Offworld trading company campaign how to win
“The opening moments of each match are spent exploring the shrouded map with scanning pulses, which creates a tense risk-reward system that dares you to lock yourself in before you have a complete picture of the resources in the surrounding terrain. Do you risk hitting the most obvious target, such as a geothermal power plant, even though it might be protected? At the same time, do you let your opponent assume you’ve protected a crucial building and save the cash for other uses? What’s more, the pool of available Black Market abilities changes from match to match, keeping the mind games fresh by preventing you from repeating the same strategy over and over. You can hire pirates from the Black Market to steal resources for you.To keep Black Market attacks from being too straightforward, Offworld has a clever mind game in play by allowing you to buy protection for any building. That’s easy to do if you’re playing in single-player against the competent AI opponents and can pause to examine them at your leisure, but much tougher (and thus more rewarding) in a live multiplayer game where you have to split your attention between observation and managing your own company. Pulling off elaborate industrial sabotage like this takes some keen observation of how the rival company is set up. Watching an opponent’s debt skyrocket and their share price plummet after you shut off their power with an EMP and force them to buy it from the market is a satisfying reward for a job well done alternatively, using a Hacking Array building to artificially inflate the price of power beforehand, then inciting a mutiny in the enemy’s power plant to divert its flow to your supply will both maximize the damage to their ledger and pour cash into your account as you sell off their power for a profit. If you can identify where your opponents’ supply chains are weakest, you can send their entire economy into a tailspin by temporarily crippling key production facilities with purchased attacks. Since Mohawk doesn't plan to fully release the game until 2016, they've given themselves plenty of time to tighten up a game that already feels pretty damn solid.“What gives Offworld its depth is how you compete with up to seven other corporations using a randomized set of Black Market attacks and buffs. There are sample levels to learn the ropes but not a proper tutorial.įor a game on Early Access, though, Offworld Trading Company has arrived in a state that feels far more complete than pretty much any other Early Access game I've played. Tooltips, as you hover over a resource or menu item, feel slow to respond, problematic in a game where you're often scrambling to keep ahead of your opponents. The voices that read these notifications aloud are annoying and inconsistent.
Notifications appear in the right-hand corner of the screen and are both oversized and yet difficult to read. And, if you do want a more drawn out experience, there's an enjoyable single-player campaign mode. Ultimately, it's a great and refreshing design choice. You can play through two or even three matches in a single hour, and still experience an entire evening's worth of drama, heartbreak, and victory. A randomized world, a short, frantic match, an abrupt and shocking end, a dive back in to start from scratch. OTC, in skirmish or multiplayer mode, feels more like a strategy rougelike.
There are plenty of strategy games in which a single match can fill an entire evening, or even several evenings. The more I play OTC, though, the more I've come to really appreciate the short rounds and the sudden game-ending moves.