Following up from my initial impressions I posted on reddit: (http://www.reddit.com/r/Offworld/comments/2vpsik/after_a_few_hours_play_i_love_it_here_are_some/)
This game is still exciting me massively, so I've decided to collect some more thoughts on things to post here now that I've had a bit more experience.
Game Speed
I feel like this game is in fact two games in one. One of them is an extremely frantic RTS game, in which the player must make rapid decisions with significant consequence; a game where time is the most scarce resource. So you work a lot on gut feeling, quick arithmetic and formulating a rough strategy/gameplan in your head that you try to focus on. Making gigantic U-turns in that strategy is extremely costly due to the time you have to spend re-planning, so you have to build around being able to roll with the punches. You build around an imperfect, non-optimal (realistic) plan.
Then there's the other version of the game, kind of the EU4 version, where you're either pausing constantly (single player) or playing at a reasonably low speed (multiplayer). In this version the focus is on being optimal. In fact it feels like playing Civ, where you're taking your time on turns making sure you do everything perfectly. You aren't doing x because it's probably going to work out well - you're doing y because you've decided it's the very best move available.
Now, I may be getting old, but I'll defend what I'm about to say first by saying I've played my fair share of high APM games, and I love them. But after playing vs the AI lately and making copious use of the space bar (pause), I'm finding that I actually enjoy the experience just as much - but in a different way - as playing in real time with other people. What I'm finding is there is SO, SO MUCH you can do in the lategame if you crawl along at a snails pace that just isn't feasible in real time. And it's not like "oh you're just slow, get a higher APM and you'll be able to do it in real time too": There is just so much information and options available to you, so many CHOICES you can make, that I don't think anyone will get close to doing it optimally in real time (of course, the best players will be the ones that find the most optimal move the quickest - think speed chess).
Late game can indeed be very chaotic, and very often time is the most limited resource. Once everyone is level 5 certain markets tend to shut down (ie building materials), and often it can be profitable to just scrap a bunch of buildings and get something new. I'll be interested to see how capable people get at doing this in real time - when I do such massive re-factoring of my base in SP to capitalize on a changing market, I tend to spend more time paused than not!
Ending the Game
The run-up to someone winning can be very frantic, followed by a sort of lull where both remaining players are just saving up money. All stocks are bought so there's no clear visual indicator of who is closest to winning. In order to find that out, and react accordingly, you have to mouse over players to see their current funds. You need 100k more to buy them out, but they're only 50k away? Better pull the most amazing black market play out of your ass. But currently this massively important info - of who has the most funds, of who is nearest to the buyout, is hidden in this tooltip. I feel like the final moments would be a lot more exciting if this information became more visible when only 2 players remain who both have no more stock to buy. Progress bars showing how far each player is from having the money required to win, put somewhere easy to see that just raises the tension for both players, would be a fantastic simple way to spice up what can currently be a bit anticlimactic.
I'm sure there are many ideas floating about for improving this bit of the game, though. Another could be that the buyout takes a certain amount of time to actually go through, based on the value being paid, with the timer visible to everyone in the game and possible countermeasures to speed it up or slow it down.
On a more mechanical note, there's some weirdness to playing out games with 3 people fighting to win. As far as I can tell, you never ever want to be the first to buy-out someone in a 3-way. Everyone is saving up vast amounts of money to end the game with, so if you then spend all that money to actually buy someone out, it's down to 1on1 except you have no money, the other has almost enough to buy you out and end. The extra income you get from aquiring someones stuff doesn't counteract the fact you're now several hundred thousand dollars behind in the race to win. So it seems the only way to play this correctly is to be the first to save enough money to buy out both other players at once. I guess that isn't such a bad mechanic, but it isn't too intuitive and will certainly catch out a lot of new players.
The Colony
I'm starting to understand the role of the colony, and it's a pretty great mechanic. Obviously the UI is still missing more immediate access to colony info, but you can get the important info hovering over segments of it.
In my early games I thought electronics and chemicals were essentially pointless, as outside of research and some buildings, they aren't used much by players. Many games I played would end with water, o2, food and fuel being twice or more the price, with enough demand to get rich off of being the supplier.
What I realized is that the fact that these life support resources are expensive limits the growth of the colony, preventing segments like the Laboratory or Leisure from being built, which (when present) make up a huge demand for chemicals and electronics. So it's this really interesting dynamic, where - if you're looking to get rich off of electronics/chems, you first need to crash the life support market so that the colony grows. Similarly if someones heavily invested in electronics/chems, keeping the life support prices high will eventually drop demand for electronics/chems, pulling the rug out from under them. Looking forward to seeing how this stuff is developed - it has a lot of potential to add even more variety to games by being this procedural organism that adds extra complexity to your planning outside of just what resources are on the map.
Offworld Market
I know I listed problems I had with this in my last post, but it's a big enough issue I've gotta touch on it again. It still feels, to me, incredibly OP. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily, it's a late game unit designed to hurry things along, I guess not dissimilar to the Experimentals in SupCom. I'm not sure if it just needs tweaking (higher fuel cost, less profit margins, etc), or better counterplays: mutiny is of course extremely strong, along with dynamite etc, but isn't a counter-strategy, rather a way to mitigate a lead someone has from getting their offworld up faster. What I would love to see is a viable way to win without building them. Right now whoever gets 2 up first is generally going to win, unless they get collectively sabotaged by other players until someone else sneaks ahead. Of course they should be poweful, but they should also have a weakness.
The weakness they seem to have built in is the large differential in prices between different resources. Some might be listed for 600K, others as low as 50K. As far as I can tell, these prices are random from game to game, but are static within one game (please correct if wrong on this). So I suppose one could counter them by driving up the prices of every product that was lucrative to sell offworld. If food is $50 on mars, but $550 offworld, the ideal move for someone trying to play without them would be to drive the price of food up so much that, with the cost of fuel included, it's barely worth the effort for the offworld player. The problem right now is that there are always multiple resources with huge margins of 300-400k, so I can't see it being practical to reliably thwart the offworld player. Still, with offworld prices known from the beginning of the game (hovering over price in market window), perhaps as we get better at the game we'll start to build our whole game more around the offworld, going into the endgame knowing exactly what to sell. The trouble here seems to be that, as everyone shares the same offworld market prices, inevitably it will either be profitable for everyone, or no-one. Having each company ship to a different world could prevent that, but it adds extra complication and balance issues galore.
Quality of Life
Some of the problems of playing in real time can be easily rectified by changes that are most likely already in the pipeline. Here are some examples:
- Being able to shift-click (or something) on a building to turn it off, ctrl-shift to turn off all of its type, alt-click to toggle autosupply, etc. It saves one click but would make the experience so much smoother, as toggling buildings on and off is something you do a lot in most games. Switching off all my steel factories and turning on all my glass with a couple of quick clicks would be lovely.
- Better hotkeys - the recent old-school RTS Grey Goo has a neat way of using a tree of hotkeys to make a selection, so you don't have to move your hand around but instead can just memorize a few combinations to make a selection. A system like that would let you easily have convenient hotkeys for the black market too, which would be huge. Hotkeys to bring up the specialist building windows would be nice too.
Could probably keep blabbering for even longer but I'll wrap it up there for now. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!