Observations by a returning player

from Offworld Forums

Team:

I started with OTC last March, now I'm back playing and I thought I'd offer some observations from a new/not-so-new perspective.

The game looks fantastic and the animations are on point.  I read through the beta updates, checked the forums, played through the tutorial, then hit the skirmish. 3 AI, medium, random, standard.

Dat AI doe.  "Improved AI" is a lol understatement.  Much more difficult to pull out a win.  I thought the tutorial felt light in the information presented and didn't scale to match the AI.  Some mechanics had to be discovered before being addressed by the robot guide.  I felt that it could be condensed with a basic outlay of building placement perks, overview of black market items by animations, and then off to an semi easy map with resource distribution to fit each HQ type.  

The updates have definitely made each HQ more nuanced, with founding center stage and incredibly critical.  The "insta-claim" mechanic can make or break you when resources are scarce vice the old way where it was a claims race.  Not sure if I like it or not.  No way to recover from a bad click, compared with the old cancel claim before the building landed. Losing 30% of your production capacity due to an inadvertent mistake with no way to correct is basically a game ender.  I read about returning claims in the forum post by Blues, but it wasn't addressed in the tutorial, and have yet to figure it out.  

The AI is so good (perhaps a little too good) at stomping and claiming resources that when one founds, you can find yourself in a lost cause 30 seconds into a game with no way to recover.  I've seen resource distribution mentioned in the forums before and I'll echo it, not really wanting to beat a dead horse with feast or famine.  IMO, making a resource scarce for a monopoly run should be in some way balanced a little better that a player who chooses to NOT take on debilitating debt can still found and have a fighting chance.  I don't profess to know the answer... but that AI goes for the jugular every time.  Makes for a damned steep learning curve, possibly too steep for brand new players.

I've also noted that the AI chooses robo close to 60% of the time (if not more), with several matches seeing all 3 AIs choose robo regardless of resource distribution.  I presume that a skirmish -v- AI represents the (multiplayer) game in a vacuum where a true balance would be demonstrated. My assumption being that the AI will play with an optimum strategy to learn from.  If the AI chooses a power robo expand in <20 seconds a disproportionate amount of time... it tells me that that specific strategy (HQ perks) could be considered OP.  In my skirmishing, I've found that you don't take on ~35K for even a semi-optimal spot, the AI has you beat; and you know it. Or if you wait till say 0-5k debt... you're the last, and down by at least an upgrade.  Thats fast. To have an AI that upgrades on par with, if not faster than, the very best players of the game like Cubit... That kind of beat down gets old. CEO level I would expect it, but Manager?  I can eek out a win perhaps 1/7.  I've never won a game that I hadn't massively upgraded production with the E-lab.  It feels like you are forced to use secondary buildings to win. 

Auctions.  The AI seems to put on clown shoes from time to time.  36k for a mule on a resource rich map mid game? Most auctions end appropriately valued (claim 18-30k--sabotage 10-20k), but occasionally the AIs will not bid on an auction until I do.  Then its off to the races.  If none of the AIs show no interest in an auction down to 1 second on the timer, why would ALL AIs then get into a bidding war pushing it up to 30k+ once the human begins bidding?  Its demonstrating contradictory behavior when no one bids, then I bid and get out at 14K and they keep going to 28-32k.  

I don't know if this is a bug.  Lets say I've bought 6 shares of myself and an AI has the other 4 (7/3 - 5/3/2).  If I buy that player out, I'll get x of my shares -1.  With the 1 available for purchase again.  Its happened every time.  Is there something I'm missing?

Campaign.  Hella tough.  I'll hit on resource generation here.  If you MUST choose a CEO/HQ, even with low resources, there's got be some kind of minimum available for basic upgrade needs of the HQ you are locked into that cant be shanghaied by this demon of an AI.  Through several attempts I found my campaign completely derailed by low aluminum or low iron being either stomped or unavailable due to found protection.  Protection on the only patch of necessary upgrade resources sets you back so far that its neigh impossible to recover.  And if you get unlucky with your scanning... the week is lost before it began.  One can't continually buy into an upgrade and expect to progress successfully.  Either that... or I suck at campaign mode.  Probably the latter.

Found protection countdown timer on all the resource tiles looks cluttered, its distracting, and makes it difficult to tell the difference between low and medium (especially aluminum) tiles.   Perhaps something like a thick outline, 80% transparent, greyish ghost like mat that covers the footprint of protection with one bigger number bottom-centered counting down would be better and clean up the look.  Resource coloration versus background has proven problematic for me.  Given that initial founding is THAT important to the game now, debt timer is fast... I think that the less you have players say to themselves "Doh! Dammit... didn't see that" the happier they will be.

Couple things in the campaign that I've noticed.  When hovering over geothermal plant in the labor screen, it says +1.0 to power.  Geos are +2, yes?  When, purchasing habitats, labs, whatever... the base cost does not display the zeros following the comma.  On the last Sol, if you are not in first place... buyout certificate? Despite the read through that says you are not buying other corps?  If I choose to exit the campaign before the follow-on option screen (sell engineer/acquire goon) the splash will still pop up and I have to make a selection and then click exit again. 

Pleasure domes... kind of a mystery to me now with placement versus return.  I've seen them set at HQs make more than ones placed near the colony.  Speaking of- great addition to the colony nodes that give bonuses.  Forces a player to make a simple, but hard decision.  All star move.

I like the summary spreadsheet at the end of the game, but some kind of background for the numbers to stand on would help immensely.  If you've just finished on an ice/dry ice map, one can hardly make anything out. 

My final point is about off-world prices.  I'll bet dollars to pesos giving you 3-1 that food,fuel, or oxygen has a 90% chance of having the highest price for shipping. Making water THE resource for late game.  Its been this way since I first started playing.  But why don't the offworld market prices react to the shipments? 3 players repeatedly launching food should have a noticeable effect on the price.  I understand that there must be a way to end the game with evenly matched players.  However, I think that an offworld market price that reacts to shipments when the market is getting flooded would make the late game more interesting for players to have to react to.  I dont know if this would make nanotech OP; but it would force players (who realize by HQ4 that the game will go deep into the paint) to make some decisions about claim placement and usage.

 

Thanks for a great original experience with this game.  Looking forward to hammering some release day noobs.

 

 

 

 

16,154 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

First of all I suspect you're playing on Beta 9 which is quite behind Beta 10 by now. I believe beta 10 fixes the 60% robo found problem. Beta 10 is sortof closed hidden from the general community but its steam unlock code is MohicanSun2015 (right click OTC in steam, go to betas, fill in the code).

In the campaign every production building at Lv1 starts at 50% production speed compared to skrimishes, including geos.

Founding is by far the most important part of winning an OTC match and (with reveal map) you have only 40 seconds or so to decide where you're going to found. Each founding spot should basically be valued by how close it is to Iron (or carbon), Aluminium, Water and Silicon. Iron/aluminium being the most important and water a slightly more distant 2nd priority unless you're scientific in which case it needs to be adjacent to your HQ almost always.

You HAVE TO have a plan for how you're definately going to reach HQ3 (even in spite of your opponent using EMPs and Power Surges) before you even found. For all companies who want to reach HQ3 first this means getting the cash from selling out of aluminium and water on HQ2 (after your opponent reaches HQ2 too) which is why it is so important to be close to all to iron, alu and h2o because every tile away that a resource is away delays its coming back to you by 2 seconds.

The black market will heavily favor either one or other company. Pirates are a big negative for any scientific without adjacent iron+water. Underground nukes are a big problem for any nonscientific factions. Mutinies & pirates are a huge boon for scavenger players. The lack of mutinies makes expansive more viable because they can make their cheap geothermals without fear of donating them to their opponents.

I'll agree the campaign is very RNG and tough at the start, depending a LOT on RNG and the way in which you do or not get lucky while scanning for resources and whether or not you get high resource maps with favorable BM. As it is there is no reason to ever pick a low resource map with unfavorable black market (ie. power surges, EMPs, etc) because you need to win in the long run which means generating as much cash as fast as possible, which is best done on high resource maps without annoying BM interruptions which usually don't help the victim nor the villain AI who buys them. I find it is usually best to focus on producing aluminium + another construction resource for a specific module + the resource that that module consumes (and never ever playing on maps without that module). Continually expanding the colony with habitats and your specific module will make the resource which you're good at producing extremely profitable.

Pleasure domes should be placed next to colony habitat modules and they produce about 4$ per second for every unit of population on the map, multiplied by an additional 15% for every habitat that they are adjacent to. Habitat modules on the colonyproduce 1 pop, player HQs produce up to 5, 10 and 15 pop at HQ5 for scientific, scavenger and expansive.

This usually means that PDs are very viable in matches with 2 or more scavenger/expansive players.

I can promise you (as a fellow newbie) that the AI is a complete pushover.

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

Hey there, i just started off with OTC yesterday after watching Gameplay Vids the whole day and sucking up all Information there is although its really scarce. Does anyone of you have some particular good writeups or Sites where i can catch up on strategy etc.??

Atm i am reading your Guides Cubit...but how uptodate are they for the Beta10?

Kind Regards,

 

Pandaroc

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Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

they're fairly good for Beta 10, but a few details will be missed.

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

Great. BTW is there any meeting point for multiplayer Games except ingame Lobby? And are the Games played most in beta 10 or 9? Does anyone have something like a discord or Chatchannel for OTC? So many Question and so scarce Info on the game and i absolutely love it.

So far i do not see any Lobby Games... -_-

 

Reply #5 from Offworld Forums Top

On the AI: the two big differences I've noticed in the AI is in stock buying behavior and power production. One of the AI's bigger old weaknesses was its difficulty scraping enough cash together to complete buys, but with the newer buyout system, you can much more easily be pushed to the brink of being bought (harder in beta 10 than 9, but still true). With power, the AI stops spamming it on HQ1, which both causes power to spike much higher (similar to in multiplayer games) and allows them to progress a faster early on. As Cubit said, it still isn't overly difficult to pull ahead of the AI and crush them on manager (though you definitely have to prepare for a longer game), but in a couple experiments with CEO, I do wonder if it's even possible to win anymore. 

On campaign: I recently played through a scavenger campaign on Executive (on the internal build) and I must say I was not prepared for the challenge. Part of it was a failure on my part to adapt to changing starting prices, but in some cases, I had a hard time seeing how maps were even playable with the resources available. There was one map where carbon/aluminum were located across the map from (the very weak) water, and I basically barely broke even after fuel debt, and another map where I specifically chose the scenario with medium resources over the one with low and there was only a single low carbon tile and no dry ice. In a regular game, you can play around these problems with tech and patents, but it's hard for me to figure out what I'm supposed to do in campaigns with poor production and little access to advanced buildings (yes, I could have purchased those engineers, but sacrificing production upgrades for expensive and only potentially useful buildings seems foolish). That said, I did accidentally play through one week of the campaign as Robotic with no access to steel mills and managed to do fine, so things aren't necessarily too hard.

Black market in the campaign can also get weird with all the free black market perks. One notable example is there was one map with no goon squads available (because the only tile-targeting black market item was Slowdown Strike), which meant that all the black market could be used freely. Having all the black market available immediately can also make the early game slow/annoying, and perhaps some sort of cooldown might be called for (though maybe not).

One thing that was nice about campaign was that I was given the option to replay any week where I lost, and I found that quite necessary to actually win the campaign. Even with the reloading, though, I was consistently on the brink during the elimination rounds and did have to win in some weeks to avoid elimination. Looking at the code and stock price breakdowns, I do wonder if the random increases to structures and cash need to be reined in a bit; I found that most AIs had significantly higher structures values than me despite me being very competitive or winning most rounds and AI investments in labor also tended to far outpace mine.

Re: shares being available after buys - that happens when the shares owned by the purchased player cannot be evenly split between shareholders. The player that completed the buy has a short exclusive window to buy any shares made available this way, then it becomes available for anyone to purchase. All players get cash refunds reflecting the value of the portion of the stock they would've gotten if it could have been split.

On Discord: I do feel like a Discord server would be good for getting games together, fielding questions and discussion, and other assorted things, but I have no idea how much community interest there would be in having one. I've just set one up anyway, though I haven't actually done anything with it. https://discord.gg/0pQ0rgV4DDFxO2rD

Reply #6 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting pandaroc, reply 4

e Games played most in beta 10 or 9? Does anyone have something like a discord or Chatchannel for OTC? So many Question and so scarce Info on the game and i absolutely love it.
End of pandaroc's quote

I've been campaigning for Soren to make this happen. At the moment I don't think there is anything like this. Steam 1 on 1 chat is the next best option or someones stream on twitch.tv when someone is streaming (not nearly often enough).

If you want to chat with me just add me on steam. I'll probably remove you after a month of not chatting (as I do everyone who I don't remember after a month).

Reply #7 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting Offworld_Blues, reply 5

On Discord: I do feel like a Discord server would be good for getting games together, fielding questions and discussion, and other assorted things, but I have no idea how much community interest there would be in having one. I've just set one up anyway, though I haven't actually done anything with it. https://discord.gg/0pQ0rgV4DDFxO2rD
End of Offworld_Blues's quote

Nice. Perhaps make a new Thread about it so the word can spread.

Its Kinda sad that the playerbase went to sleep after the initial early access release. I think this game brings some fresh wind to the rts genre. I think i will try to learn the ropes in Skirmishes and perhaps some campaining

Reply #8 from Offworld Forums Top

@Blues, thanks for tha campaign feedback. I have lowered the money/structures the AI gets in simulated missions although I'm not sure if that is good big to make it into Beta 10, which should be out next week.

Reply #9 from Offworld Forums Top

Thanks for replies fellas.  

Yep, I'm on 9.  I'll get that 10 running and see whats up.  After reading your responses a few things definitely clicked... took me a minute to wrap my head around the split shares.  

One thing else about the AI that I've seen... there's certainly a tipping point.  In my experience its between HQ 3/4.  The more I think about it... the more I like the difficulty.  Its a fight to the end and requires you to have a very well rounded understanding of the game.  Proper valuations, black market usage.  

About the player pool.  Yea.  No easy answer there.  There was an initial rush and some of the criticisms were valid, but its a better game now.  With a little luck and a  PR we'll see some of the old ones come back.

Thanks again for the constructive feedback. See you in the lobby.