I have a real problem with this game

one piece of advice - if they are in D debt, they can't buy anything on the black market, so punish them for it. Try Scavenger perhaps?

Instead of assuming those players have no clue it might be a good idea to look at what they did to improve, rather than working off your own assumptions. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of extra punishment in debt, but as the game works right now in 1v1 most of the time if you don't have debt you've made a big mistake.

Good playing against you today Mike.

 

It's not the debt, it's the interest on the debt that really counts.  By taking the debt i'm gambling I can get a head start on building one or 2 offworlds, if I can get 2 or 3 launches off before my opponent has built one, then when it is majority buyout I can use the 100k or so from the launches to buy stock and end the game before a debt spiral.

 

And sadly no, I don't have any cheat codes.

 

The best cheat code will always has and will forever be Ctrl+shift+backspace.

May it rest in piece.

 

King morgan you are exactly the person I am talking about. Every time we play you have massive debt and I have none yet you still win sometimes.

And I thought this was supposed to be a life like experience. Sure I can adjust to playing terrible to work with the game as it is now but I would prefer if the game plays like a real business does. If you're in a crazy amount of debt you can't purchase many things.

 

play it like a country than a business then.  Countries cant seem to do anything but go into massive debt.

If kingmorgan loses sometimes against a player who doesn't understand debt at all, I think that would be somewhat sad...

In terms of realism, I don't think OTC is meant to be a "life like experience", but OTC's handling of debt is actually quite realistic in its simplicity. I don't consider my understanding of bonds to be deep, but few people in the world know much better than I do, and I do see why people misunderstand debt as cash.

good call

 

i'm pretty frickin good at this game. ranked 3

 

Only people I've played that give me a fight are morgan and wino. this thing won't let me reply anymore because I am a new member and I have no idea. I pick quick match and play whoever shows up. I tried to play a game against all of you guys once but got the boot. I play with blackmagic sometimes. He seems pretty decent. Log on I'll play you right now. I've definitely played pb head. Can't rember who won.

 

 

Have you encountered some of the finalists from the recent tournaments? If you are doing well, I recommend looking for matches against gameslayer, cubit, pbhead, and blues.

As a tip for finding matches, occasionally Zultar does streams, and Soren (Mohawk) does streams. You can join their matches, which are semi-regular. Zultar is probably still the best player despite focusing on other games now; he makes the fewest strategical mistakes out of any player around, and his micro is not bad either. Soren has really fallen off and just plays Science most of the time because it's easy, but sometimes good players show up in his stream, and winning his matches is nevertheless not simple.

ouch!

Well, you're still strong, you just have room for improvement.

Just playing the devil's advocate:

I'm assuming Mike is realatively new to the game. However, he has impressively hovered around rank #4 or #5 for a week or so in the QM system. Unless he was as pathetic as the rest of us and spent most of his spare time watching mohawk or zultar streams, he would have no reason to believe that he is not one of the best players. This highlights a major problem with the ladder favoring raw number of wins (or even percentage of wins) over an ELO system. The fact that a player like myself has a 90+% win rate vs. him is not reflected in the ladder.

Furthermore, Mike's concerns are shared by all new players to the game - just check the steam forums. The current state of the game resembles something closer to "ENRON trading company" than logical economics. In real life, a company that is spending 30% of it's annual income paying interest would eventually fail. I can't tell you how many times as a newcomer I was swearing at the monitor saying "THIS SOB has $400k in debt and HE wins?". The truth is that debt diving for quick victory makes no sense to anyone who hasn't been "in the loop" since early beta stages. I have learned to live with it... but will never like it.

FYI Mike: KingMorgan, BlackMagic, Dermas, Vevei and myself are just some of the more active ladder players. We are all decent players, but most of us would barely make the top 10 list of the best players in the game. So, as the others said... be careful who you call a NOOB

You are a start-up company new to mars sent by the government which are attempting to create long-lasting colonies through private enterprise fulfilling market forces. Your goal is to subvert the governments goal and eliminate all other players. So, who's providing the debt? There is no private enterprise already established, so you cannot take out a loan from them. Look at the clock, each tick is 10 minutes of ingame time. It takes 12.5 minutes on average for a communication to get from mars to earth, another 12.5 minutes to get back. This means you are not getting your debt from anywhere on Earth, indeed it is the colony governments themselves that are footing the bill for you, lending you money that was being lent to them as their own debt. Each government would be registered as an independant country, recieving funding directly from investors or from the governments of Earth. Now think about the interest rates as well, why are they daily? Because the rate of growth of the colony is a daily thing, everyones moving at lightning speed and your debt is paid by the investors of the colonies. Your debt is effectively a part of a countries debt, which is part of why the debt acts wierdly, any debt you take on is listed as the colonies debt overall back on Earth. The system of debt used here is not true debt, it is the governments lending you money, subsidising you in exchange for becoming self-sufficient with your help, and then you pay them back later. The more debt you have, the more debt they have so the harder it is for them to borrow money back on Earth, so the more interest they claim you owe the them and therefore the tax payer later on. This means the system is realistic, because it's a new and different system of lending. When you buy a company, you are not taking on their debt, instead the government just writes it off, they will probably be compensated by Earth for every failed private colony attempt later, since it was their idea, so it doesn't get reflected in your own stock price.

 

TL;DR: This debt system is neither a country nor a private enterprise system, thus it can be anything mohawk wants it to be, but it does make sense as a possible way a martian colony might handle debt.

Debt diving is not a normal thing that naturally arises in the real world, although it can be accomplished by shady executives and opaque accounting. It's probably in OTC for gameplay purposes. I agree that it is unintuitive to have resources/cash not to affect stock price as much as debt, but maybe it is time for the tutorial to shine here?

(To get a 5x debt multiplier in the real world, it would have to be the case that investors are able to see a corporation's debt, but are unable to figure out at all what kind of production and resources that corporation has. Then, the corporation can report having 1/5 the resources it really has, which leads to the stock valuation counting debt 5x as much as money. This would let executives buy stock cheaply, which is fraud, and therefore expected. But such a fraudulent scheme makes zero sense when a corporation is trying to avoid being purchased. Although I can't criticize it as a poor feature, this non-symmetry between cash and debt is somewhat unreasonable without an in-game explanation, and it does break a player's expectations and drive obscure behavior.)

I looked at the steam forums, but I was unable to find the complaints about debt Wino was talking about, only complaints about fast games (which I personally don't sympathize with).

The bond system is totally fine. Higher debt/asset ratio = higher interest rate. That's what happens in life too. The "realism" question is mainly why debt affects stock price so much more than cash does.

Debt writeoffs on purchase don't make any sense, but they're easy to grasp and hence not a problem for players to accept.

This, I disagree with. If it's called debt, players expect it to behave how debt normally works. That's the entire point of giving a concept a name, so that others can understand that concept by the ideas surrounding that name. If Mohawk called potatos "debt", players would still be forced to accept it, but I doubt they would be happy with it. At a minimum, the differences between the normal concept and the in-game one should be explained to the player.

AHEM. I'm confident that I'm one of the top 10 players of this game.

 

Zultar

PB

Cubit

Blues

Yerand

Gameslayer

Roler

InSync

SorenJohnson

Deathtacticus


.....Rats.


Ok serious answer: they recently reset the leaderboard and a lot of the top players don't play quickmatch anymore. I only play it because it's impossible to get an 4 player FFA going when there are only 25 people online playing the game every night.

To be fair to mike the 1v1 game plays completely different than a 4 player FFA. The 1v1's are a lot shorter so you never see the ill effects of carrying a lot of debt (the interest compounding that tanks your stock price). Therefore most 1v1 players take on more debt and ignore or minimize power in order to build revenue producing tiles to get the first offworld up. If you're the first to launch in a quickmatch you're often a step ahead and can close out the match before debt kills you.

In a 4 player FFA that lasts longer you're shut down more often by the BM and the game is longer because you're fighting for resources vs multiple players. I wouldn't be opposed to mike's suggestion to make debt more punishing in the 1v1 to mirror the 4 player game but that might be difficult to implement.

Actually, making debt more punishing based on how many players are in the game ought to be a relatively easy adjustment to implement.  You just make the formula for bond rating factor in the number of players in such a way that you go into lower ratings more quickly with fewer players.  It is an additional level of complexity, but might not be a bad idea.

I like being able to divide by 10 to see the D cutoff though.

 

I think a good change to the game would be that debt interest comes out of you funds rather than adding more debt. They might have to adjust the amount of interest to not make this overkill but it would be Nice to see carrying a lot of debt slow you down rather than speed you up.

That won't help. What if theres no cash? Added to debt? Any player will just burn all cash on high end resources for the debt tick.

There can be a third category of outstanding debt and this is any interest owed. As long as you have outstanding debt you can't expand or but stock.

Buy