld Trading Company clicks with me. It’s pretty miraculous in that regard. It helps immensely that it’s beautifully presented and well designed.
The campaign might be worth holding off on until you’ve got Manager difficulty skirmishes covered because it’s a very different beast, but in a good way.
Zultar has some videos that discuss things iirc:
Thanks so much to both, and especially thanks for writing that out Geggis!
Thanks for these. Plan to watch when I get home. This is one of those games I still feel like I’m playing completely wrong.
So I just won a ten week Mars campaign with Ezra Hoang of the Penrose Collective (nomadic) on manager and, phew, that was a long campaign and tense!
The final day was a bit of a letdown because of a combination of things. I got an early monopoly on water and was able to core sample another hex to make a diamond of profit. Even after several underground nukes, they were still hugely profitable after perfect optimisation on trace amounts. The big problem was that the crazy price of water made food, oxygen and fuel too expensive to produce so everyone was producing lots of everything else to the point that the stock market was hitting the bedrock:
I was able to buyout Ilana Kamat before she did me, but it was close! Still, Reni-6 and Maisie Song were far from reach (£800K+ each) and while money was coming in from water, everything else was sloooooow. There was no dry ice, no core samples, no slant drilling. The Black Market was crazy town prices and I’d adrenaline boosted my water pumps as much as possible. Claims were pointless because everything exploitable was essentially worthless and I’d stockpiled enough aluminium, iron, carbon, silicon and electronics (from the boom days!) in case there were any freak upticks. (I’d actually bagged a perk that gave me low level silicon and carbon on any hex, and with several engineers I was able to make some proper bank from those alone for a good while.)
Anyway, ultimately it was a slow and painful climb (Sol 13!) to buying out the other two:
Look at those static stock prices and steps!
I will say, there’s a lot of moving parts in the campaign so it can get quite confusing. The in-game UI doesn’t clearly display all the perks/benefits you accrue over the course of the campaign so there were several times I was like ‘Oh shit, I have that already!’ or ‘Damn, I forgot I was able to do that!’.
The relationship between different colony types, different resource/building shares and the stock market prices feels a bit… I dunno, loose or mushy. I was producing a lot of electronics and power so kept trying to fund more workshops (I think?) so the colony would process more of them to keep the prices steady for me but often I’d end up having to switch back and forth as the market yo-yoed. The same happened for food, oxygen and fuel etc. In the end I just tried to snap up the cheapest shares when I could!
Phew. I think I just need some Io skirmishes now.
I played one recently, and the bastard killed me in the final round. I think it ended up with 2 hacker arrays, and it put them to good use. Up until that last round it had gone pretty smoothly, expect for one round where I had no access to geotherms and power was very expensive. They kept messing with my power, and got my debt out of control. I still came out of it okay, and had enough in the bank plus the week inflow to take the hit, but it was a lot of $.
Yeah, the AI is very good at doing just the right things to upset you. I love how various factors can focus lots of underhanded play like that. You never go into a level knowing what to expect or knowing how exactly to get out of a given situation.
Actually, why am I not incurring debt from not producing food, oxygen and fuel in the screenshots above?
Robots don’t consume those resources, so you have no unfulfilled demand from which to incur debt.