The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Probably the most difficult building to use in the game, the Hacker Array is the only way a player can influence the demand side of the supply-and-demand equation. The building emerged from the random event system (inspired by M.U.L.E.) which randomly triggered resource shortages and surpluses during the game. These random events add some nice chaos to the resource market so that it is not so primarily driven by the players. Once they were in place, however, we began to wonder what would happen if a player could trigger a random event, especially if the other players couldn’t tell if the event was real or not.

Thus, the Hacker Array lets players start artificial shortages and surpluses, which can be a great tool used at the right time. One of the best aspects of the Hacker Array is the paranoia it creates in other players. As soon as a Hacker Array is spotted, players start to doubt the events – maybe one Electronics shortage is inconclusive, but two in a row? (The best, of course, is when those two consecutive event were actually real!) In fact, we had to make an important rule change to the Hacker Array shortly after coming out on Early Access because players quickly discovered that if they built not just one Hacker Array but two or three or even more, they could trigger multiple concurrent shortages of a stockpiled resource, driving the price up so quickly that they could win the game just be selling at the top price. Therefore, we limited multiple hacks of a single resource from processing concurrently; players could still use multiple Hacker Arrays, but they needed to be manipulating different resources.

What makes the Hacker Array so tricky, however, is that unlike the other advanced buildings, there is no guarantee that the building will help its owner the most. A player might short Steel after noticing that he has the most Steel Mills on the map but end up helping a different player who was holding a stockpile of 500 Steel and then sells out of it before the original player realizes what is happening. One of the tensest moments of the game is watching the price of a resource climb up and up and up with one’s cursor hovering over the sell button, trying to win the game of chicken by selling for the highest price just before anyone else does.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Unlike the more orthogonal Patent Lab, the Optimization Center provides consistent and straightforward production upgrades for every type of resource in the game. Originally, the Optimization Center (whose name has become a bit of a running joke in our community as it has also been know as the Engineering Lab, Efficiency Lab, Industrial Lab, Upgrade Lab, and Research Center) gave bonuses not for resources but for buildings. Thus, the player could research Solar Power Production or Wind Power Production. In practice, however, most players were not switching between different sources of Power (or other resources), so the extra complexity of upgrading a building instead of a resource was dropped. (Essentially, claiming a tile with high wind was already a significant commitment.) This simplification also greatly improved the UI for the Optimization Center as each upgrade could be listed right next to the corresponding resource.

The Optimization Center improves the efficiency of buildings (how much of resource X is output per input of resource Y) instead of their speed (how fast resource X is converted into resource Y). For example, a Steel Mill with Perfect Steel Production will produce twice as much Steel but still consume the same amount of Iron. From a gameplay perspective, improved efficiency encourages resource diversification between players and is an important counter-balance to production cycling; if a player researched Perfect Chemical Production, then it might make sense for that player to keep producing Chemicals even if the price drops well below that of Electronics (which is also primarily built from Carbon). This player has a quasi-monopoly on Chemicals as she might be the only player in the game who can make Chemicals profitably (unless, of course, another player starts upgrading Chemical production).

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

The patent system was one of the earliest elements of the game to take shape. As both an RTS and a science-fiction game, Offworld obviously needed an interesting technology system. However, we wanted our system to have variability (so that players weren’t always following the same research path) and interactivity (so that players were reacting to each other’s choices). Turning technologies into patents (meaning that each patent could be held by only one player) achieved both goals at once. Players could never count on a specific set of patents because another player might get to some of them first, which meant that players had to watch one another, possibly sabotaging Patent Labs to make sure no one else got to an important patent first. Further, patents appearing as auctions could shift the course of the game significantly.

Superconductor (+100% Power production if connected to HQ) – The best locations for Power (high altitude for solar, steep ridges for wind, and geothermals tiles) might not be near one’s HQ, but Superconductor meant that a player need only build Power connected to the HQ. A Solar Panel with Superconductor would generally (depending on altitude) be equivalent to a Geothermal Plant, which could be hugely profitable if Power spikes in price. The most important advantage of building Power close to one’s HQ, however, is that those claims can later be deleted and used for something else if Power crashes. However, players often have to build their Power sources before they get Superconductor, which means this strategy is risky if someone else gets the patent first.

Energy Vault (Produces +1.0 Power as storage, up to 100 units) – Power is the only resource which cannot be stored and must be sold immediately, which gives it a unique price curve as players with excess Power are constantly selling it. Because Solar Panels shut off at night, the price of Power usually goes up when the sun goes down and then drops during the day. This pattern makes life difficult for players who rely solely on Solar Panels as the price of Power is highest when their production is shut off. Energy Vault lets players avoid this pattern by storing up a stockpile of Power during the day and then using at night when the sun is gone. Also, it is possible for a player to stop selling Power if she want to keep the price artificially high. Normally, this excess Power is just lost because the player cannot store it; with Energy Vault, however, this tactic is more viable because the player can stockpile this Power for later use.

Financial Instruments (Receive 25% of other player’s interest payments) – This patent was the last one to be added to the game because it originated as a response to players taking on too much debt. Although the debt problem was mostly solved by bond ratings, Financial Instruments also made debt dangerous because a player could benefit from everyone else’s debt. If an opponent racks up too much debt, simply acquire Financial Instruments and use that daily influx of cash to help buy that player’s deflated stock. Naturally, players with a lot of debt also began grabbing this patent as a defensive measure.

Water Engine (Uses Water instead Fuel for units and launches) – The price of fuel can go up quickly on maps with distant resource clumps (for example, if all of the Water is in the west while all the Iron is in the east). Indeed, sometimes distant mines are turned off because the shipping costs are so high that the building would be a net loss. Water is almost always cheaper than Fuel (as it takes two units of Water to make one unit of Fuel, not to mention the Power consumption and the tile occupied by the Reactor), so being able to spend Water on shipping can be very useful. However, Water Engine did suffer from the disadvantage of being strictly worse than another patent, Teleportation, which simply removes shipping costs entirely. To compensate, Water Engine costs half as much (and takes half as much time to acquire) and is still obviously useful if another player gets to Teleportation first. Nonetheless, we felt that a player should still have a reason to acquire Water Engine even if he has Teleportation, which is why we also let players use Water instead of Fuel to launch resources at the Offworld Market, a building that is unaffected by Teleportation.

Perpetual Motion (-50% Power Consumption) – Although Perpetual Motion does not appear to be particularly interesting compared to the rest of the patents, it is the only item in the game that actually reduces consumption of anything. Perpetual Motion can turn a Power consuming player into a Power producing one. Indeed, it must surely be the most flexible of patents as it would aid every player — even a player with Cold Fusion would benefit because his Water consumption from powering buildings is also cut in half. Thus, even if Perpetual Motion is not as flashy as other patents, it is a good one to research early because everyone else is going to want it.

Cold Fusion (Uses Water instead of Power for buildings) – Water is probably the most common resource on average in Offworld, which makes Cold Fusion a powerful patent as it enables a player with a good source of Water to just ignore making Power altogether. Cold Fusion can become dominant combined with Water Engine and Water Production optimizations. Nonetheless, the patent was seen as a bit of a trap early in development because if the Water price rose higher than that of Power, the patent is actually a net loss. Thus, we made a small but important change — that buildings would switch automatically between consuming Water or Power depending on which one was cheaper (Water Engine works the same way). The patent now gives its owner great flexibility in manipulating the market; shorting Power, for example, knowing that once the price of Power passes that of Water, all of the player’s Power buildings will be selling directly to the market.

Virtual Reality (+50% revenue from the Pleasure Dome) – Because revenue from the Pleasure Dome is so highly dependent on the actions of other players (the potential revenue is divided by the total number of Domes on the map), players want to find ways to discourage other players from building more Domes. Virtual Reality is the best method because once a player acquires it, the potential value of new Pleasure Domes drops (as other players know that their new Domes will never get the boost). Often, it is one of the first patents to be taken as players are afraid of missing out on it. Indeed, before we dropped Virtual Reality from +100%, it was almost always the first patent to disappear (which is, of course, why we weakened it as it had become an uninteresting, automatic decision).

Nanotech (Construction resources are refunded when a building is scrapped) – Nanotech was considered perhaps the weakest patent before we released on Early Access, so it greatly surprised us to find that competitive players considered it the best patent in the game. The patent enables player to cycle their production from one resource to another for basically free, with the only cost being the time lost in constructing the new building. Internally, we cycled our production far less than we should have, not taking advantage of resources that were rising in price and not giving up on ones that were actually losing us money. Thus, Nanotech is a good example of why development teams don’t understand their own games nearly as well as the players do. The patent was brought back into balance by raising its cost and from the diminishing returns on adjacency bonuses, which discouraged cycling quite so quickly.

Slant Drilling (Can mine resources from adjacent tiles) – The value of Slant Drilling varies highly from map to map. Its most powerful use is as a counter to a resource monopoly; if one player somehow claims all the Aluminum, just grab Slant Drilling and put a mine next to that player’s best source. The patent is also a useful hedge against Underground Nukes because resources tend to be found in clumps; if someone nukes a player’s High Water, there is probably a Medium Water adjacent to her Pump which she can use instead. Slant Drilling is especially attractive to Scientific players as it makes creating building triangles much easier — all they need is one resource tile for up to six adjacent buildings. Occasionally, a Scientific player might even find adjacent sources of Aluminum, Silicon, and Carbon, enabling free Electronics production by using Slant Drilling to access all three resources at once.

Carbon Scrubbing (Buildings consume Carbon for free) – This patent was inspired by the fact that a building could extract some Carbon from Mars’s atmosphere, which is primarily carbon dioxide. From a gameplay perspective, making one resource potentially free creates an interesting bit of asymmetry among the primary resources, especially because Carbon is an important input for Chemicals and Electronics, two valuable late-game resources. Thus, one popular strategy after acquiring Carbon Scrubbing is to start Carbon shortages at the Hacker Array, which makes producing Chemicals and Electronics less profitable, which drives up their price as other players cycle away from those resources, which ultimately makes Chemicals and Electronics extremely profitable for the player with Carbon Scrubbing who can ignore the Carbon cost! Also of note, Scavenger players love the patent because it means they can keep all of the Carbon they produce for buildings and HQ upgrades.

Thinking Machines (-50% sabotage protection for buildings adjacent to the HQ) – The original Black Market had no defensive options, which meant that players had no way to protect themselves from EMPs, Dynamites, Mutinies, and so on. Along with Goon Squads, Thinking Machine was added to provide another tool to balance the power of sabotage. Initially, the patent provided complete protection against sabotage, but it was easy to see that was simply too much — the player with Thinking Machines was able to put Offworld Markets next to her HQ and just launch her way unchallenged to victory. After changing the effect to -50%, the patent is still important but no longer dominant. Another nice aspect of Thinking Machines is that players now plan ahead in anticipation of picking up the patent later, perhaps even in an auction, by carefully arranging their claims to provide potential location adjacent to their HQs for buildings to be protected by the patent. Ideally, the player has to make trade offs between short- and long-term gains — should I snake my claims out from my HQ to connect to a distant resource (saving Fuel costs and potentially avoiding Pirates), or should I claim every tile adjacent to my HQ to maximize my potential protection from sabotage?

Teleportation (Resources are transferred instantly to and from the HQ) – Everyone wants Teleportation, even if just to make sure that no one else has Teleportation. The benefits are pretty obvious – no more Fuel costs, instant access to distant resource production – but a few special cases are worth noting. Teleportation makes one immune to Pirates and Magnetic Storms, which can be very important if shipping expensive resources; owning the patent means that the other players will use those types of sabotage only against each other, which is certainly a best-case scenario. Although receiving building outputs instantly is the obvious appeal of Teleportation, being able to deliver inputs instantly is important as well; players are free to place their secondary buildings wherever convenient. A Scientific player with Teleportation has the freedom to put his Glass Furnace on Silicon, his Chemical Labs on Carbon, and his Electronics Factories on Silicon, Carbon, and/or Aluminum, no matter how far from his HQ.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

I mentioned above that the earliest version of the game had neutral Colonies and no HQs. When we replaced Colonies with HQs, the players were immediately more invested in the game as they felt ownership over a part of the map and could also see the progress reflected in the size of the HQ. However, the game’s fiction suffered some as it was unclear why exactly these companies were on Mars. Were they just manufacturing resources to sell to each other? Obviously, the Offworld Market was part of the answer as one purpose of business was to supply goods to colonists living offworld in the Asteroid Belt. Nonetheless, the game felt like it was missing some focal point to justify all this business.

Thus, we brought back the Colony, this time as a single entity in the middle of the map that would serve as important source of market demand. (When the game had no Colony, the market had a hidden demand curve which drove up prices; putting a visible Colony on the map meant that we could remove this hidden mechanic.) The needs of the Colony were visible in the types of modules which extended out from its center. Habitat modules would need Water, Food, and Oxygen; Office modules would need Power; Laboratory modules would need Chemicals; and so on. Further, the Colony would grow over the course of the game, increasing demand for these resources.

That simple system, however, was quite different from how the single neutral Colony started, and the process to get to there is a good lesson about how game mechanics work best in strategy games when they are simple and transparent. The original system, in contrast, was complex and opaque. (In Sid’s words, the problem with complex, opaque systems is that computer is having the fun, not the player.) Initially, the modules all consumed multiple resources (the Office, for example, consumed Power and Electronics) while also having a cost (the Office required Steel and Glass) which affected the probability of it appearing if those resources cost too much. Further, each workplace module could level up depending on that resource cost as well as the Colony’s excess population that needed jobs. Each Habitat module could level up based on its build costs as well as the Colony having more jobs available than population. Moreover, the Colony’s population would go up and down depending on the price of life support resources, which could then leave some workplace modules unoccupied so that they didn’t consume any resources at all. Thus, the Colony might not be growing because Steel cost too much to construct more modules, or it might not be growing because Food was too expensive, or it might not be growing because there weren’t new jobs available for the new colonists. Got all that?

Most players simply ignored the Colony as it wasn’t clear what was going into the black box or what was coming out of it. The system needed radical simplification. Slowly, each part got stripped away – the resource costs for each module, the population restrictions from life support costs, the leveling up of each module – until the colony itself was simply a visual indicator of demand. Finally, each workplace module consumed only one resource (Offices consume Power, Laboratories consume Chemicals, etc.) and every workplace module had a matching Habitat module that consumed life support. New modules were added randomly over the course of the game, independent of the players or the market. The Colony was simply another random element which added replay value by diversifying resource demand — if the Colony is full of Laboratories, for example, then the players might want to invest in Chemical Refineries because of demand from the Colony.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

We are often asked how being on Early Access changed the design of Offworld, and it did so in more ways than we are probably even aware. One of the most obvious changes was the Reveal Map option, which completely changed how the game opens. After removing Scouts from the game, we were pretty happy with the scanning mechanic for exploring the map and founding the HQ. However, once we released the game on Early Access and started running tournaments with the best players, the scanning system became a point of contention. The community argued that if a map had a single best founding location, superior to all others, the game would always be won (assuming evenly matched player) by whoever discovered that founding location first and took advantage of it.

We did have various mechanics in place to balance against the disadvantage of missing the best spot – players who found later can get an extra claim and earlier access to the black market. However, it was hard for us to argue that games would never be won or lost based on who found the best spot first. The solution was to start with the map fully revealed and then let players choose where to found; each player would have the same amount of time to consider which spot to take.

However, obviously just revealing the map would not be enough. Players would frantically look around the map trying to find the best spot, and whoever clicked first would still get a huge advantage. We needed a mechanic to give a cost to founding first. In fact, I had considered a Reveal Map mode before launching on Early Access, but I couldn’t figure out a simple way to make it work. Perhaps players could all mark their favorite positions and then, if they conflicted, find some way to negotiate the tie? Perhaps the game should run an auction for the right to found first? That might work in a two-player game, but how would it work for an 8-player game? Maybe there should be blind-bidding to determine the first player to found? Although that would technically work for all number of player, it would turn the beginning of the game into a turgid, turn-based affair, killing multiplayer.

The solution was to use the debt mechanic to make this process both simple and still real-time. After the map is revealed to all players, a debt counter starts at $200K and then starts going down second-by-second. Founding immediately would cost $200K in debt, which is far too much to manage; thus, players must wait at least a few seconds before getting serious about founding, which provides important time to look around the map. Then, after players have spotted the best founding spots, the question is simply how much is that spot worth? $30K debt? $40K? $50K?

The system is perfectly balanced for all players, works well regardless of player count, and keeps the game moving in real-time. The option quickly became the standard mode of play amongst the multiplayer community. One further wrinkle was added to this system after a tournament game between PBHead and Cubit in which neither player wanted to found because the map had two great founding locations; there was no reason to take on debt and also give the other player the free claim for founding second. We fixed this scenario with a founding bonus that starts ticking up after the debt counter got to $0. Thus, in the situation above, the first person to found would get money to balance out the other player’s free claim.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Auctions were an early element of Offworld’s design that were compelling from the beginning. Player interaction is the core of competitive strategy games, and one risk of making an RTS without combat is that players might feel they are playing competitive solitaire, focusing mostly on their own buildings and ignoring the other players. Thus, auctions are a great way to put players into direct conflict as they bid on items, driving up the price until all but one blink. Judging the value of an auction is tricky, and many players experience the “winner’s curse” common in auctions where the winner of the auction ends up losing the game from overbidding.

Initially, we implemented three types of auctions: a new claim, a specific tile, and an unclaimed patent. One mechanic we originally tried with auctions was creating a new resource deposit specifically for an auction if no unclaimed source existed. For example, if all the Silicon tiles on the map had been claimed, the game would create a new source of Silicon and auction it off. We had wanted to create meaningful auctions, but this situation was too meaningful. If a player had accomplished the difficult task of claiming all the Silicon on the map, she felt cheated if the game magically created a new one. The player had the painful choice of either overbidding to protect her monopoly or letting it go and losing a rare advantage. We didn’t want to punish players who went for the strategy of monopolizing a specific resource, so we took away the feature.

As development continued, we integrated new features to improve auctions. Once the black market was no longer a fixed set of seven items but a random selection from a larger pool, we could then auction sabotage items which were not available on the black market (if the item was on the black market, then there was little reason to bid much over the current price). Once special buildings (Patent Office, Hacker Array, etc.) could be built next to the Colony, we could then auction them off since they would be potentially valuable to all players (although we never auction off Offworld Markets because that would be insane).

One other important change was only possible once debt became a game mechanic. Originally, auctions were paid directly from cash, which meant that players were often selling all their resources to be able to outbid their opponents. However, at some point, players are simply going to hit a limit and have no more cash to bid on an auction. Further, if the auction comes at a point when most players are cash poor (possibly from recently upgrading HQs), one player might be able to win an important auction simply because he was the only player in the game with money on hand. That situation felt wrong, especially when a rival player was willing to bid if only she had the money. The solution was to instead pay for auctions out of debt, which solved the problem completely. Players were free to bid as much as they wanted to on auctions but knew that if they overbid, their stock price might crash to dangerous levels. In the days shortly after this change, there were some hilarious playtests where one player (usually me) overbid heavily on an auction and then saw his stock price immediately collapse to $1 and get bought out. Lessons were learned.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

One of the trickiest parts of the design was how to handle when the player needed to consume a resource but had none in her stockpile. Our initial solution was that every time a player could not supply the needed Power, Fuel, or life support, the game would lower that player’s stock price. If this penalty was applied too many times, the company would drop to a price of $1 and would soon be acquired by a competitor. The system worked, in that players would be afraid to run out of required resources, but the system was also obtuse and caused permanent damage to players; each stock penalty lasted for the rest of the game, which meant we were encouraging a very conservative strategy of always making required resources first.

The solution was the debt system, which kept track of each time the player needed to buy a required resource from the market, acting as an unlimited line-of-credit. The debt would also affect the player’s stock price but, significantly, a player could pay off the debt to recover later in the game. Too much of a resource shortfall early in the game was no longer a death sentence. The system now worked because it was transparent, players could see how bad their debt was getting and decide when to fix the problem.

However, as all game designers know, give players a new feature, and they will do everything they can to break it to their advantage. “Debt diving” became a term among the players for ignoring debt in favor of resources that produced straight cash in the hopes of buying out the other players before dying to too much debt. It was a dangerous strategy but, in the hands of the best players, also a dominant strategy. (Simply put, a player with $300K in cash and $200K in debt can easily beat a player with $100K in cash and no debt, even though their net assets are identical.)

The solution was bond ratings, which changed the interest rate paid on debt each day depending on the ratio of a player’s debt to his total assets. The better bond ratings (AAA, AA, A) had interest rates between 2% and 6%, which were quite manageable. However, once a player sunk to a D rating, the interest rate jumped to 30%, which meant that a player could die to debt as her debt might increase faster than she could pay it down. Finally, players with a D rating were also locked out of the black market, which meant they could no longer sabotage their competitors and were also vulnerable to sabotage without access to the defensive Good Squad. Basically, D debt is very bad — bad enough that while players would still use debt as a tool to accelerate their progress at times, they were also acutely aware that going too far could mean disaster.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

A game with 13 resources would not be very interesting if all 13 resources are basically different flavors of the same thing. Thus, when building the resource tree, we had to think about what purpose each resource served. The natural place to start is the primary resources which are found on Mars. We decided early on to have five primary resources which would appear randomly on the map (although also depending on terrain so that, for example, Iron is most likely to be found on Volcanic terrain). The initial five resources were Water, Iron, Copper, Aluminum, and Silicon. Our secondary resources would derive from the primary ones, creating a resource tree similar to those found in the Railroad Tycoon series:

• Greenhouse Farms turned Water in Food
• Electrolysis Reactors split Water into Oxygen and Fuel (Hydrogen)
• Plastics Manufactures turned Fuel into Plastics
• Steel Mills turned Iron into Steel
• Glass Kilns turned Silicon and Oxygen into Glass
• Electronics Factories turned Silicon and Copper into Electronics

This resource tree meant that certain resources were easier or harder to obtain. Steel was easy to make as it simply required Iron while Glass was much hard as it required Silicon and Oxygen (and the latter comes from Water). This difference kept the market interesting as players had to judge a resource not just by its price but also by how hard it was to make the resources. If Glass is $100, and Steel is $80, it’s not immediately obvious which resource is better to produce as Glass is harder to make and also sensitive to price changes in three different resources (Silicon, Water, and Oxygen).

Furthermore, the resources were differentiated by how they were to be used. Steel was the primary construction material, used to create almost all of the buildings and also to upgrade the HQ, which makes it a very important resource early in the game. Copper and Glass were also used to upgrade the HQ, which made them similarly crucial as upgrading was the primary method to acquire new claims. Other resources – Water, Food, and Oxygen – were needed as life support to keep one’s workers alive. These resources were consumed every turn depending on the size of the HQ, which meant that their price would rise steadily if no one was supplying them to the market. Similarly, Fuel powered the player’s ships as they moved across the map. Aluminum was used for building ships at the HQ (which was important in this earlier version of the game). Plastics and Electronics (as well as Glass) were cash crops that were not particularly useful to the player but could be driven up in value by onworld demand (a background factor that replaced the old neutral Colonies). A final resource, Power, worked completely differently from all the other resources because it could not be stockpiled and was constantly bought from or sold to the market depending on whether the player had a shortage or surplus of it. Power was important because almost every building in the game consumed Power while working, which meant the demand for Power would consistently increase until players ran out of claims for new buildings.

Thus, every resource in the game had a unique profile regarding how it was made and why it might become valuable. This diversity meant that players knew that investing in a specific resources meant different things for their overall strategy – claiming Water was important for ensuring access to life support, building Glass ensured that the player could upgrade and claim more territory, making Electronics meant that the player would be able to make cash by selling a rare and expensive resource, and so on.

Of course, the resource tree changed a few times before our final version. One concern was Aluminum, which wasn’t a particularly interesting resource as it didn’t lead to any secondary resources. Furthermore, we liked that the Metal Mine could sometimes produce multiple resources if the player found a tile with multiple deposits of Iron, Copper, and Aluminum, and we wanted the same feature for the Quarry. However, instead of cutting Aluminum, we cut Copper and moved Aluminum into its slot as an upgrade resource for the HQ. (By now, ships were no longer constructed by the player, so we also didn’t need a resource dedicated to that purpose.) To take the place of Copper, we added Carbon, which would also come from the Quarry so that it could ideally produce multiple resources (Silicon and Carbon). Electronics would now also come from Silicon, Carbon, and Aluminum, making it unique as the only resource that required three inputs.

The final change to the resource tree was to replace Plastics with a more interesting resource. Electronics and Glass were useful cash crops based on onworld demand, but they were also important for either building the Offworld Market or (in the case of Glass) upgrading the player’s HQ. Plastics, on the other hand, really didn’t have a purpose if the price was not high. At the same time, we had learned that the game was more interesting if costs were in resources, not in cash, so that their true price fluctuated depending on the market. Patents and optimizations had been priced simply in cash, but if they cost a resource instead, players could decide to make that resource to help themselves conduct research (or to profit from other players’ research). Thus, we replaced Plastics with Chemicals, which would now be used for patents and optimizations. Further, Chemicals would come from Fuel and Carbon, making the resource similarly difficult to make as Glass and Electronics.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Perhaps the one game element which has changed the least from the earliest prototype to the finished game is the claim system, which was borrowed directly from the classic economic video game, M.U.L.E. However, the way buildings interacted with claims in Offworld did change. Originally, each tile could hold four buildings, and the production bonuses were not between buildings in adjacent tiles but between buildings in the same tile. Two Steel Mills in the same tile got a bonus, three Mills got a higher bonus, and four was the best. However, this system was hard to manage, and the player mostly just built the same four building in each tile every time. Most importantly, players were not specializing in specific resources as they generally devoted one tile to each one, which was a big problem for the gameplay. If each player is building the same set of resources, the market is going to be less dynamic; players don’t have to make hard choices about which resources to skip.

The solution was to allow only one building per tile and to give production bonuses for buildings of the same type in adjacent tiles. (We also switched from squares to hexes around this time, which made adjacency rules much more natural.) The bonuses for two adjacent buildings was +50%, which meant that two adjacent Steels Mills produced as much as three non-adjacent ones (and, of course, consumed less power and iron). This dynamic strongly encouraged specialization, which led to more interesting games as players couldn’t just build one of everything and be safe. It was much better, for example, to commit to either Food or Oxygen but not to both, which meant that the price of either one could spike if players all ignored that specific resource (which would then reward the player who first noticed that no one else was making it).

The bonuses were initially +50% for each adjacent building, which meant that the ideal situation was a circle of 6 identical buildings surrounding a seventh building in the center, which would receive an amazing +300% production bonus. We initially thought that committing seven tiles to just one resource would be too dangerous for players if the price of that resources crashed (which was likely considering the oversupply), but players instead quickly cycled these seven buildings (meaning to scrap and rebuild them as a different type) depending on the market. It was a hectic experience, and we didn’t want the best strategy to be one of constantly scrapping one’s building – it felt wrong and also introduced an unwanted dexterity challenge to the game as cycling speed became important. The solution was to add diminishing returns to the bonuses so that the third building gave a +25% bonus, the fourth gave a +10%, and so on. Ultimately, the maximum bonus possible was only +100%, and a player probably would be better off splitting those seven tiles between two resources instead of committing to just one. Now, the triangle of buildings – each with a +75% total bonus – became the new sweet spot, which felt just about right for balancing specialization and diversification. (Interestingly, the final balance is similar to that of M.U.L.E., which also gave bonuses for adjacent building and for every three buildings of the same type.)

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

The reason we streamlined unit selection from the game was that we wanted to create room for the part of the game we cared about – the free market gameplay. Originally, this aspect of the game resembled Railroad Tycoon as well. Players did not have an HQ at all but the map had multiple neutral Colonies, and the player earned the most money by dropping off a resource at the Colony with the highest demand for that resource. Thus, Steel might be selling for $10 at a nearby Colony but for $100 at a distant one, so it was worth the effort to ship the Steel to the other side of the map.

Players had a hard time investing in this version of the game as they felt disconnected from the map, so we decided to add the HQ, a place for the player to store all her resources in a single stockpile. Once the HQ appeared, it also became the natural place to put secondary buildings that required input resources – Steel Mills, Glass Kilns, and so on. At the same time, the HQs replaced the old neutral Colonies (which would make a comeback later in the project), so the local markets were now gone, to be replaced by a single market. In this case, we were heavily inspired by the Market building from Age of Kings, which allowed players to buy and sell Iron, Wood, and Stone at prices that went up and down with each transaction. Thus, if one player bought Wood, the price went up for everyone. We built a similar game-wide market but developed one important difference.

The designers of Age of Kings hedged their bets on free market dynamics by forcing the purchase price of a resource to be always double the sale price. Thus, if one could buy Stone for $100, one could only sell it for $50, which meant that using the market too much would eventually drain away one’s Gold. This price relationship greatly hindered one’s ability to play the market, preventing it from becoming one of the core mechanics of the game; instead, the market was simply an interesting but inessential part of the whole. In our case, however, the resource market is the core of Offworld, so we wanted to encourage people to use it as much as possible. We did originally use the price doubling mechanic from Age of Kings but, fearing that players weren’t using the market enough, collapsed the buy and sell price into a single value; the results were immediate and positive as players started taking advantage of buying low and selling high; the market was now equally driven by the game’s rules and by the players’ strategies. This one change resulted in the first glimpse of what Offworld would become, an intense free market RTS that was unlike anything we had ever played.