OffworldRookie

Join Date 02/2015

Strategic Thoughs and Ideas, Tips and Tricks about the Game

I thought it would be a good idea to have a Thread where people can post and share their findings about Strategies and strategic thoughts. So we all can learn the Game faster from each other and create new Ideas and Ways to master the game.

Here is what I found out about the game so far, pls feel free to correct me if I am wrong at any point:

1. Offworld Shippments do not always pay off

I found out that the Money you get from Offworld Shipments (100 reserouces) is sometimes lower than the amount you would get by just selling 100 pieces of the ressource. So i guess there must be running a calculation for Offworld Prices in the background.

2. 'Real Price' of Claim Auctions can be determined

I was always wondering why people bid tons of money for a claim auction, when claims can simply be bought on the Black Market. So whenever the Auction price for a claim is higher than the amount you would have to pay on the Black market, stop bidding

3. Usage of the Pleasure Dome

I found out that building a Pleasure Dome only makes sense when the Power Price is low. e.g. When you can create 100$ from the Pleasure Dome, but the Price for Power ist lets say 150$, you are basically loosing 50 $ per second. In this case its better to turn of your Dome and just sell your Power.

4. Usage of Mutinity

Buying and using Mutinity from the Black market is more effective

- when you use it on rich Ressource fields

-when the Price of the certain Ressource is high

5. Usage of Goon Squads

Protecting your own Production by buying Goon Squads normally becomes very expansive during the Game. In my opinion the usage of Goon Squads is more effective when the Price of Sabotage (EMP's, Nukes', Power Surge) is higher than the Price of a Goon Squad, because your opponent would have to invest more money than you.

6. Creating same Buildings next to each other,

provides a Production Bonus but also has a huge disadvantage.--> Power Surges are more effective. If you have e.g. 5 Wind Turbines placed next to each other it makes a lot of sense to buy Power Surges as a defending purpose to raise the Price

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1) What you basically want to be doing is to selling that resource which price difference in offworld and onworld is the largest. That basically becomes the profit. You can even say that offworld market makes me (price in offworld - price in onworld)*100/60 $ per second. Since the best price differences are usually around 200-400, you should be making 300-600 $ per second with each working offworld market.

2) I kinda disagree, the thing is you pay auctions with debt money, and since you cannot take debt directly, this is really powerful early game. You cannot compare it to a black market price until you are in a state where you use cash to pay off your debt.

3 and 4 are good.

5) Again, coming back to the first point. Goon squads protects your building for a guaranteed 60 seconds, so if you plant it on your offworld it is guaranteed to save you at least 20-40 k in money + you get the free attack, which if enemy plays right and expects your goons is the least worth black market trick.

6) Yeah, but if you have 3 buildings separately instead of in a cluster, you could look at it as power surging yourself half of the play time. Usually black market doesnt shut anyone down more than 50 % of the time. + you have to take into account that when enemy surges you, you also don't lose raw resources, which means that when you are producing something, you are doing it efficiently.

But in general, these are all good observations and good that you brought them up, it's good if strategis and thoughts are being discussed.

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#1 is true of course. Happens a lot more often since they've nerfed off-world trading prices (I think people whined way too much about how 'overpowered' off world prices are honestly. I think the bug that added the extra 0 to the tooltip kinda made people think it was a lot more powerful than it really was (even though the actual money gained was not bugged).

I disagree so much on #2. You're paying for the auction claim with debt, not cash. Debt is a lot 'cheaper' because you're not losing buying power when you accumulate it. Plus, the claim won in the auction does not contribute toward your black market cooldown. I'd easily pay 2-3x as much for a claim in an auction than in the black market.

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I also disagree on #2, but for different reasons than Cymsdale and indrkl (although I do also agree with their reasons).

A claim is extremely valuable. It allows you to produce a resource at a profit. The more claims you have, the faster you can make money.

The right way to value a claim is not by saying "You can buy one for $5k on the black market, so I won't pay more than $5k to get one at the auction." Instead, think of it this way: "You can buy one for $5k on the black market, so I'll do that. AND I'll try to buy the one being auctioned, because I'd rather have TWO extra claims rather than only ONE extra claim."

The only question is: how much should you bid? The answer depends on how much profit you think you can expect from an additional claim and how much you're prepared to invest in order to obtain that profit. This in turn depends on the market: if mined resources are expensive, or manufactured resources are expensive while their precursors are cheap, then the claim could be worth a lot! If everything is cheap and there are limited arbitrage opportunities, then maybe it's not worth nearly as much.

But while the value of a claim depends on the market, it does not depend on the black market price of claims! That's because buying claims from the black market is a highly-constrained resource. It only comes up every so often. If you could buy and sell claims the way you can buy and sell glass, then the market price of claims would be relevant. But there is no market price for claims because there is no market for claims, and accordingly the black market price for claims is irrelevant to how much a claim is worth to you and therefore how much you should bid when one comes up for auction.

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First person to off world market is still 99% going to be the winner, unless two or three build them virtually at the same time or that person was foolish early on with massive debt.

the first early claim is worth way more than the price on the black market because its debt and you know the black market price is going to 20k-50k later in the game

pleasure domes are WAY underused I've just gotten done winning a whole slew of games in a row by building pleasure dome rank 3 and once 2 early. and as long as your building positive power keep the dome running. so what if the dome is "selling" power for 150 and power costs 200, your keeping power out of the pool which hurts other people worse than you and keeps the price of power higher longer for you to profit off of it.

As for building next to each other you basically have to. If I'm going to build a resource then I'm building 3 buildings of that no matter what. If the price of the good is not worth building 3 then its not worth building 1. Your very first claims are about the only exception to this.

My number 1 tip at rank 1 save your last claim and look around the map no one building power? Jump on a solar, EVERYone building 2-3 steel? then maybe an early glass or fuel would be better, pay attention not just t what the prices are right now, but look at the buildings and get a feel for what they are going to be around the time every one is ranking up to tier 2.

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Quoting sresk2,

reply 4

First person to off world market is still 99% going to be the winner, unless two or three build them virtually at the same time or that person was foolish early on with massive debt.

I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. Even though I am usually the within the top third that upgrades to HQ level 2 and 3, I am usually the last remaining player to construct an offworld market, but I still win fairly often. Even then, the OWM only serves to end the match quickly so everyone can move on to other games. Most of my money comes from playing the market because I am a scavenger.

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I've had a few games where the off world markets best good to ship was only 35k per shipment. Last game was such a game an when I saw this demolished my offworld and made an electronics farm complete with +200% research + 5 hacker arrays and managed to buy out the leading player (who had bought someone else) after making 1.3M from inflated electronics prices. At its highest electronics were at about 650$ and I think I had about 1000 units stored. During this game I'd frequently scrapped buildings that were no longer profitable to replace them with ones that were. Unfortunately no replay .

The total value of a stockpile (let's say that the stockpile is almost infinite) I think is the square of the price of the good because the price decreases by a a linear amount for the same quantity of it being sold so it takes longer to reach 1$.

A company can also use random shortages to his advantage by buying up a large supply before it happens and selling out when it ends. Naturally resources that are stockpiled by other companies need to be avoided. This can also be combined with the profits from the off world market, prior to buying out an important competing company.

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