I enjoy most of the game but for the end (when I loose).
The problem is when you are being bought, you get no warning, no sense that you are about to loose. In other RTS you can at least see your base being crushed, or your army routed. In Offworld, you just get a sudden notice that you have been bought. It's probably like that IRL but in the game it's not so fun.
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On the same subject, if an annemy buy another player it gets him a big advantage. But when all stock have been bought there is no way of buying some (to raise the price and fight the imminent buy) except to buyout the whole company. Maybe there could be some room to fight more on the stock market.
Maybe there could be a way that buying a player's stock give him some money in return. After all you are investing money in its company aren't you?
Great games, keep up the good work.
The end game next to the stock market system is probably the weakest part of the game so far. And you're absolutely right is annoying when you get bought out because it comes with almost no warning. All you see is that your stock is being bought out and once its all bought the buyout can come at anytime.
But once I am completely bought out I have no real way of protecting myself anymore. It would be nice to be able to buy some sort of protection. My friend and I were discussing something like red tape bureaucracy. I feel like the computer or other players can beat me not because they're doing better but because at one moment in time they can unload a bunch of resources and buy me out. But if I was able to stall the game out for like a minute or two the cash they had on hand either wouldn't be enough to buy me out or their expenses were so great that they no longer had the cash to get me.
So it would be like another player wants to buy me out for 800k. They dump a bunch of resources onto the market and get the 800k and buy me out. If I have lets say 250k I can create a bunch of red tape stalling the buyout. Like I get 2 minutes to either increase my value or make the market so volatile by selling/buying something or shorting/surplussing it that by the time the 2 minutes are up the other players 800k on hand is now 400k because his expenses are so great. Or he still has 800k but my company value is now 1.2 million and he now doesn't have enough to buy me out anymore.
Now obviously the game needs to end so maybe the next time I use buyout protection it costs me 500k and maybe penalizes me in some other way.
Some people have suggested that buying stock should pay out dividends. So maybe after every day you get paid a dividend based on how much stock you own of a competing company, and the value of that stock. This way you can use their gains as your gain. Now of course they could in return tank their stock before the end of the day making the stock you bought worth a little less.
In a way, the speed that a game can suddenly end keeps you on your feed. I can understand the concern about the problem about opponents being able to buy you out with little notice, but my response to that has been to try to be a little quicker and buy them out. Try to make sure that I can go in for the kill whenever I need to. I'm still trying to figure that part out though.You can get some insight as to what kind of money your opponents have by hovering your mouse over their name in the list of companies. You can get a bunch of details like current money, debt, resources, and other assets. Between that and seeing what your opponent has on the map, it should be possible to figure out who is the major threat on the map. You could even figure out which goods to reduce the prices of so that the enemy can't dump a load of resources and suddenly have the cash to rapidly buy you out.That said, if a player had to pay dividends to other players because they owned stocks, it would give another reason to keep debt low. High debt reduces the values of your stocks so that they become easier to buy. It will therefore make it easier for other players to get their hands on your pie.
In Multiplayer there is no "sudden end" - You have all the information to see when you're doomed or to see what's coming. In other RTS you actually it's not as straight forward to see when you have lost or when you still stand a fighting chance. If you know where to look, it's pretty clear in Offworld in most cases. Let's compare
Map Vision
The entire map is revealed, you can see everything your opponents do. In any other RTS this would be considered as cheating, or "maphacking" due to there being a fog of war to prevent you from seeing everything.
Information Display
You see exaclty how liquid cash, how much worth of resources and how much debt any other player has, seeing how those values change in real-time gives you an estimate of how strong their economy is. There is even a stock value to give a rough display in case you don't do the maths on the numbes. In no other RTS can you see how many units the enemy actually has, other than counting yourself, or how many resources he has and how much he is producing.
I could go on, but those two are the two main points. Offworld is however very different from any other RTS, as outlined above. Winning actually relies much more on your critical thinking and "macro" than your "micro" and rightclicking with the mouse on the map to win the game. It is complex, and every single round is a new adventure.
Yes it's a huge production advantage when an opponent takes over another corporation. You just can't compete when they have twice the stuff. This comes back to there being the one victory condition. Just thinking out loud, but maybe if there was a resource population (that grows with food/life support/electronics and you can get additional claims as your pop grows to compete through vertical supremacy by organically growing a super power as an alternative to hostile takeover of buying out others.
Further, I was thinking that the offworld component could be done on a 'contract' basis. So you agree to sell +2 electronics offworld fex. If for whatever reason you can't meet the quota you go into debt to purchase the resources required to fulfill it, whether they be primary resources required to manufacture your goods, or secondary resources. That way competitor could sabotage your production to get back into the game/force the leader to manage the end game as opposed to the way it is now.
Also the debt component needs some work if you ask me. Interest should be a bigger component of the game and should fluctuate in terms of interest rate. If global debt goes up, maybe the interest rate should fluctuate? Further it could be a victory/losing condition in itself. As opposed to getting bought out, if your debts scale too high (fex over your income/corporate value) you become insolvent and your claims sold off/forced to sell shares to pay off debt/foreclosed in a monopolyesque type game system.
If your debt goes too high, someone will buy you out, after a certain point debt can reduce your stock value to below 1, or another number that's cheap at that point in the game.
As it stands you can pay off $50k debt and your stock price goes up 30c. I don't think it's relevant enough, bearing in mind I haven't tried CEO yet.
Also. if someone buys you out that leads to snowball and one corporation gets access to all the claims wheras if you owned shares in the company that is bought out and you missed the buyout you only get a bit of cash. Whoever just clicks buyout gets too much benefit as they have more claims than anyone else, which is the point that the end is frustrating. If there was a foreclose end as opposed to just a buyout, maybe those claims go back to paying off the debt as opposed to the buyout corp getting full value. What happened to all the debt? Who repaid that? I get that someone has to win at some point, but the end game just doesn't feel quite right at the moment.
Usually yes. But it's not always the case. Just a few games ago, my oponent bought out 2 people and had 6 working offworld markets, whilst I only had 4. However by building up the right resources and saving them, I was able to sell everything to buy him out before he could get back enough money from his latest buyout to take over my company.
I often place strategic shares into people I don't plan to buy out, so when someone does buy them out it costs them quite a bit more, also using the blackmarket to keep down offworld markets on the people that he bought out helps, as people are lazy, and they usually only goon/watch their "own" buildings. You gotta think outside the box when you're the underdog, emp important production, detonate things he's not protecting ... all of that helps.
But yes, offworld markets are a game finisher, they're not overpowered by any means though. I have seen another player at HQ lvl2 buyout 3 people with offworlds, just by playing extremely well. The game is very open ended, nothing is ever the same.
On one of the streams it was noticed that when you buy someone out your stock price fell slighty. This was seen as being a bug but given how the end game works I would not be so quick to throw that effect out. If your stock price fell after you buy someone out it makes buying someone out a more interesting proposition, and in some situations might turn into a mexican stand-off of sorts between the top two (three) players: who dares to make the first move? This would be good for the game because it gives the underdogs a tiny bit more time to do something rash that might, just might see them through okay; whereas under today's conditions the underdog is pretty much a walking dead man.
There is a simple reason why your stock price "falls" - people dont seem to understand that yet, it's actually quite logical.
Let's go over this, what does stock do? Stock gives you a stake of ownership in the company you have the stock in, now the value of that stock is proportional to the value of the company, so if the value of the company increases, so does the value of the stock, and thus your company's own stock value, because it's a company asset.
Now with that in mind there are two more things that make up for your company's stock value: the stash of money that you have sitting in your bank accounts (to some degree resources as well, but I'm not sure yet how they factor in that would need dev explanation) and your debt.
Now debt works as a multiplier that brings down your stock price.
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So what happens when you buyout anoher company? You have to pay TWICE the value of the shares that you do not already own. - You lose a lot of your cash there, it goes into the void, disappears, and thus disappears from your stock value. That's the first aspect.
The other thing that happens is that your stocks in that company "disappear" because that company is now taken out of the game, and thus those stocks you had in it have no value anymore, and thus also get deducted from your own stock rating.
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Now those two above already remove a lot of your stock value, and that is without counting in debt, if you are heavily in debt, like let's say 150k on a Manager level game, and you buyout someone - The debt works as a multiplier after your asset calculation, so that will have a great impact on your stock value rating as well.
Now that being said, it's well worth buying out another player, as long as you know that there's noone with enough cash to buy you out while your stock value takes a hit, it will recover very quickly due to the newly added production which factors into your stock value, as your assets increase at double the speed now due to production (if it's your first buyout) - you also get value from their claims, i.e. building costs.
I do like the exponential effect that debt has on valuation. I played a game on manager where the second player had all his power production tied to a single geothermal plant. Power was roughly 150 and with night coming i knew it would reach 200 easy (one geothermal spot on whole map). I saved resources all day instead of going to level 5. As soon as night hit, i used dynamite to destroy his power plant. He must've already had significant debt because in 5 hours of game time his value was cut to one quarter of what it was. I swooped in for the easy buyout.
That is why I squirm a little when people talk about valuation manipulation being too difficult... I went from the bottom to the top by doing just that. Make it easier and too many people will do it.
Maybe I don't know how to do that.
But really about the frustrating ending, I'm more or less just saying that having a fullscreen pink buyout coupon is a bit anticlimatic after a whole game of stress.
To clarify my other idea was that when you buy someone else stocks (grey, unbought ones), could he receives the money? Really like, investing in his company so giving him money in exchange of some stock. That would be a bonus to loosing player so they can try to catch up but on the other hand they have lost one tenth of their company to another player.
But really about the frustrating ending, I'm more or less just saying that having a fullscreen pink buyout coupon is a bit anticlimatic after a whole game of stress. To clarify my other idea was that when you buy someone else stocks (grey, unbought ones), could he receives the money? Really like, investing in his company so giving him money in exchange of some stock. That would be a bonus to loosing player so they can try to catch up but on the other hand they have lost one tenth of their company to another player.
About the screen: It's an early access game, the team still got a lot of work to do. About the information, just hover your mouse over the playernames on the righthand side of the screen. It will show then.
If their stock is purchased the price goes up higher, that is "sort of" a protection, if you were to receive money, then the other player would only be able to buy out 50% of your shares as you could buy back the other 50%, or 4/10 rather. It'd be too hard to buy someone out.
Thank you I will see if the frustration vanishes now that I can access these informations.
I had issues with the sudden buy-out in the solo game and even in the multiplayer ones too.
But I found as some have mentioned, by keeping dept down to as low as possible or best zero'd, tends make you survive longer, and I also found if you can get controlling shares in your own company seems to slow others from buying you out.
By doing this Ive won game against companies that have brought out +50% of the rest of the companies.
The other things I found useful was to bulk sell high prices items and force the market down fast before anyone else can take advantage of the high sell prices.
example: Steel and Glass tend to be in the high priced items, so I sell them in bulk to get the prices back down into the double or single didits, and the money from these sales I buy up cheap iron and other resources needed to make what was high priced one. normally by this stage you should have a good production line going, so you make more glass and steel in no time.
But as some have said you have to keep an eye on the other companies, as once you stop doing so you've more or less lost the game.
I've noticed that being the first to buyout someone can be a disadvantage. I've seen several games where two people are the clear leaders, one of them goes to buy out a cheap straggler for the extra claims, but by dropping all of his cash on that he's now left himself open to being bought by the other guy who now effectively bought out two people. You don't really want to buy someone out just for the claims unless your buying the person that is threatening to buy you. and actually I like having 4-5 shares of a company that gets bought out by someone else. I just doubled my money on those and I can immediately turn around and sink that money into the new owners stock.
Yes ... it always just depends, you can actually win as the underdog by employing such tactics, but it would be very hard to generalize. It depends on a lot of factors and every game is different.
In general though it's not wise to buy out a third player that the person who is threatening to buy you out has shares in.It's also usually not wise to buy other players out of your company if the game has progressed pretty far, but I can't generalize that, there are always exceptions to the rule, for example if the player you are buying out is about to bought out himself. I very often have a solid lead in the game due to a strong economy (always depends on the game and the map, as I said you can't generalize it) - When I am actually struggling I try to buy someone out, When I am clearly leading, I buy out my own shares and then I buy distributed shares among everyone, to make sure noone can "catch up".
It is not always wise to buy out everyone, you dont know the other person's economy by heart, and the numbers don't tell you everything. I have managed to win several games where someone in the lead went on a buyout frenzy, and after he had bought out his 4th person with 6 offworlds launching goods into space, he still managed to get bought out by me with only 2 offworlds running. Those games are rare but they do happen, buyouts are a risk and if someone is threatening to buy you out, you have to think twice where you put your money.
You ALWAYS have to prioritize your buyouts, there are only 2 reasons to buyout another player:
1) Buyout an opponent that is economically strong and threatening to buy you out.
2) To get ahead of the game and get an economical advantage.
ALWAYS prioritize (1) over (2) no matter what you may think. Even if that person that's threatening to buy you out costs 50% more (600k compared to 400k).You will never make back those 400k that you spend on the cheaper player in time to save yourself.
Please do keep in mind that I'm trying to hint at some tactics here, it really depends on the game and how it's going. Very often if you are in an offworld race against someone, and there are only 2 of you that are viable winners, it can help to sacrifice your own economical advance to snatch 3 of his shares (without crippling yourself too much of course) - Whichever player has the most shares in the other player's company ends up winning the game - that's usually how it goes.
But then again - you need to know that this only works if his shares are of the same or less value than your own, and that he doesnt have a lot more resources than you do.
What I see so often happening is that when I start to buy someone out with their stock value being at 10 and mine at 15, they start buying 5 of my shares, instead of buying their own shares and then they get bought out. Unless you have enough money to complete a full buyout against a player of a higher stock value, invest the money in your own shares to save yourself, as every share you buy in your own company is worth twice as much (in terms of survivability).
i think anything after a company is bought out should be split between the stock owners and all assets should be liquidated. That way you cant snowball incredble fast and the end game is exiting.
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