Meticulous micromanagement is always the optimal way, regardless the mode. But people don't really minimax, not even if they are Pb's and Cubits. Self-efficiency and avoiding debt altogether is the simplest way to handle it and much easier to understand conceptually than 'regular' mode. You can't spend what you don't have. Very reasonable. That's what OP wants. And for clarification purposes: not for a second I think tighter debt is a successful implementation of the 'more punishing' debt idea. I hate it just as much as the next guy. It's just that suggested alternatives would be equally bad if not worse, IMO.

P.S. It's funny how in this debt-rant thread people discuss the loopholes that allow circumvent the rules and trade debt for cash instead of adopting the intention behind the rules. If that's not a perfect demonstration of how much players really like the whole 'avoid debt' idea, I don't know what is.

Sylistic - one thing that you might not have seen is that excessive debt will lead to a snowball effect that crashes your stock price. When your debt hits D range you get a high interest rate and eventually the compounding of all of the interest will send your stock price into a death spiral. Watch any stream and you're bound to see 1 HQ crash because of excessive debt even though they were doing well. So while not using the black market is indeed a pain the threat of using all your income to prevent crashing your stock price is the real killer. It's impossible to defend your company when you're magnitudes cheaper than the other players.

When I first started playing I made the same assumptions about debt and tried to keep it at the minimum but it works the same as in real life. You use debt to leverage your position and make money just like any business. The only change I would make (if any) to the debt structure is in the 1v1 game where the game length might dictate a different look at how debt is treated. Perhaps the interest rates at different levels of debt could be raised to solve the issue.

I'm with you magic. I think my suggestion should only be implemented 1v1 

Quoting Stylistic_sagittarius,

reply 53

I am a completly new player. i have the game 3 days now.

I was looking here on the forums to see what the catch on debt is (and some other things).
Now that i find out there really isn't a catch besides not being able to make purchases on the black market this is a huge dissapointment to me!

Despite of what is a reality or not for the sake of this games balance large sums of debt must be punished harder.
Perhaps a 50% of cash income when you sell stuff (with the normal market or the offworld market) would instantly be used to repay debt could be good improvement if you don't want to alter the stockmarket to much.

once more i'm a new player you may shout if i speak nonsense

I always like to compare concepts in this game to concepts in more traditional RTs's like Starcraft 2, to help understand the logic behind game design decisions. Imagine that there's no hard cap on units, no population limit, but if you go over 200 (which is the cap in real Starcraft 2) then all of your side's units and buildings max hitpoints decrease. If your army has less hitpoints and goes up against an army of relatively equal strength (say 250 vs 200), you lose because your units were easier to kill. However, if your army was larger than the supply, but you fight an opponent that was much weaker than you (say 250 vs 50), you will still win, the hitpoints of your army didn't matter because you were so far ahead. In offworld trading company, your stock price could be considered the same as the hitpoints of your side in starcraft. The debt your company has is the same as the supply idea I mentioned. If you have too much debt, go over the supply, your max hit points decrease, your stock price. However a hitpoints decrease in starcraft does not change how much damage your units do to the enemy, same with OTC. In OTC, the damage is your cash, your purchasing power. Now, if you prevent -people from buying stock when you hit a a debt limit, then in my version of starcraft 2, you want it so that as you go over 200 supply your units become unable to do damage. The enemy comes knocking on your door, and you cannot defend yourself. You die. Suddenly a large part of the game revolves around not going over the supply limit, of keeping yourself smaller so as not to have a mechanic effectively kill you.I consider this punishment unfun. It's not fun to play around punishments, to intentionally weaken yourself and play more conservatively. The balancing mechanics, the tools to make having a harger army less viable, were already in place, the hitpoints. It was still up to the other player to have been skilled enough to be able to take advantage of that and win. But with this requested change, it no longer matters how skilled the other person was, you just made a mistake and now your dead. The onus of skill becomes unfairly distributed to the person in the lead.

Now, that isn't quite so accurate if your playing in larger FFA's, but in 1 vs 1 it's almsot exactly like how I described that. IF your opponent is allowed ot buy 2 or 3 stocks without retaliation, you've lost. You are bigger, stronger, you grew quicker, you were more skilled. If your opponent is not too far behidn then they can take advantage of your lwoer stock price and still maybe win, but if you prevent players from being able to defend themselves if at high enough debt then a tiny company could easily defeat a much larger one, and that just isn't good design. A large part of the game becomes about maintaing a lead in power rather than just ending the game already.

...Alright, be honest, how much of that made sense?

lol i need education!

I don't know what they changed in last update but i can't get myself not out of debt anymore. it keeps growing and growing at alarming rates.

The new update for this game is broken. The stock purchasing makes absolutely no sense what so ever. You have no way of defending yourself. I buy up all of my own stock and am leading a game and everyone just gangs up on me and buys one share at a time. I recieve no money for and of the shares that I own that they are buying out from underneath me and I can't purchase them back. With the game in it's current configuration leading a game is actually a bad thing. Why would you create a mechanic that punishes better players?

Check out the next_version branch if you want to see how it will work in Beta 9, which is sort of a hybrid where players have to buyout your last 5 shares at once. As for now, if you don't like this option, you can play without it.

you do get the money, the payout check tells you so. You just can't do anything with it!