RTStrategy or RTTactics ?

from Stardock Forums

I wonder if the current state of this game might miss a large percentage of its target audience. As a former RTS gaming site staff member and tournament chess player, I have a few thoughts to share about strategy in Offworld. Strategy (IMO) can loosely be defined as the deeper thought processes that affect meta-game and long-term considerations. Tactics are those short-term reactions to immediate stimulus that tend to favor automatic (twitch) responses. What sort of RTS player favors economic development (Offworld's premise) over twitch combat? I suspect it tends to be those who like planning, build order min/maxing, etc. Some concerns / suggestions:

 

Random events

The current state of random events in Offworld can add a lot of fun, but can be exasperating to those who enjoy strategic planning. Events such as solar flares or dust storms, which penalize a player for choosing or not choosing a certain type of resource ruin the joy of strategic planning. Also, there is not enough time to make any strategical decisions to cope with or take advantage of upcoming market fluctuations.

  • Suggestion: Create a "forecast" box which includes things such as anticipated upcoming weather and more advanced warning of random market shortages/surpluses to allow people to strategically plan their development.

 

Economic debt

The current model allows people who ignore many resources to win games simply by being the fastest to upgrade their HQ. There is very little strategic depth here when the most viable strategy is to ignore most of your economy. It seems fine for debt-diving to be a calculated chance a player might take, but there should be more associated risk (as in the real world).

  • Suggestion: Increase the interest penalties for moderate to high debt. Alternatively, reduce the stock value increase that one receive for quickly upgrading the HQ. 

 

Micro-Management

I spend half my time looking for buildings that are not profitable and clicking them on/off based on short-term (tactical) needs. I would much rather be spending that time observing my opponents, planning for their moves and long-term (strategical) game decisions such as when to build engineering vs. offworld. This problem is compounded upon acquiring another colony. A player who didn't buyout someone's stock can win by waiting for you to start losing money on newly acquired tiles.

  • Suggestion: Reduce the micro with a 3 state toggle option that automatically turns off production and turns them back on for you 
  1. keep all buildings running regardless of profits 
  2. turn off buildings not making a resource profit (output resources - input resources)
  3. turn off buildings not making a profit after subtracting power costs

 

Random Resources

It is simply impossible to play the game competitively without a decent starting amount of iron or carbon. Since the critical starting resource can sometimes be abundant and other times be incredibly scarce, the initial gamble of when/where to place a colony dominates the likely outcome of the game. This kills all strategic planning since the only way to win on some maps is the tactic of founding one second before your opponent has explored enough to be confident there is a shortage.

  • Suggestion: Make the distribution of core resources (iron/carbon) much more uniform on all maps.

 

Game length

Games that persist through the decades (or centuries as in chess) tend to reward long-term thinking. The RTS games that lasted the longest (and made the most profits) were enjoyable beyond figuring out the basic twitch-response mechanics. Games like AOE lasted forever (and were highly profitable for developers) because they offered strategic depth that kept people coming back for expansions.

  • Suggestion: Why not aim for a 30-60 minute game length such as in AOE. 


12,445 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I failed to state that I really enjoy this game and am currently quite addicted. However, I suspect the current state of things will lead to a very short shelf-life for me (and probably many other old farts).

Perhaps I am wrong about your target audience. I suspected it would be the 30-45 age demographic with some prior RTS experience who got burned out on the twitch response characteristics of games that appealed to a younger crowd. I would be very supprised if the typical 20 year old, who is better at rapid reactions than strategical planning, would favor a pure economic simulation rather than the flashy graphics of unit combat. 

If you haven't done a demographic study, I would be happy to set up some polls and data-mine the attributes of your potential target audience for you.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

this type of game becomes completely useless the moment build orders become the optimal way to play

the focus needs to be on adapting to random maps and reacting to what other players are doing or else it will become solved way too quickly

 

randomness is a tricky thing to get right, especially when there's very little that can be actively done to disrupt other players' plans.

in a normal RTS i'ts much easier because fog of war and lots of management guarantees that nobody will play perfectly, so it's less necessary to make the map 100% fair.

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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

Forecasts for the weather have been asked for for weeks and are already in the next_version beta of the game, shortage and surplus warnings however are still scavenger only. The problem with giving that to everyone is that it can easily be abused by buying before the shortage happens and then selling after the short. This could lead to people who got an early advantage and have the most disposable income to be able to buy into the short the most and just steamroll ahead.

 

The risk is fine as is. This game is, if anything, far more punishing than the real world at this sort of thing. Putting yourself heavily in debt in order to expand quickly is absolutly a thing in the real world. If you decide your going to rack up a large amount of debt inorder to expand quicker you run 2 very large risks. 1 is that other people can profit heavily off of you consuming resources such as power, which can lead to them getting an even stronger economy than you. This inturn makes it harder for you to be able to pay off your own debt later on, and getting stuck with 150K debt late game agaisnt someone with no debt at all is a huge deal. The other thing is to do with the black market: Your painting a huge target on your back by putting yourself ahead of the pack. I've had pleanty of games where i've moved ahead and then just been shut down by the other 3 players until they were all ahead of me and could easily buy me.

 

I'm not certain about whether adding less micro is a good or bad thing. I'm not for it, but I'm not against it either. However, I will say that you can speed up this micro process a lot by learning the hotkeys, like in normal RTS's. I feel that by letting players completly ignore a building they've placed down until they get a notification it's off will just encourage people to not pay as much attention to the market until they need to change things around. This is perhaps a similar issue to people who APM spam in parts of other RTS's when there is no real reason to do so, because it gets you into the mindset of thinking about the game more and faster. I don't know, maybe these options would jsut hinder people's ability to learn the game?

 

Play on reveal map mode. This fixes almsot every map gen proble you have. It will become the default standard eventually as it's far better than the luck-based scan mode.

 

I like shorter games. This is personal preference and there is no conclusive evidence to support your belief that longer game length is better and there's no evidence to support shorter game length is better. Your belief that the RTS's that made the most profit were longer games is compeltly untrue, and the only old RTS series's I would consider not dead are Starcraft, Command and Conquer and Supreme Commander. All 3 of these games have average game lengths shorter than offworld trading company, with the exception that if you don't know what your doing or want to play with no-rush options supreme commander games could last hours. Indeed, I don't remember AoE 3 games lasting much longer than 30 minutes either and would definitely not call it a 30-60 minute game. I also dislike the late game of this game. It feels like more of a formality than anything else, where 1 person is vastly ahead of everyone else and is just mopping up. He can make a mistake and still lsoe but it isn't likely. Extending this process further would be horrible in my eyes. Back in beta 2 this game was fast, faster than still it currently is. In beta 3 they made the game incredibly slow, and these last 2 patches have been slowly bringing it back to beta 2's standard of game length, and I don't see Mohawk suddenly reversing direction on this. A long RTS experience is also incredibly difficult to make. The only one I can remember that had long average game length (45+ minutes) was Cossaks, and that game did not do well in terms of sales at all.