The most common problem in the games industry is waste – wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that aren’t actually fun in practice. Often, this discovery is not made until shortly before shipping when the game is finally played outside of the development team. Basic assumptions about how the game should be played might be wrong, and a community more dedicated to winning can easily find holes in the balance. No one knows a game both better and worse than the development team, which understands why every decision was made but is also blind to how the game appears to new players.

At Mohawk, we believe that games need outside feedback as soon as possible. I saw this first-hand with Civilization 3 and 4; the former had no external feedback before shipping and thus had numerous gameplay and balance issues that would have been easy to fix if we had simply known about them. In contrast, we recruited a private external testing group from the community to play Civilization 4 over 18 months before we shipped. The logistics of managing this group – with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches – were a nightmare but much of what went right with the game can be traced to feedback from this group, which kept us on the right track.

Thus, as soon as I heard that Valve was starting an Early Access program, I knew we wanted to take part with Offworld Trading Company. Getting good feedback from players before release is a logistical challenge, especially for a game with a major multiplayer component, and Early Access would solve that problem for us, a small indie team making a very unusual RTS without combat. We were worried about the potential marketing impact of Early Access on our final release launch, but we still went for it, assuming that the increase in quality from early feedback would outweigh the cost.

What Went Right

1 – Learning About the Game

Feedback is important because it is the best way to learn about a game – finding out how people actually play instead of how the team imagines they are going to. Offworld was on Early Access for 14 months – approximately half of the project – and we learned many things that we would have never discovered internally. A great example was player dissatisfaction with scanning the map before founding an HQ; this feedback led directly to the development of the Reveal Map option that completely changes how the game begin.

We discovered this issue during the first competitive tournament as the scanning system quickly became a point of contention. The players argued that if a map had a founding location which was superior to all others, the game would be won simply by whoever discovered that founding location first. These players were concerned primarily with a sense of fairness, which was a reasonable concern for the hardcore community because founding location is so important for high-level play in Offworld.

The solution was to start with the map fully revealed and then let players choose where to found, with a debt auction determining who gets to found first. (A counter starts at $200K debt and then goes down in real-time so that players who found earlier start the game with more debt, essentially “buying” their founding location on credit.) This option worked perfectly for our most competitive players and quickly became the de facto standard for online play.

However, the important point is that we made this change a full year before we shipped Offworld, so we had plenty of time to test and balance the mode, write AI for it, and decide how to introduce it to the player. If we did not have Early Access – even if we only had a small private beta – we would not have discovered this important issue until it was too late. There is no better argument for Early Access than learning about a problem while there is still plenty of time to fix it.

2 – Live Experimentation

One crucial aspect to doing Early Access right is figuring out how to update the game while also keeping it playable. A good example of how this can go wrong is the Corpse and Hound update from Darkest Dungeon (see Tyler Sigman’s 2016 GDC postmortem) which put the developers at odds with a vocal portion of their community. This type of conflict is paradoxical – the point of Early Access is to be able to change the game for a live audience and yet players can punish developers for doing exactly that.

We were very careful about how we rolled out changes while also maintaining the position that the point of Early Access was live experimentation, so we would be fearless in that regard. We took a number of steps to meet these two conflicting goals. First, we released major updates slowly so that casual players would not experience random bugs during normal play. Then, to get feedback on our most recent changes, we created a Steam branch entitled “next_version” which we updated multiple times per week. (This branch was password protected, but we shared the password publicly so that it was essentially an ongoing opt-in patch for our hardcore community.) We felt free to make any changes we wanted to on this branch; if players were upset by a change, they could always just switch back to the main version. Our core community knew that we wanted to hear feedback about this version, so they were excited to jump onto the branch, see what was new, and let us know how they felt about it. Most importantly, they were never blindsided by a change because the next_version branch was constantly updated.

However, when we made potentially controversial changes, we would attach them to game options that the player could disable. For example, our stock system underwent many significant iterations, with some of the changes being more popular than others. In one patch, we added two major features – Destroy Buyout (a player’s buildings are destroyed on a buyout) and Majority Buyout (a player is eliminated when more than half of his or her stock is owned by rivals) – but both were options that the could be turned on or off. Thus, players who hated the changes could play without them while we keep experimenting. To ensure that we would learn enough about these new features, we hosted a community tournament after releasing the patch which specified that both options must be turned on. Knowing that an upcoming tournament would use these rules encouraged our players to practice with them in preparation, which produced meaningful feedback for us. (In this case, Majority Buyout became a standard rule while Destroy Buyout did not, being replaced in the long-term by the Subsidiary system.) Being able to experiment rapidly and without fear was a major factor in taking advantage of Early Access to improve the game’s design.

3 – Building the Community

A vibrant community is important for the long-term health of a game, especially one with a strong multiplayer component. One of the great advantages of Early Access was that we were able to build that community before launch. Although players still find each other on forums, we found that the best place for a community to form is on Twitch. We discovered our best players early by seeing them play on streams, usually ones involving multiplayer games.

We encouraged that growth by hosting Twitch tournaments, meaning that after we organized the brackets, players were required to stream their games. (Because some players were not capable of streaming, other players jumped in to stream the games as observers.) Players and viewers would jump from match to match as the tournaments progressed, forming bonds with each other in the process.

Long-term, our community became an important part of our development process. For example, when working on the AI, I would ask players to do their best on the Daily Challenge (a random map based on a new seed each day) and post their videos or replays online. I would watch to find the biggest holes in the AI’s performance, write some code to fix things, push a build to next_version on Steam, and then ask players to try again. The impact of this rapid iteration cannot be overstated. The quality of a game is determined by how many time that game can go through the design, code, play, and listen feedback loop. With Civ 4, the best we could do was bi-weekly; with Offworld, that loop could be daily.

Finally, building a strong community during Early Access paid off handsomely at launch because we had already primed an active group of players. On their own, they organized a 24-hour marathon of veteran players streaming the game for newcomers interested in the game. Two of our best players – Zultar and Cubit – wrote comprehensive strategy guides that we included as free DLC. Many YouTube videos were already online for players who wanted to see the game; according to Steam Spy, these videos averaged over 200K views per day during the first week. Our final release launch sales were just as strong as our Early Access launch sales, and much of the reason was having an active community already in place.

What Went Wrong

1 – Constantly Shipping

Over the 14 months of Early Access, we shipped ten major updates to the game along with a number of hotfixes, which absolutely took its toll on the development team. Each update had to go through a round of QA, with bugs being assigned to developers who had to interrupt their normal development flow to ensure the update was polished and ready. Some of these bugs were critical, but others were of subjective importance. The QA team was trying their best to be thorough, but during active development, not every bug needs to be fixed, especially for systems that are currently just placeholders. I gave each team member the right to make a judgment call on which bugs to ignore, but the process itself absolutely took time away from more important, long-term tasks.

Also, being on Early Access for half of the game’s development cycle meant that we couldn’t include half-baked features with just debug text and programmer art. This type of prototyping is an important way to make progress while a feature is experimental so that polish would be a waste of resources. Sometimes, we would lock away features that we knew were not ready for a general audience by enabling them only in special developer builds, which helped mitigate the problem. Regardless of the Early Access label, the general Steam audience is simply not ready to see just how ugly games can be during development.

2 – Steam Reviews

Although Steam tags user reviews written before release with a special “Early Access Review” designation, these reviews still count against the game’s positive review percentage. We had generally positive reviews, but – as our current percentage is just two point shy of the 80% threshold for the Very Positive status – it is hard not to imagine that we would be in a higher category of we weren’t saddled with user reviews written 14 months before release. (Our Executive Producer at Stardock, Derek Paxton, took the time to respond to every old negative Steam user review that had a specific complaint addressed in the release version, and we did see a number change their review.)

On a personal level, negative Steam reviews took a not insignificant toll on my own personal morale, and the same is probably true for the rest of the team. It’s hard to read over and over again that the game doesn’t have enough content, has crummy voicework, is missing a tutorial, and so on – as the team is working to fix those issues. Even with an imaginary, unlimited budget, one has a finite amount of energy to invest in a project, and premature yet permanent ratings can drain that energy surprisingly quickly.

3 – Press Apathy

One common argument against Early Access is that “you only get one launch” – meaning that a game’s Early Access launch is, in truth, it’s only launch. We certainly experienced a surge of interest in Offworld when it first launched in early 2015; our game was the new shiny object, so we were able to organize a media blast by revealing the first screenshots a couple weeks before the Early Access release, resulting in exclusive stories and interviews on Gamespot, Polygon, IGN, VentureBeat, and more. Shortly after release, videos appeared from popular YouTube personalities like Sips, Quill, Arumba, and Northernlion while huge audience watched streams from Trump and Day[9].

This wave of media interest led to very strong sales during our first few weeks on Steam even though we launched at $40, making Offworld one of the highest-priced games on Early Access. (At launch, only Galactic Civilizations III – also published by Stardock – was more expensive.) 14 months later, however, we had a much harder time getting press attention for the game’s real launch; most of the websites who wrote about the Early Access launch told us explicitly that since we had been on Steam for so long, they didn’t find us newsworthy. We could expect reviews but little else.

Fortunately, our reviews were strong (82 on OpenCritic, including a glowing review from Rock, Paper, Shotgun), the game had been on over 200K wishlists, and forums activity around the game was high, so we ended up selling nearly the exact same number of copies during our second launch as compared with our first (two-week sales of 23,607 vs. 23,457, respectively). Thus, we proved that a game can have a second launch although we certainly felt like we had significant headwinds from a lack of mainstream press interest.

We are not entirely sure how we were able to sell so well the second time without a strong media push. I’d like to think that the tradeoff we knowingly made by going on Early Access – sacrificing a traditional media buildup for the benefit of early feedback to make a higher-quality game – paid off in the long run although that is, of course, impossible to prove. Indeed, it’s still possible that we may have sold more copies without Early Access if we had paired our media announcement blast with our polished release version, but we’ll never know for sure.

What We Would Do Differently

Without question, we would be willing to put our next game up on Early Access as well. However, we will certainly approach the process differently. First, we would try harder to sell our game independently before going up on Early Access. Many games do this (Factorio, for example, sold over 100K copies before launching on Steam), and we sold Offworld with a “Founders program” on our own site but without actually showing any screenshots or video of the game. Users were buying the game blind, and predictably, we sold the game to just a handful of dedicated players. We were worried about releasing images while the game was full of prototype art (and inevitably seeing those images stick around forever online), but developing a game publicly before going up on Steam has huge advantages.

The pre-Steam audience is more mature and more forgiving of the inevitable bumps of game development; they know upfront that they are buying into something speculative. During our Founders program, we uploaded builds without running it through QA at all (although we often ran a test game internally) because we knew this group would tolerate a few hours downtime if we released a bugged version. We had the freedom to develop without worrying about a temporary mistake landing on our permanent record via negative user reviews. Next time, we would accept the downside of showing prototype art publicly to allow us to stay off of Steam longer; if we are getting sufficient feedback while selling the game independently, we would delay our Early Access launch as long as possible.

When we do launch on Early Access again, however, we would do a few other things differently. We would actually drop QA from the process entirely (at least during the long period after the initial launch and before final release) and instead develop a build process that fits the needs of the development team, which should always be thinking long-term and not worrying about a bug list too early, as well as the Early Access audience, which both wants the game to work yet also to see frequent updates.

One possibility is to run a build automatically every Monday morning which is then uploaded to Steam without testing. This build would be sent to a branch similar to next_version (although this time, the branch would be public and not password protected), which our more dedicated players would try out right away. If there are any problems during the week, we can manually update that branch. By the following Monday, if next_version was stable, we would promote it to the main branch for general consumption. Hopefully, this development process would allow the team to work unhindered while also making sure that the players are experiencing a current version of the game. Indeed, one major problems of releasing monthly updates is that, even after a single week, players might be playing a game already outdated by various new features or balance changes, which makes their feedback – which is the whole point of Early Access – no longer relevant. (Note that some Early Access teams argue that major, themed updates produce the best sales, but we are assuming that sales figures should not be a priority during active development.)

What Steam Should Do Differently

Most of the problems with Early Access result from differing expectations between developers and consumers. Developers want Steam to provide a safe place to build a game while also exposing the game to a large enough audience to get worthwhile feedback. Consumers, on the other hand, want to play a game early and, hopefully, for a low price as well. (However, we heard many times from players that they didn’t even realize they were buying a game on Early Access or what that designation even meant!) We have a few suggestions for improving the role Steam Early Access plays in game development.

1 – Allow unlisted pages

The biggest benefit of being on Steam during early development is not the exposure but the infrastructure: build distribution and branching, access to the Steamworks library, free community support features, and online sales through a trusted store. All of these tools were major problems for independent developers ten years ago and are now easily solved via Steam. However, Valve takes an all-or-nothing approach to Early Access; launch will put the game on the front page of Steam whether the developers want it there or not. During our Founders program, we sold Steam keys directly through our website, but Valve has become increasingly resistant to allow developers to sell Steam keys without their games actually being for sale on Steam.

This policy is forcing some independent developers to other options for their first online sales. (Adam Saltsman launched Overland’s “First Access” on itch.io for this very reason, and they are even limiting the number of keys available for public sale.) Most developers would prefer to stick with Steam (as it has the most mature infrastructure) but are afraid of risking their reputation by launching too early. The answer is to allow developers to sell games on Steam with unlisted store pages, meaning the page is only available via a direct link and does not show up in any advertisements, ranked lists, discovery queues, curator collections, or any other method for exposing the game to the average Steam consumer. This option would allow developers to start selling their fledgling games slowly while still benefiting from Steam’s infrastructure.

2 – Unscored user reviews

User reviews are a staple of online commerce, and Valve was wise to implement them, even with the potential chaos inherent with giving customers the power to judge a game anonymously. However, what exact purpose does a review serve when stating that an Early Access game is not ready? The game’s presence on Early Access is an explicit statement that the game is not ready! More importantly, the existence of scored user reviews argues that Early Access games should be judged and evaluated the way the normal games are, which is simply not true. If the team is serious about iterative development, Early Access games can and should take wild swings in quality during development; the fear of negative user reviews encourages developer to sit comfortably on local maximas. Removing scores (meaning thumbs-up or thumbs-down) from user reviews should send a message that Early Access games are not ready for a final evaluation; the goal is not to trick people by removing scores but to sell to less people, the ones who are onboard with experiencing an unfinished product.

3 – No sales, No refunds

Implicit in the argument against user reviews is the belief that Early Access would be healthier if the games sold to less players overall but also to ones who are more dedicated. Turning off the developer’s ability to reduce the price of a game to drive sales and turning off the consumer’s ability to test out a game knowing that a refund is possible should both drive down game sales, especially among the more casual audience looking for either a bargain or a de facto demo. A Subnautica developer spoke to their view on driving sales during Early Access:

Subnautica is a game that is still very much in development, and we don’t need to bring in a large influx of players right now. When the sale price is lowered by a large margin, it tends to attract a group of people who are less willing and dedicated to giving the game a real chance. You end up with players who just tossed it on the pile of other games they are buying, mainly because it was a great deal, and many of those people either never end up playing it or end up playing it for a short amount of time and posting a negative review because they likely didn’t research it.

One potential alternative that would provide some flexibility in driving sales but without bringing in players not ready for Early Access would be to allow two ways to buy the game – a pre-order option and a play-now option. The latter could be slightly more expensive, which should keep away players who are looking for a deal, while the former provides a nice way for consumers who trust a developer to support them.

Ultimately, Early Access development would be healthier with a slower and steadier influx of players, growing the old-fashioned way by word-of-mouth. We want a special type of consumer, one who is excited about seeing behind the curtain, contributing critical feedback, and seeing the game evolve. We have met these types of players over and over again online; they inspire us with their passion and patience while we work hard to build the best game possible for them. These players are priceless, and Early Access would be the best place to find them if Steam is willing to do the work to guide player expectations.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, released on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

Offworld Trading Company was not an easy game to make, perhaps most especially because people needed to believe that it would work in the first place. Thus, I need to thank Brad Wardell, Derek Paxton, Brian Clair, and everyone else at Stardock for believing that an economic RTS would actually be fun.

I also need to thank the team for taking the leap with me and working so hard to build the game. Dorian Newcomb, my business partner, was the game’s official Art Director and unofficial Producer, making sure that life on Mars looks amazing and that everyone was working in sync. Jason Winokur was the first programmer to join us, and he handled the graphics, supported modding, and generally made sure our project was in great shape. Dave Wagner implemented multiplayer, replays, saved games, leaderboards, and all the other details needed for a modern game. Jim Alley created all of our interface art as well as our great logo. Josh Hardy, after being lured away from the Star Control team, made our building, colony, and HQ models as well as our effects. Joel Bowers implemented the scenario system and then built the tutorials on top of them.

Zack Fowler implemented our terrain system and built the map editor on top of it. Tommy Truong helped us finish, animating our buildings and HQs. Mark Cromer made our sound effects and helped with audio design. Christopher Tin composed an amazing soundtrack that scales with the player’s progress. Kirby Runyon created 32 maps by hand, based on real locations on Mars. Andy Hull added some nice polish to our character popups (and invented the giant check for losing). Erik Ehoff made some key early concept art the helped to define the game’s look. Shentloc, our localization team, did an amazing job to help us ship in nine languages. (Ten if you count British aluminium!)

I’d like to thank my wife Leyla who, perhaps unexpectedly, fell in love with the game and sunk 1,000 hours into it, her very first RTS; her excitement and encouragement helped me keep going during the rough times. Finally, I want to thank the fans that provided us with amazing feedback and support during the pre-release phase; the game would have been much different (and certainly worse) without them. I specifically want to acknowledge the contributions of the following players: Zultar, Cubit, PBHead, Gameslayer, Blues, Blackmagic, Death Tacticus, Indczn, Kingmorgan, Jaiwera, YerAnd, GalacticWino, Roler, TheSpinCycle, Veivi, UltraPope, Dermas, Heisenberg, Showcasemike, and Sir Rogers.

Offworld would still just be an idea in my head without the amazing team we have at Mohawk, and I will forever be in their debt for believing in the game and committing to making it great. I think we will all remember that year when we were playing the game internally as one of the best of our careers — iterating on it constantly based on daily games while slowly becoming aware that we were making something truly unique. Actually finishing the game was very hard work, so I am very proud of what we created. I hope the game will mean as much to you.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, released on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

We are most proud of Offworld because it makes the player think about each game differently, adapting to the events and environment of that specific match instead of using the same build order or pet tactic over and over again. The game encourages adaptation because so many key parts of the game are randomized each time:

• Random Maps – Each map is randomly generated, with different quantities of each resource available. To encourage interesting randomness, we associated each resource with specific terrain types (Carbon with Craters, Water with Lakebeds, Silicon with Sand, and so on), which determines how likely it is that resources might appear on a tile of that terrain type. Then, we limited these types of terrain to different sections of the map; if Sand fields are in the northwest while Lakebeds are in the southeast, then the Silicon and Water will be in different parts of the map. By preventing different resources types from being too close together, each potential founding location is defined by what resources are close and what resources are not. We also create a dead zone of resources near the middle of the map surrounding the Colony to encourage players to found near the edges of the map, making longer shipping lanes more necessary.

• Black Market – The black market typically has six to eight items for sale, and they are selected at the game’s start from a set of eighteen (not unlike the ten card stacks chosen at the beginning of a game of Dominion). As mentioned previously, they are chosen not purely randomly but with certain guarantees (for example, either an EMP or a Power Surge will always be available). Advanced players watch the black market carefully before deciding which HQ type to use. For example, Underground Nukes penalize Scavengers (who are so dependent on maintaining their Carbon supply) but barely affect Scientists (who can still put secondary buildings on top of Trace levels of a resource). Pirates and Magnetic Storms are dangerous for Scientists as they often ship expensive resources across the map; on the other hand, EMPs and Power Surges favor Scientists as they have protection against both. Circuit Overload is dangerous for Robotic players as they like to maintain a positive rate of Power. Expansive HQs are a good choice if Bribe Claim is not available because they will be the only ones with extra claims. Furthermore, the items change how each other can be used; Holograms are much more powerful in games without Spies than in games with them.

• Random Prices – With the Random Prices option turned on (which is highly recommended for veterans), the starting price of resources also changes from game to game. Although half of the resources stay the same, a quarter of them are reduced by 50%, and a quarter of them are increased by 100%. This option was added once veteran players developed general starting strategies for most of the HQ types. For example, two Steel Mills and a Metal Mine on Iron is a typical Robotic opening; however, what if Iron starts high at $40 and Steel starts low at $30? Then, a Steel Mill is going to lose money by converting $40 of Iron into $15 of Steel (although the actual conversion should be a little better because of adjacency bonuses). The Robotic player can stick to the familiar strategy but might be better off looking for something else. Perhaps in this scenario, Power started higher and Aluminum lower? In that case, a Geothermal Plant would be much cheaper than normal and immediately produce some serious money. Basically, the best players will reevaluate all of their opening moves depending on the set of prices revealed at the beginning.

• Random Events – During the game itself, random events occur that shift prices of resources significantly. Some events (Oxygen Surplus, Food Shortage, etc) will affect just one resource, driving the price either up or down; these events are the ones which can be created artificially with a Hacker Array, so players should always view them with a bit of suspicion (even if a Hacker Array is not visible as it can be hid with a Hologram). Other events affect multiple resources at once; for example, a Pipeline Leak will drive up the price of Food, Oxygen, and Fuel. Finally, Solar Flares and Dust Storms affect how buildings function; while the former boosts Solar Panels, the latter penalizes them but boosts Wind Turbines. Taken together, all these events ensure that players need to adapt to random circumstance during the game as well. For instance, a Silicon Shortage might suddenly make Glass Kilns unprofitable; should the player scrap them for something else, or just hold on until the market balances out again? The answer probably depends on many factors, such as the player’s stockpile of Silicon, the Colony’s demand for Glass, whether the player still needs Glass to upgrade, the cost of switching to new buildings, and so on. The random event, however, forces the player to consider the situation carefully.

• Other Players – The decisions made by other players are, of course, not actually random, but they definitely require the player to adapt. For example, the desirability of each HQ changes depending on the other founds. If other players found Scavenger, then perhaps the player should pick Scientific, which has good protection against sabotage. If everyone goes Scientific, then perhaps founding Robotic and building Power is a good move as Scientific players consume plenty of Power with their secondary buildings. Seeing many Robotic players means, of course, that life support resources will not be in such high demand. Besides the founds, players need to pay attention to what everyone else is building. Is everyone skipping Power? (If so, put down an early Geothermal Plant.) Did most players build Farms and not Reactors? (If so, do the opposite and build Reactors..) Are multiple Patent Labs and Optimization Centers up early? (If so, build Refineries as the price of Chemicals is about to rise.) Basically, watch what everyone else is doing to anticipate where the market is heading.

We hope that we’ve made a game that lives up to our ideal for strategy games — that the player should always be planning, always be reacting, always be thinking.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, released on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

The hardest part of the game design to get right – and one that changed significantly only a few months before release – was the stock market. The system had both a thematic purpose (a modern economic game needs a stock market to reflect success) and a gameplay purpose (the system serves as a desperately needed victory condition for a game in which wiping out the opponent militarily is not an option). Basically, we needed a way to end the game that was more interesting than simply counting who made the most money.

Our initial idea involved buying out other players and actually acquiring their HQ as well as all of their claims and buildings. After a player had no more shares available on the open market, she would be vulnerable to a buyout, which any player could trigger by paying double value for all of the shares owned by other players. Thus, a player could defend himself by buying up his own stock or attack other players by buying up their stock, in preparation for a later buyout.

This system worked reasonably well except for two problems. First, players often felt that the game spiralled out of control following a buyout because they inherited a lot of new buildings all over the map that they didn’t have time to manage. Second, buyouts were all-or-nothing affairs; when two players were racing to buyout a third player, the winner would usually snowball forward and easily dominate the rest of the game (or, if we tried to balance out this effect by making buyouts too expensive, an even worse situation occurred in which players saved up their money instead, in hopes being able to afford the final buyout).

We solved both these problems with the subsidiary system, under which players no longer acquired all of the eliminated player’s buildings and claims but instead now owned shares of a new subsidiary, which is the eliminated player’s company run by a modified AI that focuses solely on making money (and avoids advanced options like sabotage, patents, auctions, and stocks). The subsidiary simply exists to distribute its profits to shareholders, according to the ownership percentage. This system is much easier for players to handle as they don’t need to manage their subsidiary’s buildings and also easily handles split ownership, avoiding the problems of the original all-or-nothing system.

Because subsidiaries enabled partial ownership of companies, we were able to add one more wrinkle to the system — the majority buyout, which occurs if the other players own six shares (meaning more than half) of a player’s stock. In a majority buyout, the targeted player is instantly eliminated and turned into a subsidiary. This feature prevents players from staying in the game far after the point it becomes obvious that they don’t have a chance; if a player’s rivals own six or more of his shares, his chances of winning are slim at best. Most importantly, the player is not left around with an opportunity to unbalance the game by, perhaps, using sabotage maliciously to keep a specific opponent from winning. If a player has clearly lost, the company should be run by the neutral, subsidiary AI as soon as possible.

One final important change to the stock system came very late, less than five months before we shipped the game. Some players asked for more transparency in how close players are to buyouts. Thus, we experimented with a system in which players could buyout an opponent’s self-owned stock one-by-one (for double cost). Stocks owned in one’s own company became the equivalent of hit points, and when a player ran out of stock, her game was over. The system led to some tense games in which players could easily see how close the game was to ending as they lost control of their own stock, one share at a time. For the first time, three-player games were playable because the two leading players could each end up with half of the last-place one. However, free-for-alls with more than three players suffered because players could team up against one specific player and buy one or two shares each, forcing him out of the game.

Next, we tried a middle ground. Players could buyout shares one at a time until only five shares remained; at that point, the remaining five shares have to be bought all together. This mechanic struck the right balance between making buyouts more transparent while also protecting players from being knocked out by the group. One final small change gave us our final stock system – during a buyout, players have to pay 20% extra for each share owned by a third party, which gives a bonus to players who invest in buying some of the first five shares. Many players didn’t even notice this final tweak, but it felt better; if a player buys the first five shares in an opponent, she is now best positioned to finish the buyout.

We are often asked how Offworld compares strategically to more conventional RTS games. Some parts of the game are so different that it is hard to even make comparisons; however, the development history of the game’s stock market is interesting because it ended up in a place that mirrors the most famous dynamic in RTS games – rush vs turtle vs boom. As a short explanation, these three strategies have a high-level rock/paper/scissors relationship. A rusher (who sacrifices economy for early military) will beat the boomer (who sacrifices defenses for a strong economy). The rusher, however, loses to the turtler (who builds defenses in preparation for an attack). Finally, the boomer beats the turtler by outpacing him economically by the end game.

Strategically, our stock system parallels rush/turtle/boom. Going for an early majority buyout of another player is akin to the rush, which is done by investing one’s money not in economic growth but in buying another player’s stock. This rush, however, can be beaten by a turtle strategy, which means buying up shares of one’s own stock, especially that all-important fifth share that prevents a majority buyout. However, the turtler will lose to a player planning to boom by investing as much money as possible in upgrading her HQ, expanding production, and usually building the first Offworld Market. Completing the circle, the boomer risks losing to the rusher who only needs to buy those first six shares to knock her out. Most games of Offworld have specific key moments when this strategic tension is clear – when a player buys his own fifth share and blocks a majority buyout attempt or when a player spends all her money to upgrade to the final HQ level but forgot to buy enough shares to defend herself. The original stock system did not have these dynamics, so it’s interesting to consider how we came upon the rush/turtle/boom mechanics of a traditional RTS, basically on accident.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, released on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

Offworld is an RTS, so having different factions was part of the design from the beginning; what each one meant, of course, took a long time to form. However, one design choice we inherited without really considering seriously was having players choose their faction before the game began — it wasn’t a choice because every strategy game ever, from Civilization to Crusader Kings, from WarCraft to Company of Heroes, from Master of Orion to Stellaris, from Master of Magic to Endless Legend, has players pick their faction before starting the game.

One of our playtesters floated this simple, but powerful, idea after a match one day — “What if I could choose my HQ after I see the map?” This suggestion took about an hour to code and was immediately a giant step forward for the game. Perhaps this idea was a natural outgrowth of the game’s design; the HQ types of Offworld favor specific arrangements of resources, so players would inevitably wish they had chosen a different HQ after seeing the map. Indeed, the exploration/founding phase of Offworld is also quite unique among RTS games (perhaps our background in the Civilization series made it a natural starting point for us), and adapting one’s choice in HQ to the random map makes for a very interesting decision. The best Offworld players are capable of winning with all four HQs so that they are never at risk of losing a game because the random map doesn’t match their favorite HQ. Finally, choosing HQs during the game also meant that players could take into account each others’ choices; for example, after noticing that all three other players founded Scientific HQs, which often consume tons of Power with secondary buildings like Steel Mills and Electrolysis Reactors, a player might decide to go Robotic and just focus on producing Power, making money as the price spikes earlier than usual.

Expansive – This HQ was always the vanilla one, with bonuses that did not significantly change the game but were still strong enough to compete. Thus, one HQ could be seen as the default – against which the others could be compared – and also what new players could use to get a baseline Offworld experience. The most obvious way to make a player stronger was to simply give him more claims, so Expansive HQs receive one extra claim each time they upgrade, a hugely powerful, if also hugely boring, advantage. We also wanted to give them a construction bonus to help them expand quickly, so we made their buildings cost half as much steel as they did for other HQ types. (In our initial Early Access version, Expansive HQs also needed half as much Steel to upgrade, but our community quickly discovered this bonus was hugely overpowered.) The Expansive player tends to look for as many High resources as possible – to feed all the secondary buildings on its extra claims – so we made claiming tiles father away from the HQ a little easier by increasing the speed of Expansive Freighters.

Robotic – From the beginning, the most obvious way to create a distinct HQ was to simply allow one to ignore life support costs. Thus, the Robotic HQ started as the one which didn’t need to worry about Water or Food or Oxygen. We also changed its units to use Power instead of Fuel, so that Robotic players could truly ignore Water entirely by not needing Electrolysis Reactors. The bonus for founding on top of resources originally belonged to the Expansive HQ, which made more sense with its large footprint when HQs got a slow but steady rate of production from the resources underneath them. We determined that it was just simpler (and reduced our UI challenge) to simply destroy the resources on found and give the player a lump sum relative to the resource level. After the change, the Robotic were a better fit for this bonus as they could take advantage of an early resource lead to upgrade fast without concern (because they consume no extra life support as they upgrade). In fact, the Robotic HQ originally consumed Power (and, in a later version, consumed Electronics), but we felt that having the HQ consume nothing as it upgraded made it even more distinct.

However, players felt the Robotic HQ was still underpowered, so we made two further changes. First, we changed the resources Robotic HQs needed to upgrade — needing half as much Aluminum and using Electronics instead of Glass (and half as much as well). Thus, we improved further the ability of Robotic players to upgrade quickly and, perhaps more importantly, changed what type of resources they looked for on the map. Because Aluminum is much less important to them, Robotic players can found in locations that are unappealing (without good access to either Water or Aluminum) to other players. (The high-level goal here is that each HQ type should have a different ideal founding location so that players benefit from being able to play all four types.)

Second, we changed how adjacency rules worked for the Robotic player; buildings would get an adjacency bonus not just for being next to buildings of their own type but also for being next to buildings which supply their input. Thus, a Steel Mill gets a 50% bonus for being next to a Metal Mine that produces Iron while a Glass Furnace would get a 75% bonus for being next to an Elemental Quarry producing Silicon and an Electrolysis Reactor producing Oxygen. We also experimented with giving Robotic HQs a general production bonus relative to how much extra Power they produced but – instead of adding another special bonus to an already long list – we extended the adjacency bonus to include buildings which provide Power. (Thus, Solar Panels would give an adjacency bonus to all buildings which consumed Power.) Again, these change meant that Robotic HQs benefit from a certain arrangement of resources that might not matter to other HQs, such as a Geothermal near Iron (which could both boost Steel Mills) or a variety of Low resources close together (which enables a chain of input bonuses).

Scavenger – The initial idea behind the Scavengers was an HQ that used a different resource as its primary building material. Almost all buildings in the game require a significant amount of Steel, making it an important resource throughout the game, so allowing a player to bypass that resource entirely radically changes the resource hierarchy. Scavengers originally required Silicon back when Copper was still in the game, but we switch them over to Carbon when it was added because Carbon was the easiest resource to skip during the early game. Carbon only leads to Chemicals and Electronics, both resources that players do not typically need until they have upgraded at least a couple time, so Scavenger players can thrive on parts of the map ignored by other HQs.

We also wanted the Scavengers to thematically be tied to espionage and sabotage, which inspired the HQ’s other two bonuses. For espionage, we gave Scavenger players early warning of most random events affecting the resource market, including all of the ones artificially triggered by the Hacker Array. It’s difficult to quantify the value of this bonus as it is simply information, but a good Scavenger player will buy and sell rapidly in response to an impending shortage or surplus. Indeed, multiple Scavenger players can greatly amplify the effects of these events; for example, if a Food shortage is coming, the Scavengers might buy up a lot of Food in preparation for the coming rise in price, which of course drives up the price before the shortage even arrives. It can sometimes be hard to tell if the price is changing more from the random event itself or from Scavengers playing the market.

To associate the Scavengers with sabotage, we gave them a random item from the black market each time they upgraded. This power was interesting but considered simply too random by most players. In a 2-player match, for example, getting Pirates from the first upgrade could put the other player in such a hole that the match felt over (whether or not this was really true). Thus, we changed the bonus to be a shorter black market cooldown, so that a Scavenger player could buy sabotage items quicker than the other players. This change took away an unnecessary bit of randomness and also had a more pronounced effect later in the game, which improved perceptions of fairness because, early on, the Scavenger player usually couldn’t afford to buy sabotage from the black market each time it unlocked anyway. (Although the old random sabotage bonus was removed, we left the code in the game and recycled it as a special power for one of the Campaign’s Scavenger executives.)

Scientific – The most unusual HQ in the game – because they can ignore High resources and skip primary buildings – the Scientists also started off with very different powers. Originally, the HQ received Optimization Center upgrades simply from maintaining buildings; if a Scientific player built a bunch of Steel Mills, then he would eventually earn Improved Steel Production, then Efficient Steel Production, and so on — and all for free. The Scientists also were the only HQ that could see and use Trace resources (which, at this point in development, were also generated randomly and were as productive as Low resources). Finally, the Scientific HQ acquired patents faster, which actually was taken away by the time the game released on Early Access but came back later to give the HQ more of a scientific flavor.

This combination of bonuses just didn’t seem to work, and Scientists were the least popular HQ. The free optimization upgrades felt too random and hard to monitor; because the player was not making active choices, she wasn’t invested in the outcome of the system. We decided to drop this bonus in favor of a new, more radical one — that secondary buildings could extract their input resources directly from their tile. This idea came from thinking about ways to make Trace resources more important for the Scientific player; a few extra Low-equivalent resources was not particularly interesting, but if those resources could be used to power Hydrolysis Reactors and Steel Mills and Glass Blowers? Suddenly, the entire map looked different to a Scientific player; that giant cluster of uninteresting Trace and Low Water tiles becomes a money-making machine for triangles of Scientific Farms and Reactors.

Ironically, the Trace resource bonus that inspired the defining feature of the Scientific HQ would not last much longer. The one downside to allowing players to choose their HQ type after exploring the map is that there was no way to show Trace resources only to Scientific players before founding (because, of course, these players are not Scientific yet). For a while, we kept Trace resources in as before and simply revealed them to Scientific players after founding, but it seemed like a weird vestigial rule that didn’t fit the current game. Thus, we dropped the association with Scientific players and changed the rules for Underground Nukes so that resources could never be destroyed permanently but instead became Trace resources (which now produced at only a quarter of the rate of Low).

Scientific HQs have one more bonus – protection against EMPs and Power Surges – which used to be much stronger, originally protecting them against all types of sabotage. The desired effect was not necessarily to boost the Scientists but to simply make sabotage decisions more interesting. For example, should a player target the Scientist with the highest stock price or someone else without protection against sabotage? Ultimately, this bonus proved simply too powerful, so we reduced it to only affect sabotage which froze buildings. The upshot of this change is that players now have an important reason to check the black market before picking an HQ; if both EMPs and Power Surges are available, then Scientists are a good choice as they have natural protection against a significant portion of the black market.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, released on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

Adrenaline Boost – The original concept of the Adrenaline Boost was to be the opposite of the EMP, meaning an area-of-effect black market item that boosted buildings instead of disabling them. However, players need to be careful with Boosts as they increase a building’s speed (how fast it works) and not its efficiency (how much of resource X is made from resource Y). Thus, a boosted Steel Mill will produces twice as much Steel but also consume twice as much Iron, which means that the player may not have enough Iron to support the boosted Mill, which means the price of Iron will rise as the player has to buy more and more Iron to feed the Mill. By the time the Boost is over, the building might even be running at a loss (especially since the price of Steel might drop from the sudden overproduction). Adrenaline Boosts are also great for advanced buildings as they make them all work faster, meaning quicker patents, optimizations, hacks, and (most importantly) launches. In fact, players favored boosted Offworlds so much that we had to add a special rule for them, increasing the speed of just that one building by 50% instead of the standard 100%. We dislike adding special rules to handle a single tactic, but a boosted Offworld (especially if protected with a Goon Squad) could simply end the game, especially in 1v1.

Slowdown Strike – Initially, the Slowdown Strike was meant to be just an alternate version of the EMP, hitting all buildings within a certain radius but slowing them down instead of disabling them. However, the EMP was still strictly better, which put the item in an odd place; it is never good to give a player two choices, one of which is always worse. We tried to fix this imbalance by giving the Slowdown Strike a bigger radius and longer effect time, but we had to increase those numbers so much that the item somehow felt both too powerful and yet still too weak (because the buildings did keep working). Instead, we gave the Slowdown Strike a unique power — the ability to ignore Goon Squads. This change gave the item an important strategic position, a way to hurt a player even if everyone knows he has a Goon Squad on that one important building. Ignoring Goon Squads only works because the original effect was so weak, an example of solving a design problem with an orthogonal power instead of just turning up the numbers. Further, the Slowdown Strike is the mirror opposite of the Adrenaline Boost (meaning a building with both effects works just like normal), and as players often protect their Boosts with Goon Squads, the Strike is the natural counter to that situation.

Network Virus – Perhaps the most conceptually strange item on the black market, the Network Virus punishes other players for allowing their buildings to become unprofitable. Initially, the effect only prevented players from deleting buildings and turning them on or off. However, as long as a player turned off his buildings when they were losing money, the Network Virus wasn’t that dangerous. Thus, we changed the effect to force a building to be always on. Still, players could still find a way out by selling off all of the input resource consumed by the building (which means it would stop processing). Next, we turned on auto-supply for all buildings, which meant that the input resources would be automatically purchased by the owning player. Of course, players found a way out of that too, by simply getting rid of all their cash to prevent auto-supply from happening. To fix that, we made Network Virus auto-supply actually buy input resources from debt if necessary. This change fixed all the ways player could avoid the effect, but it created a new, bizarre problem, which is that auto-supplying using debt is actually a GOOD thing if a building was profitable (because the building can now work even if the player is out of cash and resources). Fortunately, a fix was possible by simply not allowing players to hit their own buildings with a Network Virus, which was not something we had worried about previously. A Network Virus is most effective if the attacker is also manipulating the market at the same time; for example, if Steel Mills are hit with a Virus, the player who attacked should also buy up as much Iron as possible to drive up the price and push the Steel Mills further into the red.

Circuit Overload – Originally, the Power doubling of Circuit Overload was part of the Network Virus. The player couldn’t turn his buildings off, and the building would consume twice as much Power, which usually guaranteed that the building would be locked in an unprofitable state. However, players quickly found ways to hurt their rivals with the Network Virus regardless of the price of Power, but if Power was high, the combination was devastating. Thus, we created Circuit Overload for just the Power effect. However, because the item didn’t affect Power buildings at all, we also extended Circuit Overload to shut down buildings that were producing Power. Occasionally (and especially on maps with lots of Geothermal Plants), the price of Power drops so low that Circuit Overloads are not particularly effective; in that situation, players will often use the item as a cheap and safe method for removing Goon Squads from enemy buildings. (Because the price of Power is low, giving a Circuit Overload to an opponent is not particularly dangerous.)

Core Sample – The Core Sample is the only way to add resources to the map after the game starts. This ability could easily be too strong if players could control which resource is found, so we made the discovery random. However, the probability for each resource is different depending on the terrain; for example, a Core Sample of a Volcanic tile is most likely to find Iron. Thus, players can usually find the resource they want if they take the time to find the right terrain type. Randomness after the player makes a choice is generally not a good fit for Offworld (see above as we stopped Power Surges from hitting Goon Squads randomly), but we mitigate that issue by actually showing the odds of discovering the most likely resource to be found in the popup help when mousing over a tile. If players are going to roll a virtual die, best to be as transparent as possible with their chances.

Underground Nuke – In some ways, the Underground Nuke is the mirror opposite of the Core Sample; it is the only way to subtract a resource away from the map. However, that is actually a bit of an understatement — the Underground Nuke is the only way to permanently damage another player. Every other type of sabotage, while painful, is still only temporary. EMPs and Power Surges wear off eventually. Pirates leave after stealing enough resources. Buildings destroyed with Dynamite can be repaired. Not only do Mutinies end, but a building can be stolen back with another Mutiny. An Underground Nuke, however, is forever. Thus, players sometimes treat Underground Nukes the way real nukes were treated during the Cold War — with the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. If Nukes are available, players will often not use them, unless someone else makes the first move. If one player nukes another’s Aluminum, the victim is probably just going to nuke the attacker’s Aluminum in return, so maybe the players will all just watch and wait. Not all players are this cautious, of course, but this situation is common enough. One important change to Nukes came when Scientists were no longer the only HQ that could see Trace resources; instead of just removing Trace levels from the game, we made it the minimum state for a nuked tile, which did help Nukes from being too powerful.

Dynamite – As mentioned above, Dynamite replaced the ability of the original Pirate unit to destroy buildings. The effect could never be quite as strong as before because an unchallenged Pirate could wipe out all of a player’s buildings away from the HQ (which had natural protection against Pirates). Indeed, we were worried that Dynamite was going to be a little bit boring; the building gets blown up and then simply gets repaired. Was there an interesting choice being made? After adding Dynamite to the game, however, we found that it had two interesting uses. First, because the repair unit, the Engineer, is very slow, distance makes a great deal of difference. Dynamite is a powerful tool against a Geothermal Plant, or even just a Mine, on the other side of the map from the owner’s HQ. Also, because the owner needs to pay half the construction resources to repair a building, Dynamite is great against Offworld Markets, by far the most expensive building in the game. Even though Offworlds are usually near the owner’s HQ (so repair times are minimal), having to buy large quantities of Glass, Electronics, and either Steel or Carbon can really slow down a player. Furthermore, if the saboteur happens to be making Glass or Electronics and would benefit from an increase in demand, it is all the better.

Mutiny – Another one of the original black market items, the Mutiny allows perhaps the most devastating of powers — stealing an opponent’s building for a period of time. The Mutiny is best used to take a building at the peak of its effectiveness. If Power spikes, grab a Geothermal Plant. If Water becomes a problem, steal a Water Pump. Better yet, the player should take one next to his own Pump, benefiting from an adjacency bonus. Advanced buildings are also great targets for a Mutiny to grab a patent, trigger a shortage, or even launch resources offworld. If the launches are arranged ahead of time, a stolen Offworld Market can launch twice during a Mutiny. (Taking a boosted Offworld is one of the greatest pleasures in the game.) Stealing a tile already hit with a Mutiny is also a great move because those tiles are very unlikely to be protected by a Goon Squad (although that is occasionally seen in 1v1 play).

Goon Squad – The Goon Squad has been mentioned so many times already that it is hard to know what else to say about it. Although the item was created to give players a defense against sabotage, we designed it to also encourage revenge. If sabotage is caught by a Goon Squad, the identity of the attacker is then revealed, and the sabotage item is then given to the defender. Thus, the game encourages the defender to strike back at the attacker with the same sabotage used against her. Players often make an emotional decision in this situation, even if it’s not necessarily the correct one; saving the sabotage for later or for a different player might be the best choice, but revenge definitely feels better. One interesting aspect of Goon Squad use is guessing where one’s opponents have placed them; every time a black market item is purchased, the price goes up, so everyone knows when a Goon Squad has been bought. If a player gets down the first Geothermal Plant, and Mutinies are on the market, then a Goon Squad would be a good idea to protect the tile. However, once the Goon Squad is purchased, and the price goes up, everyone is going to assume that the Geothermal is protected. Perhaps it would be better to protect the Steel Mills and catch everyone by surprise? Finally, we made one small but important tweak to Goon Squad after seeing it in action. The protected tile is shielded from EMPs, Power Surges, and other sabotage that hits multiple tiles, which of course reveals the location of the Goon Squad. After seeing players watch for these events, trying to remember which tile had the Goon Squad for later, we decided to just make it easier for players and permanently reveal the Goon Squad to everyone once it had been exposed. If information has been available to players previously, we don’t believe taxing their memory is good game design — better to help them remember to inform decisions later in the game.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases today and is available for purchase here. (A Game Almanac, which includes the full Designer Notes, is available as free DLC.)

Bribe Claim – Certainly the simplest black market item, Bribe Claim is one of only two (along with Cook the Books) which takes effect immediately. Everyone wants more claims, but however appealing a new claim may be, players should be careful not to overvalue the item. Bribing a claim for $4K may sound great, but what if the player could instead upgrade her HQ for $8K and get three claims? The best time to bribe a claim is if the player has one claim left for a new building and needs the extra claim to at least build a second building for the +50% adjacency bonus.

Cook the Books – This item is one of only two (along with Bribe Claim) that can be purchased with a D bond rating, which is especially important in this case because buying Cook the Books can actually raise the player up to a C rating. (However, the game will track if the player’s debt is so bad that he would be below D if such a rating existed. In that case, buying Cook the Books will not raise the bond rating.) Games with Cook the Books available are interesting because players know that they can take on more debt than normal. However, a lower interest rate on a larger amount of debt can still spiral out of control, so sometimes the winner ends up being the Robotic player who decided to skip debt and just sell Power.

Auction Tile – The first version of this item only allowed players to auction off their own tiles. The upside is that the seller is rewarded in straight cash (while the buyer can overbid with debt), and if the other players get into a bidding war, the money can fund something much more important than the lost tile. In fact, the building on the tile is auctioned off as well; I’ve always been curious to know how much people would pay for an Offworld Market although I have certainly be too hesitant to try that myself. However, auctioning off one’s own tiles is a rare strategy, so we also added the ability to auction off neutral tiles (although in this case, the money goes to the bank). The typical strategy is to auction off a tile next to one’s own HQ so that it is not particularly valuable to anyone else and can therefore be bought for a low price.

Hologram – Philosophically, I have always designed games for both the human and the AI. Obviously, game mechanics needs to be fun for the human as the artificial intelligence is not going to be buying our game. However, I also always evaluate game mechanics by whether the AI can, not necessarily have fun with them, but can understand them and use them in a reasonable way. The hologram is a very interesting black market item that adds an element of guessing the opponent’s mind into the game, but it is completely unsuitable for the AI. The problem is making the AI capable of guessing where the humans placed her Holograms. If we don’t solve that problem, then the human can easily hide every Offworld Market and just walk to victory. On the other hand, if we DO solve that not insignificant problem, then the human is going to just assume the AI is cheating and peeking at a bit of game state it shouldn’t be seeing. It’s a classic lose-lose situation for an AI developer. We solved this problem by finally drawing a line between the single-player and the multiplayer versions of the game; the Hologram (along with the Spy and Auction Tile) would be considered Advanced Sabotage and turned off by default in the single-player game. Keeping both sides of the game identical is still the rule, but sometimes breaking that rule is worth it. Holograms were simply too much fun to sacrifice to a philosophical goal.

Spy – Of course, the Hologram would never have worked at all if there wasn’t some way to counter it, which is why the Spy exists. However, the Spy does a whole lot more; it reveals hidden Goon Squads, what advanced buildings (such as Patent Labs and Hacker Arrays) are doing, and the stockpile stored inside a building (which can be useful when destroying a full Glass Kiln with Dynamite). Information is powerful although that power is also hard to quantify; many players felt that the Spy was not worth triggering a black market cooldown, especially when looking for an Offworld Market to steal with a Mutiny. Thus, we removed the cooldown for the Spy, as well as for the Hologram, so that players could use as many as they could afford. Because both items only affect information and not actual resources, this change was still balanced with the rest of the black market. (We also tried taking the cooldown away from Auction Tile, but Zultar proved in a memorable game how much one player could grind everything to a halt by auctioning off all his buildings.)

MULE – A not very subtle nod to one of the major inspirations for Offworld, the MULE also lets the player do something unique — to mine resources without constructing a building or even using a claim. Thus, players can acquire 200 Aluminum without actually having to commit to an Aluminum tile. MULEs are also a great way to take advantage of a primary resource that has spiked in value by simply mining the most valuable resource relatively close to the player’s HQ. MULEs do, however, consume Fuel while traveling and while mining, so players should be careful not to use MULEs if the price of Fuel is too high.

Pirates – As mentioned above, Pirates were originally actual units that the player would buy and move around the map, attacking enemy ships and buildings. The black market version simply stayed on one tile and stole resources from every Freighter that came within range (and would disappear after giving a total of 100 resource to the attacker) Initially, every ship was shot down, so a player hit with Pirates early in the game might be knocked out entirely if he lost his first 100 units of Steel to another player. Thus, we added a dice roll for each shot so that each Freighter had a 50% chance of surviving. This system worked reasonably well but could still annoy players (either the attacker or the victim) if the dice were streaky. Our artists came up with a new concept for the Pirates; they would no longer fly in circles but instead shoot at Freighters from the ground to knock off resources. This art change inspired the final system, which uses no luck and also doesn’t strangle victims. Now, Pirates always hit Freighters but only steal half of the resources; we’re not sure why it took so long to get to this obvious solution! (Putting Pirates on the ground also creates an interesting, if obscure, wrinkle; players can actually remove Pirates from the game if they construct a building in the same tile. Normally, placing a building in a tile just to kill Pirates doesn’t make sense, but players should at least consider this possibility when placing them.)

Magnetic Storm – The Magnetic Storm originated from trying to design a way to hurt Freighters differently than Pirates do. We chose the simplest approach — to simply destroy all Freighters (and their cargo) within a large radius. This power can be especially useful if multiple players are shipping across the same territory as it can hit as many units as are within its range. Scientific HQs are especially vulnerable to Magnetic Storm as they sometimes ship Food, Oxygen, Fuel, Steel, Glass, and even Chemicals and Electronics across the map, all of which tend to be valuable. Players who want to wipe out a specific resource can use an EMP first on the distant buildings, which then automatically triggers a shipment to the owner’s HQ, which can then be wiped out immediately with a Magnetic Storm. One rare, but still powerful, use of a Magnetic Storm is to prevent a player from repairing a distant building destroyed with a Dynamite; the repair Engineer can be wiped out just before it gets to the tile (and although the it does regenerate at the HQ, these units travel very slowly).

EMP – One of the original black market items, the EMP may have been the first one added to the game as it has such a straightforward effect – simply turn off all the buildings of another player within a certain radius. Initially, all buildings were shut off for the same period of time, but we found the choice more interesting if the effect decreased by distance from the target tile — not only did this effect make sense thematically, but players now needed to consider which specific buildings were the most important to freeze. Because an early EMP can be so devastating (potentially shutting down all of a player’s buildings), an expert player will often split her early buildings between different sides of her HQ, making sure that at least half of her production would survive an EMP attack.

Power Surge – The Power Surge works similar to an EMP but is meant to punish players for a different type of arrangement. The EMP is most destructive if a player clumps his buildings together to take advantage of adjacency bonuses. A Power Surge, on the other hand, is most dangerous if a player builds out in snaky lines, which are less vulnerable to EMPs and can be useful for connecting the HQ to distant resources. The Power Surge moves to adjacent tiles randomly but cannot hit the same tile twice. Therefore, if a player isn’t careful, a Surge can end prematurely if it gets trapped on a tile without a valid path; the best place to start a Surge is at the end of a line of buildings because it will have a clear path. We made one important change to how Power Surges interact with Goon Squads, which kill Power Surges if they randomly hit them. After the change, the Surge will only move onto a tile with a Goon Squad (even if unrevealed) if there are no other options available, which means that players never get an unlucky roll with Surges. Players had referred to hitting Goon Squads with an unlucky roll as a “bad bounce” — which meant an unintentional and unwanted bit of luck had entered the system. (Goon Squads were meant to protect primarily against single-tile sabotage, like Mutiny or Dynamite; it was not meant to kill Power Surges randomly.) Now, if a player wants to protect against Surges, she should arrange her buildings with chokepoints and place the Goon Squads on those tiles, guaranteeing the block.

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.

Although the black market is one of the defining features of Offworld, it was not part of the initial game design. The idea originated, after the basic free market gameplay was already in place, from an offhand comment made by one playtester — “It would be cool if I could sabotage the other players’ buildings.” The game was not supposed to be about combat (although in this earlier version of the game, the player could hire pirate ships that flew around attacking units and building), but some well-timed sabotage sounded interesting and fun.

The first question was how players should acquire sabotage. The idea of something called a “black market” fit well with the economic theme of Offworld. Initially, the Black Market was actually a neutral building that appeared on the map, which players could discover during exploration and then access to buy the items. (An equivalent Pirate Haven building existed for hiring pirates.) Each time a player bought an item, he would then be locked out of the market for a specific period of time, so players couldn’t sabotage as much as they could afford. (Under the original model, if a player found more than one Black Market, they could buy sabotage more often.)

We were also concerned about players turning an economic game into a de facto military one by deciding to spend as much money as possible hurting each other with sabotage. Therefore, we decided to double the price of each item every time it was bought by any player. (Eventually, this algorithm became a little more nuanced; the price went up by less than double, scaled by the number of players, and also increased for the purchasing player slightly more.) This global increase in price meant that, at some point, the cost of sabotaging another player would be so high that it would no longer be worth doing. Increasing prices globally had another interesting effect; seeing a Mutiny go up in price means that everyone knew that someone just bought one. Who is going to get hit? Which building? Maybe a player should buy a Goon Squad to protect his Geothermal Plant? Of course, once the player with the Mutiny sees the price of Goon Squads increase, maybe she should be more careful where she attacks?

The visibility of black market prices created a wonderful sense of paranoia, and we wanted to ratchet up the level of distrust among players by also not revealing who actually triggered each sabotage incident. When a Geothermal Plant gets destroyed with Dynamite or stolen with a Mutiny, the owner can only guess who attacked him. Hearing inaccurate accusations fly back and forth during play sessions is a singular experience. Players will sometimes engage in crude diplomacy by declaring who they think should be targeted (and why they themselves, of course, should not be). The fear of players aiming to knock out a specific players based on his pregame reputation led to the idea of the Masquerade mode, which hides a player’s identity until he is either eliminated or wins the game.

Originally, the items on the black market were the same six every game: Bribe Claim, EMP, Power Surge, Statis Field, Mutiny, and Underground Nuke. The Stasis Field, which froze ships in place, was cut when the Pirate and Police ships were removed from the game. To replace Pirate ships, two new items were added to the black market that had similar effects but no micromanagement – Pirates attacked shipping lanes and Dynamite destroyed buildings. After playing with this set of items for months and months, we were worried that players had no way to protect themselves from sabotage. Thus, we added the Goon Squad as a check on too much black market aggression.

We launched on Early Access with these seven items – Bribe Claim, EMP, Power Surge, Underground Nuke, Mutiny, Dynamite, and Pirates – which long-time players still think of as the classic set. However, after many more months of play, we felt that we were missing a great opportunity to add diversity to the game (and thus encourage more adaptive play) by adding more items to the black market and choosing them randomly before each game. Eventually, we added twelve more items to the black market, from which around seven are chosen each game.

Initially, the algorithm to select them was quite random, like picking cards from a deck, but this method made the game too random as the delicate balance between each type of sabotage and the other game mechanics was lost; for example, a Scientific player didn’t have to worry about Pirates or Magnetic Storms if neither one appeared for sale. Thus, we added some rules to govern the black market — there would always be either an EMP or a Power Surge, either a Dynamite or a Mutiny, and either Pirates or Magnetic Storms. Further, Goon Squads would always be in the game as long as at least two items which triggered them were available. These rules helped preserve a bit of the flavor of the classic black market, so that players have a sense of which items are more common and which are more rare.

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 Offworld Market was inspired primarily by the triangle trade system outline by Robert Zubrin in The Case for Mars — miners in the Asteroid Belt would send rare and valuable metals to Earth, Earth would send send colonists and finished goods to Mars, and Mars would send supplies and life support (water, food, oxygen, fuel) to the Belt. Although Mars seems like an unlikely source of, say, food, the important facts are that Mars is significantly smaller than the Earth (so that launching a rocket offworld consumes much less fuel) and also much closer to the Belt (saving both fuel and time).

From a gameplay perspective, the Offworld Markets give players access to a much larger trade network with more stable prices. Essentially, there is no way for players to drive down offworld prices because the demand is so high and widespread, which contrasts significantly with the violent swings of the onworld market. This stability is important because, simply put, it guarantees that the game can end. Occasionally, players produce so many resources that the onworld prices drop low enough that not enough money is available to end the game in a timely manner. Once players start shipping offworld – often making over $50K per launch – the end is near.

Thus, Offworld Markets are equivalent to the uber-units seen in traditional RTS’s, which are only available at the end of the tech tree and are used to end a game quickly. Because Offworlds signal the endgame, the are a frequent target of sabotage, especially Dynamites and Mutinies. In fact, some players believe that one Offworld Market is better than two because it is much easier to protect just one Offworld with a Goon Squad. The worst-case situation after constructing a (very expensive) Offworld Market is for another player to steal it with a Mutiny and then start launching resources himself. (Actually, the worst-worst-case is to have someone munity away an Offworld just powered up with an Adrenaline Boost.)

Offworld Markets changed quite a bit over the course of development. Originally, it was actually two buildings – a Launch Pad, which functioned similarly to the current building, and a Space Elevator, which shipped faster and didn’t consume Fuel or Aluminum when launching. We combined them into a single building to simplify the game and also to connect the building with the title. Once we chose the name Offworld Trading Company, it made sense to have the most important building in the game reflect the title. Also, there were originally no limits on how many Offworlds a player could build, which led to some ridiculous Offworld arms races in which two players had four, five, six, and even more each, making so much money that their stock prices were rising almost as fast as their cash, extending the game far too long. Furthermore, once a player has more than two Offworlds, sabotage becomes a less useful tool against him, which also makes the endgame somewhat stale. Things improved after limiting Offworlds to two per player, and they improved again when we tied the first one to HQ level 4 and the second to level 5. Now, players have an interesting decision to make at level 4. Build an Offworld early (perhaps using a Hologram so no one notices) or push ahead to more claims at level 5?