ARTICLE - Offworld 1.11.15121

Offworld Trading Company, Version 1.11.15121 (Sans DLC)

Stardock Entertainment, Mohawk Games

Hello again!  This week I will cover an odd one, but a great one: Offworld Trading Company. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

It is often advantageous to build buildings adjacent to your base.
It's harder for pirates to get your resources that way.

Mohawk Games’ Offworld Trading Company is a unique economic RTS that sees the player as a corporate manager near one of humanity’s early colonies on Mars. Your company’s stated mission is to produce materials for the colony, providing for it’s growth and well-being, however, the competition - like the martian conditions - are quite harsh. In order for your company to survive, you must fight fiercely for your claim, and buyout the competition, or be yourself bought out.

At the beginning of each game, the player
scans the map for a place to land their base.

The gameplay consists of building on a hexagonal grid of martian land with multiple other companies, claiming what land you can and exploiting it to the best of your ability to produce valuable resources to be sold on the market. Each map is randomly generated, and will have the different resources vary in rarity between matches, with some matches having iron being critically rare, while in others it is incredibly abundant, for instance. The 14 different resources that the player collect are sold on a reactive market with prices that ebb and flow according to player purchases and random events, including shortages and surpluses. In addition, there is a black market that sells questionable services, such as network viruses, dynamite, and “filthy pirates”, which give the players an opportunity to get at each other’s throats while firmly establishing a hostile atmosphere between the players (because it’s no fun to work together peaceably, obviously).

A valuable Geothermal Plant.
These are often the target of sabotage.

One of the nicest things about the game is how it encourages play which matches the competitive and backstabbing atmosphere of the game. The developer does a good job encouraging scumbaggery among the players, with the scarcity of resources naturally driving the players to conflict and the black market auctioneer even encouraging the player to avoid using that dynamite which they have just bought on their opponents (because that would clearly be quite rude). The players quickly get to the point where they are rushing for valuable geothermal vent tiles or depositing dynamite on their opponent’s only water pump, mirroring the game’s premise and atmosphere. In addition, the potential strategies that the game allows the player is staggering, and each map presents the player with different resources to take advantage of, further increasing the depth of strategy-making. One match the player may choose to try to monopolize one of the two patches of iron in the map in order to drive the other players to bankruptcy, but in another match a player may use the abundance of ice on the map as an excuse to rely solely on market purchases of oxygen to supply their buildings, as it may be cheap to buy as a result of this abundance. Such choices make the game interesting to play and lends every match to new and unique strategies.

Offworld Trading Company does a great job of delivering an interesting economic strategy gaming experience, with many exciting choices to make at every turn, and with beautiful visuals and audio quips from your advisors. The game rather successfully sets the player in the shoes of a corporate manager, and makes it pretty fun in the process as well! The game has a bit of a learning curve, mostly due to the fact that business tends to be a bit of an abstract concept to a lot of people; It’s just a lot easier to understand how to play a military strategy, mostly due to the popularity of such games and the subsequent proliferation of the genre’s conventions. Despite this, Offworld Trading Company is a really fun, once you get through the initial learning curve, and It presents the player with engaging strategical choices throughout play.