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RTS Offworld Trading Company - economic RTS from the designer of Civ 4

Jaedar

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Does this game have lan?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Interview: Offworld Trading Company

offworldinterview.jpg


Offworld Trading Company [official site] is a competitive, multiplayer RTS set on Mars, but instead of fighting with lasers, players compete to dominate a fluctuating commodities market. The winner is the person who buys low, sells high and uses their gains to launch hostile takeovers of their opponent’s companies.

At GDC, I spoke to designer Soren Johnson (formerly of Civilization IV) and artist Dorian Newcomb (formerly of Civilization V) about Early Access, how player’s had surprised them in the months since its initial release, why they wish the game was hidden on Steam, and what small companies can do that big .


RPS: How’s Early Access going so far?

Johnson: It’s been good so far. The nicest response we see is people saying, ‘Oh, this is fresh. I’ve never seen something like this before.’ They’re really excited about that. Our big concern going into selling the game was, we’re specifically trying to make a game that’s different. There isn’t an economic RTS, there really isn’t something quite like that, and we’re doing that because we’re a small team. We’re not going to make a StarCraft RTS, it’s just not going to happen, so we want to do something different. And everyone says they want something different, but do they actually want something different? Are they ready to buy something different? So from a sales perspective, it’s been great. It’s been more than Stardock projected internally, and just from my own point of view, it was basically hanging around the top 25 for three weeks. It was great to see.

The forums are full now, lots of people talking about things they like, things they don’t like. A very common thing we heard, and this is why we’re doing early access, is some people were not totally helped with how the victory condition works. They felt the game ended really suddenly. I really like the way the game ends, but people play games for different reasons. If you’re playing the game very cutthroat– You win the game by buying out all the other companies and so you buy out their shares on the stock market, and eventually you hit a button to launch a hostile takeover, but you need a certain amount of cash. So once you have that much money, you can take them over, but it’s kind of sudden. Most RTS games, you kind of slowly killed, right?

Newcomb: There’s an angled ramp up and an angled ramp down and it’s very linear in both directions.

RPS: That can be frustrating as well.

Johnson: You can see it coming.

RPS: You get over that curve and see you’ve won and you just need to keep playing for 45 minutes.

Johnson: But with Offworld it’s like, bang, right? [laughs] It just suddenly happens. Once you’ve played the game for a while, you know when you’re in danger of getting bought out, but for someone who’s fairly new to it, they jump into multiplayer for the first couple of games, it can come pretty sudden. I think these are people who are coming from more the Tycoon, Anno, city-builder games. They like the idea that there’s competition but they’re not necessarily wanting to wipe everybody else out.

So long story short, we’re adding a new victory condition that’s coming out in a patch next week. It’s a timed mode.

Newcomb: My experience is that the early access has been very exciting for the team, but there’s a lot of pressure to fix things that are broken. Internally we’ve been playing the game for about nine months, a lot, and there’s tons of things we’ve put off doing because, developing the game, it’s good enough to know that these things are working.

We spent some time trying to make sure that we’ve got the right information for players to be able to play the game successfully, are we conveying that in the interface, is it there in the wrap-up screens? But when you release it for new players, you instantly see that there’s these huge gaps. In what we thought we were saying and in what we’re actually saying.


RPS: Are you surprised by the some of the things people care about versus the things that they don’t?

Newcomb: As an artist, I was surprised because when I look at the game, I see something that’s a third of the way there. I know that most of the artists who are working on the art team, they’re like, ‘oh, this is a very good start.’ We’re developing a style that’s going to work with the game, I believe, but so much of it is rough and when we get feedback, it’s like, ‘oh, the game looks pretty good.’ I’m shocked.

It’s nice because it’s a reminder that some of the work that’s in there is good, and it holds up, but I’m actually really surprised there weren’t more complaints about all the visual gaps that I feel like are present. We don’t have a lot of really nice transitions, things are a little more jarring, and the people don’t complain as much about that, and I’m like, OK, our goal is to make it a lot smoother, and I’m hoping that when we do, it just makes it better. I’m just surprised that wasn’t a barrier for people in the way it was for me.

Johnson: I wasn’t sure whether people would go for multiplayer. Would they be able to figure the game out? And that’s gone pretty well. And I see this over and over again now, that people are getting information of the game from YouTube and Twitch. That’s how they’re figuring out how to play it. We have a tutorial that’s very barebones, but that coupled with people who play the tutorial and then they talk about it, that seems to be what people do. And it’s an adjustment for me. I’m not used to watching a lot of video of games, but it’s such a common thing now, you almost have to factor it into development.

RPS: In watching the videos, have you been surprised by the strategies people are using while playing the game?

Newcomb: You get to see totally different strategies and things that didn’t think would be issues do rise up. Building solar panels as one of your first builds turned out to be great because so many new people were playing and everybody was running negatives on energy. So everyone hadn’t played how we were in the office, there were opportunities to sneak some money here or there. But then once people realised you could sneak it this way, there’s other strategies that were developing.

Johnson: Yeah, we talk surprises, the thing I was looking forward to being surprised by were what ways people figure out to play the game that we hadn’t anticipated yet.

This is a good example, since you brought it up. When you put down your headquarters, there are basically places on the map that are really good for energy. You’d look around, ‘I’ll put my solar panels here, I’ll put my wind turbines there,’ but what people figured out quickly was that, ‘I’m just going to put them next to my headquarters.’ Because it won’t be as good, but then I can adjust later. I can delete them and build a different building later if the price of food goes up, or steel goes up or glass goes up or whatever. We’re seeing people adapt a lot more as the game goes than we were doing internally, and that’s just cool to see. Now I play differently. I had to.

off1.jpg


RPS: Do you foresee continuing to balance the game in response to dominant strategies for years to come?

Johnson: Part of the reason I wanted to make an economic RTS is, to some extent – there’s still issues with balance that are continually going – but to some extent it’s self-balancing, right? Because you’ve got thirteen resources, they’ve all got a price, and the core of the game is making resources and then selling them. And you win if you make the resources that sell the game. Long story short, right? There’s a lot more involved but that’s the basic thing, you’ve got to figure out how to sell the resources you make for the most amount of money. But the thing is, every time someone sells a resource in the game, it drives the price down. So there’ll never be a situation where everyone’s like, electronics is the best.

But having said that, we’re absolutely looking for, does everyone who plays the game open in the same way? Is everyone picking–

Newcomb: Scientific right now is a little more popular.

Johnson: Scavenging is starting to go up, so I think we’re in the next phase of the metagame, but yeah, is everyone picking the same headquarter type? If those things happen then yeah, we’re going to keep adjusting it.

RPS: How do you track that stuff? Do you have internal metrics?

Johnson: We have some Steam stats that will show win/losses for each headquarter type, and how many of each type of building has been built, and how many of each patent has been researched, and how many of each sabotage item has been bought. So yeah, if I look at the patent chart and one of the patents has only been researched 1% of the time, then I can adjust it. We don’t have a super complex metrics system, we just want to make sure that the stuff we’re hearing from the community is backed up by the stuff we’re seeing in the data.

off4.jpg


RPS: What’s the line between your vision as the designers and what the community wants?

Johnson: I try to take a high level view. I find that often times, people put themselves in this false opposition with their community where, I want it one way, this is my vision, they want something else, and we can’t both be happy. I’m going to have to either sacrifice my ideals or blah blah blah, but half the time there’s usually some third way.

For example, I believe that there are lots of ways to play. A deep game can be played so many different ways, so I like giving game options. I usually look at, what are the most common player types, and how many of those player types can we satisfy with this game? And maybe that means we need different victory styles because we can’t make them all happy with one mode. That’s totally fine.

Beyond that, I’m not generally too precious about specific ideas I have in the game if it’s clearly not working. To me, there’s the idea of the game that we have now, but it’s only my best guess. This is what early access is for. As soon as I heard about early access I was like, we absolutely will be doing that for our game, because I won’t know the game we have until a large number of people start playing it.

I’m interested in a game that involves economics and is deep enough that people can play for years, and that means that I’m not going to forcing people, there’s no one specific thing that I need to have done that way. If the community is like, ‘We hate business games, give us guns,’ well, OK, then we have an issue.

Newcomb: We don’t have enough games with guns.

RPS: What’s your responsibility to the Early Access community as far as their expectations go?

Newcomb: We’re developing a roadmap now, which we haven’t shared, so we have a rough roadmap in abstract, but we don’t have it laid out so people can see, ‘oh, this is what they have in the next three months, six months, nine months.’ I think one of the things we did OK, and hopefully people think that: it’s clear that we’re early access, and the video that we showed wasn’t a trailer for a kickass game, it was, ‘we’re developing this game and we want feedback.’ And so we’re hoping to try to be obvious with that. We’re developers that are hoping to have a company making interesting games for the long-term. We want a game that people play long-term. To make a casual game that caught people’s attention for two weeks, we would be massively disappointed.

Johnson: I actually kind of wish that Steam was being a little more…

Newcomb: You want us hidden.

off2.jpg


Johnson: Yeah. I think it would actually be cool if you could be on Steam but not be visible. Obviously you can share a link, but you’re not on the frontpage, you’re not listed among their top sellers or whatever. Marketing, they’d kill me for saying that, but you need some gap. We were selling on our own website, which means a tiny amount of sales, and then suddenly we were on the frontpage of Steam, so then there was like, [explosion/wave crashing sound], just a deluge of players. There needs to be some middle stage there.

Even beyond that, we feel like a lot of people buying in early access, they’re just buying games, right? They go to Steam, they see the game’s there, they see the price, it just looks like any other game except for this one little thing that says “early access,” and I feel like it should be much more clear. Like the background should have a different colour or something that makes it very, very clear that this is not a complete game.

Newcomb: A lot of my friends hate early access games, and they’re like, ‘So! I hear you’re doing this terrible thing.’ Well, I can say I know why we’re doing it. We’re doing it so that we’re building a community that’s playing the game, and we’re actually creating a competitive field that’s larger the bubble that we have in our studio. Or larger even than if you’ve got a really large QA department. You’re still not going to get the emergent strategies that very competitive people are going to bring to bear, and we need to get a lot of that feedback.

You don’t want that feedback to come at the expense of someone’s experience, and you don’t want someone to feel like they’ve been jipped. ‘Oh, this game’s half-baked. Call me when it’s done.’ I don’t want to sell to that person and have them feel like they’ve been lied to.

Johnson: We only want to go to early access with games that are fun in the state they’re in. There’s more stuff we’re going to do, matchmaking or music or a full tutorial or whatever–

Newcomb: Voice acting!

Johnson: Voice acting! But at the same time, I really only want people to buy who are excited about being part of the process. If they want to get the game when it’s totally ready, I want them to wait. We’ll let you know when the game’s released, please buy it then.

RPS: A lot of the people don’t know when a game is ready for them. They see it in early access and don’t know what that means, whether it’s fun already or barely functional.

Johnson: There’s no metric, yeah. With some companies, they have a game that’s almost ready, they’re like, ‘why don’t we put it on early access? We may as well.’ And then of course, there’s games that never get finished on early access. That’s a huge range. How are you supposed to judge that?

But in early access, it makes you face the importance of that, right? An issue like late-game UI lag, is an issue that we really probably could have ignored with a small test group right up until release. Right now we’re forced to face the fact that we have to fix this. In the next year we’ll be able to do it, but we could easily have waited until final release and been like, oh crap, we really should have fixed that before we released the game.

off0.jpg


RPS: Do you have a philosophy of design that you think will carry through not just Offworld Trading Company but all Mohawk Games future releases?

Johnson: I would want to say that we’re built to make innovative strategy games. Innovative is sort of a loaded term, but the main thing is we want to make strategy games but we’re not going to make games that are just like other, bigger games you can buy, because that why would someone buy our game? We want to make something that’s really compelling for people that are core strategy games, and I think our best bet right now is to look at things that haven’t been done before. Or really big twists on stuff that is successful.

Newcomb: And I think you want to make competitive, interesting strategy games that larger companies can’t make or won’t make. Having worked with so many people that have worked with Sid Meier and have done Civilization designs, almost every one of those designers’ have a bunch of very strong ideas, that if you went to publish them for a 50-person, 60-person team, the publisher would say no. But for the most part, they’re games that as a game player, I want to play. You hear the idea and you’re like, ‘I would like to play that game.’ So we’re trying to maintain a size and be agile enough that we have the opportunity to make those.

As far as a company goes, I want Mohawk to be what I thought game development looked like before I got into it. So you imagine, it’s a bunch of people in a room, they love games, they love the games they’re making, and they’re really passionate about the product, and there’s someone in there that has a really strong vision for game design, and it’s going to be a game that people haven’t played before. And when you get into the game development environment, a lot of times it’s not the case. A lot of times you’re working a franchise, and because you’re working a franchise you can’t make chancy decisions. So the idea is that if we’re making our own new game, we can make all the chancy decisions we like, and we should make them.

RPS: Thanks for your time.
 

Pony King

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The most interesting question and answer:
Redditard said:
  • Who are the designers that you'd absolutely love to have in your podcast someday?
Soren Johnson said:
I have a bunch of podcasts stocked up with great designers (Brian Reynolds, Bruce Shelley, George Fan, Chris Avellone, Jamie Cheng, Brad Muir, Nels Anderson...), so I've been able to speak to everyone I'd like to so far. Of course, at some point, I'll need to do one with Sid. Probably a three-parter!
 

Jaedar

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The game is now on sale for 20 euros on steam.

Has it been evolving well? Is it worth taking the plunge now?
 
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The multiplayer is decent. The singleplayer is ass.
If you have someone to play it with maybe. Depends on how much you crave a "slightly different" RTS
 

KoolNoodles

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The multiplayer is decent. The singleplayer is ass.
If you have someone to play it with maybe. Depends on how much you crave a "slightly different" RTS

Yeah, game play reminds me of a few boardgames I've played recently. Really really needs that human element to succeed, and probably better with some friends. LAN setup, couple of brewskies, screaming from room to room about blocked trades and whatnot. Other than that, wouldn't bother.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
:necro:

Release Date: April 28th, 2016!

Offworld Trading Company
has been in Early Access for over a year, and in that time we have launched 10 major beta updates based on feedback from you. The game has improved in innumerable ways from our first version because of the dedication and involvement of our community.

Today, we announce the release date of the game as April 28th, 2016, and we are excited to bring this game to a wider audience. We don’t view release as the end of the project but as another milestone in the game’s progress. We will be supporting, updating, and playing the game with all of you as we have always been (indeed, we have added an achievement entitled Beat Soren, so look for me online!).

We want thank all of our players for believing in the game, posting on our forums, and playing with us. Building an economic RTS was a leap of faith for us, but it was also a leap of faith for you, one that we will never forget. From the entire Mohawk team, thank you for supporting Offworld Trading Company.

http://www.mohawkgames.com/2016/04/07/release-date-april-28th-2016/
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/29/offworld-trading-company-review/

Wot I Think: Offworld Trading Company
Adam Smith on April 29th, 2016 at 5:03 pm.

otc1.jpg


Offworld Trading Company [official site], the new game from Civ IV lead designer Soren Johnson and his team at Mohawk Games, is a strategic simulation of a sci-fi Martian economy. It’s also one of the smartest strategy games I’ve ever played.


Money is no object. That’s the most important lesson I’ve taken from the hours I’ve spent running a corporation exploiting the raw materials of Mars. It’s a phrase that I mean in a very literal sense and cuts to the heart of the brilliance of the game’s design: it’s a game about making money in which the actual amount of money you have doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the flow of cash and resources.

Offworld Trading Company treats money as ephemeral. Values change constantly in the dynamic market that is the game-space. Mars may be the landscape on which you’re constructing the tools of capitalism, but the entire corporate conflict plays out in the markets. Just as many RTS games are played on the minimap, Offworld is played in the numbers at the side of the screen. The genius of the game is in making the manipulation of those markets comprehensible while never allowing them to become predictable.

And yet they’re entirely predictable. Everything that you and your opponents do causes the figures to shift in a sensible fashion. Build a production chain to make glass or computer components and you can flood the market with the end-product, causing prices to plummet. Create a monopoly on one of the resources necessary for survival on the planet and you can hoard the fruits of your labour (or your labourers’ labour, I guess), forcing everyone else to ship the stuff in from off-planet at great expense.

off0.jpg


You’re always making choices, every second that you play. There are ways to interact with other players directly through purchases made on the black market. These disrupt and interfere, cutting off sources of revenue, stealing resources or manipulating the market to present false figures. All of that comes later. The most important decisions are related to the limited claims you’re given at the beginning of each game. Looking at a random map, you must decide where to place your headquarters and then secure the first pieces of land that you’ll construct factories, solar panels and other facilities on. There are obvious sequences of construction to follow in the early minutes of each map, but to win you’ll need to adapt to the situation as it changes.

Everytime you upgrade your HQ, which costs cash and specific resources you’ll receive a new set of claims. There are other ways to get them as well, but mostly you’ll be working your way up through the game’s equivalent of a tech tree, enjoying a brief flurry of expansion each step of the way. The claims system ensures that your corporation can’t produce everything – you need to specialise and, crucially, you need to engage in a symbiotic relationship with your opponents.

otc3.jpg


Offworld creates an incredible tension through this forced cooperation. The difficulty of operating on a planet with an unfriendly environment makes the corporations reliant on one anothers’ produce, particularly in the early game. They can’t thrive – or even survive – without what the others have. To destroy them would be suicidal. You’re not trying to destroy your opponents, you’re trying to absorb them. The end-game isn’t destruction, it’s a hostile takeover.

When you’re vulnerable to a takeover, the game tells you. It crunches the numbers, figures out that somebody has enough assets to buy a majority holding in your company, and lets you know. Your opponent – the person currently holding all the cards – doesn’t get that message. They may have the ability to snuff you out but the game doesn’t tell them; the potential victim sees the Sword of Damocles but unless their opponent is paying close attention, they might just see a CEO sitting on his throne.

That goes back to that opening phrase: money is no object. Cash alone isn’t always enough and the buy-out might require liquidation of stock. Performing the buy-out might then make the buyer vulnerable to the remaining corporations and will almost certainly cause an upset in the markets that might dangerously upset the balance of power.

off4.jpg


Everything that you do has consequences and everything that your opponents do will have an impact on the state of the world. I can’t think of another strategy game that is so changeable. To succeed you’ll need to be flexible, not just building bigger and better, but willing to change course, tearing down facilities that have been rendered obsolete by market forces and replacing them with something new. The market never stands still but, thankfully, the game does. In the endlessly replayable singleplayer campaign, the world pauses whenever you make a decision, and can indeed be halted at anytime with a push of the space bar.

The entire campaign is like a turn-based variant of the rapid-fire multiplayer game. There’s a progression system threaded through the randomised scenarios and it’s forced me to reconsider the entire game, having only experienced it in multiplayer for so long during Early Access. When I came to write this review, I asked myself if I’d buy the game just for the singleplayer mode. I would. The multiplayer brings out the best of the systems, creating its own weird momentum through panicked mistakes and elegant deceptions, but the singleplayer takes all of those same systems and creates a slower, more thoughtful experience out of them.

off2.jpg


That the economic simulation can cater to these two varied experiences is testament to the intricacy of the design. The core mechanic – the market that acts as a malleable foundation on which every other system is built – is close to perfect.

All this talk of systems (and there’s much more of that in my preview) makes Offworld Trading Company sound like an abstract thing, disconnected from its setting. Every element is thematically appropriate though and there’s some subtle world-building between the interplay of mechanics, particularly in the implied off-screen asteroid mines that are an essential part of the flow of capital. Mars is a relatively safe and serene place, even when there are horrible weather conditions and pirates buzzing around, and if you focus on the map and manage to filter out the movements of the market for a while, there’s a certain tranquility at odds with the cutthroat deals and deceptions.

The score helps – it’s the work of Christopher Tin, composer of Civilization IV’s Baba Yetu.



Civilization IV – the greatest strategy game ever made – was Offworld creator Soren Johnson’s first commercial games as a lead designer. Offworld Trading Company is an entirely different proposition: short-form rather than ultra-long-form, real-time rather than turn-based, sci-fi rather than history. Its surface complexity and basis in economics rather than war and culture make it a less immediately attractive game than Civ, but it’s an exceedingly intelligent game.

I haven’t even mentioned the different challenges offered by each of the four factions. There’s so much to analyse that I could write another couple of thousand words, but you don’t need to know everything. What you need to know is that Mohawk have made a game that creates tension and ruthless competition out of a screen of ever-changing numbers. Every victory feels hard-earned and every defeat can be traced back to specific twists in the tale, and in each of its half hour sessions, there are as many twists as in Civ’s six thousand years.

Offworld Trading Company is out now.
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Definitely going to grab it if Soren is behind it, there's a reason Civ 4 shits on Civ 5 in every way imaginable.
 
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Ulminati

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Just r00flestomped through the single player campaign on medium difficulty as robots. for some reason, the AI didn't invest in farms. Hab domes in the colony had food going for 700+ apiece and let me build MORE HAB DOMES. With some warehouses on the side for my surplus glass. It was ridiculously profitable.

At least they've reined in the ridiculous profits from offworld market in a little.
 
Last edited:

Rellin

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Medium difficulty as in "Manager" which is the same difficulty that the AI plays at?
 
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Ulminati

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Yes.

Skirmish seems slightly harder for 2 reasons:
1) You can't cheaply upgrade the main colony to consume tons of food
2) the AI all gang up on the human player. Even though I was 2nd/3rd place in share price all game (neither easiest target, nor the front runner), all 3 AIs targetted their sabotage on me. game ended with me losing and the post-game score screen showed the AIs had spent a total of 38 sabotages on me. and presumably none on each other. Every auction I didn't win was used on me a few seconds later.
 

MoLAoS

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An optimizing AI in any strategy game should gang up on the player till they can't win before fighting among the other AI. Its simply the ideal method.
 

flyingjohn

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An optimizing AI in any strategy game should gang up on the player till they can't win before fighting among the other AI. Its simply the ideal method.
That is the definition of bad ai.Ai should play the game to win not piss off the player.Imagine any strategy game where the moment you meet the ai it declares war onto you and suicides you for the rest of the game,not very fun or challenging,just tedious.
 
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Ulminati

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Also, robots special feature is that they can ignore several resources. (Don't need food, air or water for life support. Don't need fuel unless you build an offworld market. Don't need glass for any of their buildings). But at the same time, every game sees those resources become the most expensive as the colony and other players need them.

The only resources robots need that tend to sell decently are electronics. And steel in the early game, but robots need all the steel they can hoard until the mid/late game where steel is worthless.

How the AI makes money when it doesn't build farms and had to get food at 700/unit is a mystery to me. Especially when I rarely sell any food until I have an offworld market in place.
 

Jaedar

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In my experience the AI is pretty good at this game. I have a hard time winning on Manager, although playing robots is certainly easier since you can provide for yourself and thus have more cash to use on other stuff while still running with lower debt. Getting a bunch of free resources on settle is good though, basically a free hq upgrade.
 
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i gave it a spin.
i understood nothing without tutorial, which is good.
then i went through the whole tutorial and... it's probably my fault, for some obscure reason i was expecting something along the lines of capitalism, or a-train, something like that. instead i got the feeling of playing a standard rts with combat visually swapped out, or a simplified anno (back when anno was good).
maybe it's an excellent rts, but then it's not for my taste.
 
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Ulminati

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The developers pitched the game as an economic RTS/spiritual successor to M.U.L.E.

It's succeeded pretty well meeting those criteria.
 

baturinsky

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instead i got the feeling of playing a standard rts with combat visually swapped out, or a simplified anno (back when anno was good).
maybe it's an excellent rts, but then it's not for my taste.

My thoughts exactly. It feels like an Anno with half of features and very short sessions. Maybe it gets more interesting if you use black market options more aggressively...
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...ld_Trading_Companys_Early_Access_campaign.php

Postmortem: Offworld Trading Company's Early Access campaign
June 7, 2016 | By Soren Johnson

The most common problem in the games industry is waste – wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that aren't actually fun in practice. Often, this discovery is not made until shortly before shipping when the game is finally played outside of the development team. Basic assumptions about how the game should be played might be wrong, and a community more dedicated to winning can easily find holes in the balance.

No one knows a game both better and worse than the development team, which understands why every decision was made but is also blind to how the game appears to new players.

At Mohawk, we believe that games need outside feedback as soon as possible. I saw this first-hand withCivilization 3 and 4; the former had no external feedback before shipping and thus had numerous gameplay and balance issues that would have been easy to fix if we had simply known about them. In contrast, we recruited a private external testing group from the community to play Civilization 4 over 18 months before we shipped. The logistics of managing this group - with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches - were a nightmare, but much of what went right with the game can be traced to feedback from this group, which kept us on the right track.

Thus, as soon as I heard that Valve was starting an Early Access program, I knew we wanted to take part with Offworld Trading Company. Getting good feedback from players before release is a logistical challenge, especially for a game with a major multiplayer component, and Early Access would solve that problem for us, a small indie team making a very unusual RTS without combat. We were worried about the potential marketing impact of Early Access on our final release launch, but we still went for it, assuming that the increase in quality from early feedback would outweigh the cost.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
1) Learning About the Game
Feedback is important because it is the best way to learn about a game - finding out how people actually play instead of how the team imagines they are going to. Offworld was on Early Access for 14 months - approximately half of the project - and we learned many things that we would have never discovered internally. A great example was player dissatisfaction with scanning the map before founding an HQ; this feedback led directly to the development of the Reveal Map option that completely changes how the game begin.

"There is no better argument for Early Access than learning about a problem while there is still plenty of time to fix it."
We discovered this issue during the first competitive tournament as the scanning system quickly became a point of contention. The players argued that if a map had a founding location which was superior to all others, the game would be won simply by whoever discovered that founding location first. These players were concerned primarily with a sense of fairness, which was a reasonable concern for the hardcore community because founding location is so important for high-level play in Offworld.

The solution was to start with the map fully revealed and then let players choose where to found, with a debt auction determining who gets to found first. (A counter starts at $200K debt and then goes down in real-time so that players who found earlier start the game with more debt, essentially “buying” their founding location on credit.) This option worked perfectly for our most competitive players and quickly became the de facto standard for online play.

However, the important point is that we made this change a full year before we shipped Offworld, so we had plenty of time to test and balance the mode, write AI for it, and decide how to introduce it to the player. If we did not have Early Access - even if we only had a small private beta - we would not have discovered this important issue until it was too late. There is no better argument for Early Access than learning about a problem while there is still plenty of time to fix it.

OTCblastoff.jpg

2) Live Experimentation
One crucial aspect to doing Early Access right is figuring out how to update the game while also keeping it playable. A good example of how this can go wrong is the Corpse and Hound update from Darkest Dungeon(see Tyler Sigman’s 2016 GDC postmortem) which put the developers at odds with a vocal portion of their community. This type of conflict is paradoxical – the point of Early Access is to be able to change the game for a live audience and yet players can punish developers for doing exactly that.

"Being able to experiment rapidly and without fear was a major factor in taking advantage of Early Access to improve the game’s design."
We were very careful about how we rolled out changes while also maintaining the position that the point of Early Access was live experimentation, so we would be fearless in that regard. We took a number of steps to meet these two conflicting goals. First, we released major updates slowly so that casual players would not experience random bugs during normal play. Then, to get feedback on our most recent changes, we created a Steam branch entitled “next_version” which we updated multiple times per week. (This branch was password protected, but we shared the password publicly so that it was essentially an ongoing opt-in patch for our hardcore community.) We felt free to make any changes we wanted to on this branch; if players were upset by a change, they could always just switch back to the main version. Our core community knew that we wanted to hear feedback about this version, so they were excited to jump onto the branch, see what was new, and let us know how they felt about it. Most importantly, they were never blindsided by a change because the next_version branch was constantly updated.

However, when we made potentially controversial changes, we would attach them to game options that the player could disable. For example, our stock system underwent many significant iterations, with some of the changes being more popular than others. In one patch, we added two major features - Destroy Buyout (a player’s buildings are destroyed on a buyout) and Majority Buyout (a player is eliminated when more than half of his or her stock is owned by rivals) - but both were options that the could be turned on or off. Thus, players who hated the changes could play without them while we keep experimenting. To ensure that we would learn enough about these new features, we hosted a community tournament after releasing the patch which specified that both options must be turned on.

Knowing that an upcoming tournament would use these rules encouraged our players to practice with them in preparation, which produced meaningful feedback for us. (In this case, Majority Buyout became a standard rule while Destroy Buyout did not, being replaced in the long-term by the Subsidiary system.) Being able to experiment rapidly and without fear was a major factor in taking advantage of Early Access to improve the game’s design.

3) Building the Community
A vibrant community is important for the long-term health of a game, especially one with a strong multiplayer component. One of the great advantages of Early Access was that we were able to build that community before launch. Although players still find each other on forums, we found that the best place for a community to form is on Twitch. We discovered our best players early by seeing them play on streams, usually ones involving multiplayer games.

"The quality of a game is determined by how many times it can go through the design, code, play, and listen feedback loop. With Civ 4, the best we could do was bi-weekly; with Offworld, that loop could be daily."
We encouraged that growth by hosting Twitch tournaments, meaning that after we organized the brackets, players were required to stream their games. (Because some players were not capable of streaming, other players jumped in to stream the games as observers.) Players and viewers would jump from match to match as the tournaments progressed, forming bonds with each other in the process.

Long-term, our community became an important part of our development process. For example, when working on the AI, I would ask players to do their best on the Daily Challenge (a random map based on a new seed each day) and post their videos or replays online. I would watch to find the biggest holes in the AI’s performance, write some code to fix things, push a build to next_version on Steam, and then ask players to try again.

The impact of this rapid iteration cannot be overstated. The quality of a game is determined by how many times that game can go through the design, code, play, and listen feedback loop. With Civ 4, the best we could do was bi-weekly; with Offworld, that loop could be daily.

Finally, building a strong community during Early Access paid off handsomely at launch because we had already primed an active group of players. On their own, they organized a 24-hour marathon of veteran players streaming the game for newcomers interested in the game. Two of our best players - Zultar and Cubit - wrote comprehensive strategy guides that we included as free DLC. Many YouTube videos were already online for players who wanted to see the game; according to Steam Spy, these videos averaged over 200K views per day during the first week. Our final release launch sales were just as strong as our Early Access launch sales, and much of the reason was having an active community already in place.

OTC_Release__1_UIGameplay.jpg


WHAT WENT WRONG
1) Constantly Shipping
Over the 14 months of Early Access, we shipped ten major updates to the game along with a number of hotfixes, which absolutely took its toll on the development team. Each update had to go through a round of QA, with bugs being assigned to developers who had to interrupt their normal development flow to ensure the update was polished and ready. Some of these bugs were critical, but others were of subjective importance. The QA team was trying their best to be thorough, but during active development, not every bug needs to be fixed, especially for systems that are currently just placeholders. I gave each team member the right to make a judgment call on which bugs to ignore, but the process itself absolutely took time away from more important, long-term tasks.

Also, being on Early Access for half of the game’s development cycle meant that we couldn't include half-baked features with just debug text and programmer art. This type of prototyping is an important way to make progress while a feature is experimental so that polish would be a waste of resources. Sometimes, we would lock away features that we knew were not ready for a general audience by enabling them only in special developer builds, which helped mitigate the problem. Regardless of the Early Access label, the general Steam audience is simply not ready to see just how ugly games can be during development.

OTC_Release_Mars.jpg


2) Steam Reviews
OffworldReview.JPG
Although Steam tags user reviews written before release with a special “Early Access Review” designation, these reviews still count against the game’s positive review percentage. We had generally positive reviews, but - as our current percentage is just two point shy of the 80% threshold for the Very Positive status - it is hard not to imagine that we would be in a higher category of we weren't saddled with user reviews written 14 months before release. (Our Executive Producer at Stardock, Derek Paxton, took the time to respond to every old negative Steam user review that had a specific complaint addressed in the release version, and we did see a number change their review.)

On a personal level, negative Steam reviews took a not insignificant toll on my own personal morale, and the same is probably true for the rest of the team. It's hard to read over and over again that the game doesn't have enough content, has crummy voicework, is missing a tutorial, and so on – as the team is working to fix those issues. Even with an imaginary, unlimited budget, one has a finite amount of energy to invest in a project, and premature yet permanent ratings can drain that energy surprisingly quickly.

OTC_Release_Magnetic_Storm.jpg


3) Press Apathy
One common argument against Early Access is that “you only get one launch” – meaning that a game’s Early Access launch is, in truth, it’s only launch. We certainly experienced a surge of interest in Offworldwhen it first launched in early 2015; our game was the new shiny object, so we were able to organize a media blast by revealing the first screenshots a couple weeks before the Early Access release, resulting in exclusive stories and interviews on Gamespot, Polygon, IGN, VentureBeat, and more. Shortly after release, videos appeared from popular YouTube personalities like Sips, Quill, Arumba, and Northernlion while huge audience watched streams from Trump and Day[9].

"We proved that a game can have a second launch, although we certainly felt like we had significant headwinds from a lack of mainstream press interest"
This wave of media interest led to very strong sales during our first few weeks on Steam even though we launched at $40, making Offworld one of the highest-priced games on Early Access. (At launch, only Galactic Civilizations III - also published by Stardock - was more expensive.)

14 months later, however, we had a much harder time getting press attention for the game’s real launch; most of the websites who wrote about the Early Access launch told us explicitly that since we had been on Steam for so long, they didn’t find us newsworthy. We could expect reviews but little else.

Fortunately, our reviews were strong (82 on Metacritic, including a glowing review from Rock, Paper, Shotgun), the game had been on over 200K wishlists, and forums activity around the game was high, so we ended up selling nearly the exact same number of copies during our second launch as compared with our first (two-week sales of 23,607 vs. 23,457, respectively). Thus, we proved that a game can have a second launch although we certainly felt like we had significant headwinds from a lack of mainstream press interest.

We are not entirely sure how we were able to sell so well the second time without a strong media push. I’d like to think that the tradeoff we knowingly made by going on Early Access - sacrificing a traditional media buildup for the benefit of early feedback to make a higher-quality game - paid off in the long run although that is, of course, impossible to prove. Indeed, it’s still possible that we may have sold more copies without Early Access if we had paired our media announcement blast with our polished release version, but we’ll never know for sure.

Robotic_HQ_Design_full.jpg


WHAT WE WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY
Without question, we would be willing to put our next game up on Early Access as well. However, we will certainly approach the process differently.

First, we would try harder to sell our game independently before going up on Early Access. Many games do this (Factorio, for example, sold over 100K copies before launching on Steam), and we sold Offworld with a “Founders program” on our own site but without actually showing any screenshots or video of the game. Users were buying the game blind, and predictably, we sold the game to just a handful of dedicated players. We were worried about releasing images while the game was full of prototype art (and inevitably seeing those images stick around forever online), but developing a game publicly before going up on Steam has huge advantages.

"Next time, if we are getting sufficient feedback while selling the game independently, we would delay our Early Access launch as long as possible."
The pre-Steam audience is more mature and more forgiving of the inevitable bumps of game development; they know upfront that they are buying into something speculative. During our Founders program, we uploaded builds without running it through QA at all (although we often ran a test game internally) because we knew this group would tolerate a few hours downtime if we released a bugged version. We had the freedom to develop without worrying about a temporary mistake landing on our permanent record via negative user reviews.

Next time, we would accept the downside of showing prototype art publicly to allow us to stay off of Steam longer; if we are getting sufficient feedback while selling the game independently, we would delay our Early Access launch as long as possible.

When we do launch on Early Access again, however, we would do a few other things differently. We would actually drop QA from the process entirely (at least during the long period after the initial launch and before final release) and instead develop a build process that fits the needs of the development team, which should always be thinking long-term and not worrying about a bug list too early, as well as the Early Access audience, which both wants the game to work yet also to see frequent updates.

One possibility is to run a build automatically every Monday morning, which is then uploaded to Steam without testing. This build would be sent to a branch similar to next_version (although this time, the branch would be public and not password protected), which our more dedicated players would try out right away. If there are any problems during the week, we can manually update that branch. By the following Monday, if next_version was stable, we would promote it to the main branch for general consumption.

Hopefully, this development process would allow the team to work unhindered while also making sure that the players are experiencing a current version of the game. Indeed, one of the major problems of releasing monthly updates is that even after a single week, players might be playing a game already outdated by various new features or balance changes. This makes their feedback -- which is the whole point of Early Access -- no longer relevant. (Note that some Early Access teams argue that major, themed updates produce the best sales, but we are assuming that sales figures should not be a priority during active development.)

OTC_Release_2_Campaign.jpg


WHAT STEAM SHOULD DO DIFFERENTLY
Most of the problems with Early Access result from differing expectations between developers and consumers. Developers want Steam to provide a safe place to build a game while also exposing the game to a large enough audience to get worthwhile feedback. Consumers, on the other hand, want to play a game early and, hopefully, for a low price as well. (However, we heard many times from players that they didn’t even realize they were buying a game on Early Access or what that designation even meant!) We have a few suggestions for improving the role Steam Early Access plays in game development.

1) Allow unlisted pages
The biggest benefit of being on Steam during early development is not the exposure but the infrastructure: build distribution and branching, access to the Steamworks library, free community support features, and online sales through a trusted store. All of these tools were major problems for independent developers ten years ago and are now easily solved via Steam.

" Valve has become increasingly resistant to allowing developers to sell Steam keys without their games actually being for sale on Steam. "
However, Valve takes an all-or-nothing approach to Early Access; launch will put the game on the front page of Steam whether the developers want it there or not. During our Founders program, we sold Steam keys directly through our website, but Valve has become increasingly resistant to allowing developers to sell Steam keys without their games actually being for sale on Steam.

This policy is forcing some independent developers to other options for their first online sales. (Adam Saltsman launched Overland’s “First Access” on itch.io for this very reason, and they are even limiting the number of keys available for public sale.) Most developers would prefer to stick with Steam (as it has the most mature infrastructure) but are afraid of risking their reputation by launching too early.

The answer is to allow developers to sell games on Steam with unlisted store pages, meaning the page is only available via a direct link and does not show up in any advertisements, ranked lists, discovery queues, curator collections, or any other method for exposing the game to the average Steam consumer. This option would allow developers to start selling their fledgling games slowly while still benefiting from Steam’s infrastructure.

2) No user reviews
User reviews are a staple of online commerce, and Valve was wise to implement them, even with the potential chaos inherent with giving customers the power to judge a game anonymously. However, what exact purpose does an Early Access review serve when stating that the game is not ready? The game’s presence on Early Access is an explicit statement that the game is not ready!

More importantly, the existence of user reviews argues that Early Access games should be judged and evaluated the way the normal games are, which is simply not true. If the team is serious about iterative development, Early Access games can and should take wild swings in quality during development; the fear of negative user reviews encourages developer to sit comfortably on local maximas.

Removing user reviews should also send a clear message to consumers that they are taking a risk by buying the product; the goal is not to trick people by removing reviews but to sell to less people, the ones who are onboard with experiencing an unfinished product.

3) No sales, No refunds
Implicit in the argument against user reviews is the belief that Early Access would be healthier if the games sold to less players overall but also to ones who are more dedicated. Turning off the developer’s ability to reduce the price of a game to drive sales and turning off the consumer’s ability to test out a game knowing that a refund is possible should both drive down game sales, especially among the more casual audience looking for either a bargain or a de facto demo. A Subnautica developer spoke to their view on driving sales during Early Access:

Subnautica is a game that is still very much in development, and we don't need to bring in a large influx of players right now. When the sale price is lowered by a large margin, it tends to attract a group of people who are less willing and dedicated to giving the game a real chance. You end up with players who just tossed it on the pile of other games they are buying, mainly because it was a great deal, and many of those people either never end up playing it or end up playing it for a short amount of time and posting a negative review because they likely didn't research it.

One potential alternative that would provide some flexibility in driving sales but without bringing in players not ready for Early Access would be to allow two ways to buy the game - a pre-order option and a play-now option. The latter could be slightly more expensive, which should keep away players who are looking for a deal, while the former provides a nice way for consumers who trust a developer to support them.

Ultimately, Early Access development would be healthier with a slower and steadier influx of players, growing the old-fashioned way by word-of-mouth. We want a special type of consumer, one who is excited about seeing behind the curtain, contributing critical feedback, and seeing the game evolve. We have met these types of players over and over again online; they inspire us with their passion and patience while we work hard to build the best game possible for them. These players are priceless, and Early Access would be the best place to find them if Steam is willing to do the work to guide player expectations.
 
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