And the bigger your debt, the lower your stock price, which determines how much money it takes for an opponent to buy you out. It instead gets put onto your debt, which can be paid off later – interest does still accrue, however. Also, when auctions periodically pop up, offering advantages to the highest bidder, you don’t actually have to use the money you bid if you win if you don’t have it. It takes resources to maintain your base, so should you run out of surplus food, fuel, oxygen, or water, and it automatically pays the difference for you. But this makes sure that you can never get stuck. In another brilliant stroke, Offworld Trading Company lets you accrue debt, which sounds like a bad thing. From start to finish, each game plays out like a mini-narrative chronicling your rise to a successful operation, constantly building from the minute you touch down on the planet. Pretty soon, you’ll have enough to build an Offworld Market, which lets you send goods to other planets for even bigger returns, bridging the gap to you being able to buy out your competitors. You eventually transition to producing goods that will net you a fat profit based on the current state of the market, which you’ll use to keep upgrading your base of operations with buildings that can manipulate the market or let you research specialized technology. Then you use your starting resources and money to start constructing building that will produce what you need to start being self-sufficient. In the beginning, you scan the shrouded map for resources, informing your decision on where to put your base. In Offworld Trading Company, you feel like you’re building to something more. Games then ebb and flow between skirmishing and making reinforcements in equal measure. In most RTS games, a match’s progression is predictable: You build up your resources and then let your forces loose on the enemy. You find little friction in manipulating resources, and that’s a good thing. And the immediacy of buying and selling means you get instant gratification from your money makers or necessary resources that you lack when building. All you need to worry about is profit, and it doesn’t matter how you get there. It also displays their market value, which fluctuates, giving you immediate goals to pursue that at the same time aren’t set in stone. The left side of the screen lists all the resources available, their market value, and buttons that let you buy and sell them instantly. The genius of Offworld’s central gameplay hook is how easy it is to buy and sell resources at will.
This means the usual practice of constructing buildings that will produce a specific resource, which in turn will let you build other structures and gain access to other resources. Because of the focus on capitalism - you play as a corporation trying to monopolize colony business from rival corporations – all you need to worry about is your resources and how they’re working toward making you rich. In Offworld Trading Company, money is what you want, and you want a lot of it. It’s just a shame that it so rigidly and slavishly stays focused on that center, artfully dodging any potentially interesting variations on its brilliant core.Ībove: Behold, your budding operation at work. As an RTS focused entirely on manipulating resource gathering and economic supremacy, Offworld Trading Company centers itself on the obvious thrill of making your numbers get bigger while trimming distracting elements like units. That’s what makes Offworld Trading Company, from strategy game phenom Soren Johnson’s Mohawk Games, such an enticing proposition. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does result in a game that’s somewhat harder to get into. Your attention is almost always divided between your home base and your units, which means bouncing back and forth across the map, diminishing the time and mental space for you to come up with a plan. Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.īlob management can get in the way of the fun with numbers, though, thanks to how much of the map you need to pay attention to.
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