Offworld Trading Company - Soren Johnson's new joint

When you turn Random Prices on does it also affect successive missions in the campaign or just the first one?

Also I noticed that you get a 50k connection bonus when you compete in campaign maps that are connected on the larger planetary map. Is this a one-time cash bonus or does it affect your income per week?

- Random Prices are factored in every week.
- The $50K bonus is weekly. You should see it in the mouseover help for your income.

I started up a new campaign as the first robot. This time around I'm using random market prices and already I can see my strategy (and that of the AI) adapting to these prices. Whereas before life support items were a sure bet, it's sometimes possible to go all in on things like chemicals at the start just because the prices are so high. I think I'm doing better than my first attempt because I manage to completely fill the first three colonies with modules. On my 4th colony I only managed to get it to 27-27 modules but since I also managed to get more shares I'm getting over 500k from it, way more than my other colonies.

So far my strategy has been more or less going all-in on electronic production. This plays to my strengths in terms of engineers, and it's also quite profitable because manufactured products like electronics lower the market price less than raw resources when you sell a lot of them. Another thing that helps a lot is the type of colony I pick, although the mission perk is what usually decides my next mission US colonies are the only type without machine shops. Machine shops consume .2 electronics a second, so when there are 20 of them it really drives up the demand for electronics and helps keep the price high.

One thing I need to consider more is when to sabotage the AI. When I have an overwhelming majority of >50% colony ownership it's actually to my benefit to allow the AI to purchase modules because it increases my weekly income. However in my last mission the random effect was increased life support and both AIs only got to HQ level 4. If I had let them grow we probably would have been able to max out the colony between our combined income.

Another trick I learned was that I could research nanotechnology and scrap all of my factories at the last minute. This would give me a pile of resources I could sell at a massive profit given the vastly inflated price the market tends to reach at the end of a campaign mission. The boost I got was just enough to purchase two more modules. Although in my latest mission I wasn't allowed to scrap my offworld market or my pleasure dome and I couldn't quite figure out why. The market was under strike but the pleasure dome was not. I also had a patent lab and that was scrapped without issue.

Oh my. I don't think I'm going to have much trouble winning this campaign!
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528647837367/FF0BF4151D60A0419469E6DD565960B6E29AFB34/)

Look like you're doing pretty well... fwiw, if you have Nanotech, it automatically scraps all your buildings at the end of a mission and gives you the money in straight cash.

Oh that's handy, it should mention that on the tooltip.

I got to the final mission in high style. I had so much money I just went and bought everything. On the 6th day it isn't worth putting too much money into a colony because you only get one days worth of income from it. Spending 50-200k to buy a module or colony share only nets you an extra 5k "weekly" profit, you're basically throwing money away. So I just sat on my cash and ended the mission with 900k in hand.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528648203233/DB3A3A3BCEFFFE9FE597F40495E6A308BF87DFB8/)

I did notice one small bug. At the bottom of the stock price list there is this errant "Player Name" entry with a stock price of 45$. I've never seen that before. On a similar note is there any particular reason why the campaign only permits 7 competitors including the player? There is always one odd corporation out.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528648203110/D7CB57C59DB149455C274F9856DC1844CCA33F28/)

Needless to say between my THREE offworld markets the AI didn't really stand a chance.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528648203305/EB516691A2501BE7D820AFF6B809EB3B1E5C206C/)

Sounds like you need to got up a level (or two!)

Do you have a screen from before "PlayerName" showed up? I have never heard of that issue either...

I'm not sure why that happened but I know which CEO it was supposed to be. When I beat the final mission the only CEO missing was Anastasia Xu. So the 8th person on the stock list should have been Silas Crichton. Only for some odd reason he showed up on the list as "Player Name" and his stock price was 45$ instead of "Eliminated".

Starting a new campaign on manager, again with random prices turned on. I'm going to have another go at Scavenger and see how far I get after the boosts to carbon in the last patch.

So I figured out what I'm doing as a scavenger and the campaign is progressing nicely. Playing as Frank Dawson presents a lot of challenges in the early game. By far the biggest hump to get over is fuel costs, Frank's life support and water engineers are particularly weak and this forces you to found your HQ near water. Doing anything else is just a recipe for debt because shipping water uses more fuel than you can ever make back with electrolysis. The first mission was very difficult and I barely managed to squeak in a majority. However in the second mission I managed to solve my fuel crisis by stealing Llana Klamat's patent lab and then using adrenaline to scoop up 3 patents before control reverted. In this way I was able to pick up teleportation and cold fusion which really put me ahead of the game. This mission also got me the Water engine patent which I put to good use for the next two weeks.

Scavengers only need carbon instead of steel to build things so they are able to skip an entire production chain and use the claims for other things. Maps with rare resources heavily favour scavengers because a lack of iron can utterly cripple other factions. In my 4 week the map I picked shoehorned my opponents off into a far corner because it held the only iron on the map. Every other resource had to be shipped in at exorbitant fuel costs from the other side of the map and over a large canyon. Meanwhile I was sitting pretty in my crater happily building stuff out of carbon.

IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528652531688/DAE721AA9F23DE69254A14265A46E3F1E112887A/)
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I made to the final mission, again in high style. I had so much money I went ahead and bought everything again. Way back in the first mission the perk I struggled so hard to get was faster offworld market launches. I was banking my entire strategy on having markets available for the final mission and boy did that pan out. Not only do I have faster launches but I also picked up a free market along the way and hired not one but two engineers.

Once boosted with adrenaline my three offworld markets were all launching every 9 seconds! The AI kept trying to knock them down using every black market trick in the book. But being a scavenger myself I could access it much faster than them and even when they dynamited the buildings I was rolling in so much cash I could just rebuild them on the spot. Given how I struggled in the beginning the final mission felt really good, it was amusing to watch the AI's feeble attempts to compete.

I did run into two minor bugs at the end of the campaign. Before I got to the hiring screen it asked me if I wanted to promote a water engineer to greenhouse or electrolizer. I hit "choose later" because I wasn't sure if I wanted either of them. When I hit the button to start the mission it brought up the choice again, but this time there was no way to say no. I was forced to swap out one of my water engineers.

Another minor bug is that when you have the faster launches perk offworld markets can run at super speed. I run the game at blazing speed, this combined with the perk and an adrenaline boost can reduce launch times to 6-9 seconds. The market animation does not sync to these speeds at all. The rocket barely protrudes out of the ground before it is time to launch and what ends up happening is the animation jumps to the end before the rocket takes flight.

IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440604528652820296/1FA6331DE14271DD98BCF9B37123B8680A3DD89F/)

Hey, Tamren, I've been enjoying your OTC journey here.Thanks for the posts!

Thanks for the update, Tamren! We'll add an option to not promote the Water Engineer, etc. in the next patch.

Oof. I started a new campaign as Ilana Klamat and playing as the science faction is really kicking my ass. Playing with a science HQ is hard enough in most skirmishes but Ilana emphasizes all of their strengths and weaknesses. Ilana starts with strong production abilities but no gathering engineers except for a single metal mine. This is the minimum necessary to get the aluminium for HQ upgrades because of her ability to build production directly on resources and skip the gathering altogether.

This is what I've learned so far:

- Science HQs favour maps with large patches of low resources. Unsurprisingly since they are so dependant on a good map seed you rarely see the AI use them.
- While the ability to gather directly from resource nodes allows you to skip on gathering buildings, it also prevents you from taking advantage of price increases. If the price of food drops to nothing you cannot simply turn them off and sell the water at a profit until the price goes down.
- Lack of elemental mines is often painful because constructing things like solar panels require silicon that you can't mine yourself.
- The inability to gather resources also stops you from repurposing buildings. A cluster of farms build over water can't be switched to chemical production without buying carbon off the market. This makes it much harder to respond when the market changes it's demands even if you have nanotechnology and can recycle buildings for free.
- It's very important for a science player to make the most out of patents as they cover the majority of your weaknesses. Ilana starts with the base +50% patent speed and I also picked up another +100% bonus from my first week win. This makes patents finish in as little as 6-12 seconds. A bit overkill to be honest.
- The only method of power generation Ilana has is solar. With superconductor you can generate staggering amounts of power and crash the market, but only during the day. If you don't invest in power early and get the energy vault tech you can end up in a debt spiral quite easily.

I'm currently stuck on mission 2. All three of the available maps have very bad random events ranging from a dust storm (that greatly limits my solar power) to elecrolyzer strikes that halve fuel production.

I managed to get past missions 2 and 3. I've learned a lot about playing scientific and also noticed a few deficiencies with the interface.

What got me past mission 2 was learning to look for combined nodes, particularly areas with lots of different resources where I could locate my base. Tiles with two (or even three) resources on them are quite rare. But when you take into account slant drilling two resources beside each other can be accessed by the same triangle of buildings. So for instance if you have a water node beside a silicon node you can build three greenhouses in that space and later swap them to kilns. Iron/water nodes are particularly valuable because steel is in high demand at the start of the game but peters out by the end at which point you can swap them fore more lucrative life support.

In skirmish mode you would be able to replace production buildings with mines and wells to take advantage of high resource prices, so it's still advantageous to build on top of high nodes (as well as to deny them to the enemy). But when playing as Ilana in the campaign you don't have the engineers for this.

Another handy thing about playing as scientific is that you are relatively immune to underground nukes. Since the density of resources doesn't matter you can run 8 buildings off of the same trace level node with no issues. One source of constant frustration with other factions is my resources getting constantly bombarded until they become useless. So far I've never been hit by a single nuke as scientist, though granted I've also never put down a resource mine either.

I don't have an overall plan as to what my endgame is going to be. I have the opportunity to hire an astronaut on day 4 but I think it might be better to sink my money into engineers as my current lineup has a lot of gaps in it. Since I have a free patent lab I've been completely ignoring the patents that do come up, even teleportation which would be very attractive to other factions. The next set of maps coming up are highly interesting, particularly the one with no adjacency bonuses. Since I have easy access to teleportation that map would be highly in my favour.

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As far as bugs go I've only come across one new one. When you have a lot of notifications on the top bar they can actually push the top right part of the UI off of the screen. This only happens if you have a LOT of them, for instance if you demolish all of your buildings at the very end of a mission so you can afford that one extra colony module. When you factor in bribed claims this can generate 20 or more "empty claim" notifications that just clutter up the screen. My recommendation here would be to collapse all of the the "empty claim" notifications into a single notification and add a number to it.

There are also some areas where I see room for improvement:

- When you purchase colony modules you can hover over the bar on the UI to see a breakdown of how much estimated income you will receive per week going forward. However this estimate is not very accurate and tends to lowball the actual about by about 5-10%. So far as I can tell you get about 5k/week per habitat and per module. Having a matched pair will net you 16k/week. But this is seems to be a rough estimate.

This part of the UI should be made more accurate and extrapolate out how much income you will receive based on how many days are left in the campaign. More modules is not always better if you spend money and never make it back, better to save it and use it to hire engineers.

- At the end of a campaign mission a lot happens at once. The game cashes out all of your assets to pay off your debts as much as it can, and also liquidates any buildings worth money if you have access to nanotechnology. However you don't really get any indication of this happening other than the standard victory screen. So what I would suggest is to add a campaign specific breakdown of the things only relevant to campaign missions, like how much money you made in a mission, how much you stand to gain, what your end assets were and what they sold for, things like this.

As well I also noticed that when you have Financial Instruments it doesn't properly give you your income on the final day. Normally debts are calculated at the start of a new day but campaign missions end at 24:30 on the final day. You don't get your final cut of the interest until the game is over. If you win a campaign mission and hit the "back" button to go back to the game you will find it in a frozen state with your last debt report displayed on the screen. This money goes on to pay off your debts (if any) and is available as cash for the next mission, but it should be available during the mission itself because that income can help you buy one last module before the mission ends.

- When you build colony modules it's a complete tossup as to what direction they will go in. So for instance this makes it almost impossible to try and surround a patent lab with laboratories, they might surround the lab in a circle but more often they just kind of meander outwards in a random direction. Even if you restart the same map the direction changes every time. For this reason I consider double adjacency ideal and triple adjacency to the highest practical bonus achievable in campaign.

One thing you could consider is highlighting what tile a module will be placed on when you hover over the buy button. This would give you a rough idea where the building chain is headed so that you can plan accordingly.

- Lastly one issue I've been having a lot lately is identifying the yield of a mine at a glance. When mines have mixed input resources the mine doesn't always have a consistent appearance. Metal mines with dual inputs will display blue and brown silos, but the order is not consistent and doesn't reflect the size of the deposits underneath. Elemental quarries with dual inputs seem to pick one resource to display and ignore the other.

I thought up a new way of displaying mine resources that accurately shows the size and type of each deposit. This system follows the old one bar-two bar-three bar system but organizes them in a different fashion. Mines and quarries have two possible input resources, so each of these resources is given a particular side of the building. Aluminium goes on the left and Iron goes on the right. To indicate the richness of a deposit under the mine "bars" are added on the module in the form of storage silos. These bars are added from the top down instead of the previous alternating system. When two resources are present each resource get it's own set of bars on opposite sides of the mine. This clearly and accurately denotes at a glance what levels of resources the mine is currently tapping. Elemental quarries work the same way only the "bars" are displayed as wedges where the bucket lifts terminate at the surface.

I'm not much of an artist so hopefully this diagram is readable. It would be a lot of work to implement something like this, but I think the effort would be worth it. Especially in multiplayer when the game can't be paused and being able to take in a situation at a glance is important.
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Thanks, Tamren. Think the ship has sailed on our mines, but that's a cool idea!

Just changed it so that the game shows you where your next module will go. Great idea! (Will take a few weeks to make it out as a patch as we already have one in the pipeline...)

Sounds good. About when is the next patch expected to come out?

I'll have more time on the weekend so I plan to try finishing this Science campaign soon.

This afternoon, in fact!

IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/486767061418182069/09F11A48081AEA600BEB20BEC0441229402E6EFE/)

I've done a few skirmish games as Scientific to get back into the swing of things. Did researching patents suddenly get more expensive? Everything costs 50% more.

To get a different experience I set the map to start revealed and forced myself to start last. I found this to be an unworkable position in terms of the resources I had access to as the map was a tiny one and rather crowded for 8 players. I tried again with the same settings and launched third instead. This time went much better as I was able to secure a very useful alum/iron/silicon node. I'm not sure why but the AI in this new patch seems to be rather hesitant to buy patents, almost all of them construct a lab and then never us it. I was able to use this to my advantage with mutinies and managed to scoop up all of the good ones. Things went okay-ish for a while until I noticed that power was spiking very high. I secured superconductor first and then went all in by reconfiguring the 5 buildings attached to my HQ into solar. This zeroed out my 50k of debt and even made a moderate profit before the price crashed again. Despite my lack of steel production this gave me enough money to get to HQ5 and offworld markets. From there it was fairly smooth sailing.

Bit of feedback:

- There is an opportunity to make the optimization screen much better. When you open the optimization tab it replaces the construction tab. However the construction tab is where players go to check if a certain type of building is profitable or not. So what could do is change the tooltip on the optimization button to show how much profit a building of that type currently generates (if any), as well as how much profit it would generate AFTER you research the next +25% optimization boost.

- When I buyout or participate in a buyout of another company I'm never quite sure how much I'm getting from it. Sometimes I even get a small amount of money from subsidiaries I have no shares in. The almanac states that 1% of a companies wealth is distributed based on ownership of shares but that doesn't really explain the exact math going on. The tooltips could be improved here to give a more accurate breakdown.

- The buyout warning text really feels unpolished. It's not very noticeable despite how important it is and doesn't fit in with the rest of the UI. That said I'm not entirely sure how to make it better, at the very least you could simply add a tab on the interface that puts a blue UI background behind the text. Plain red text is hard to see on certain maps and during events like a solar flare.

- I have mentioned this before but the controls for auto-selling resources are very awkward. Even though I know what the hotkey is and have used it for many games and campaigns I STILL stumble over it all the time and sell resources when I don't mean to. My original suggestion still stands, the price for each resource has a $ symbol next to it, this could be made into a button that toggles autosell on and off.

It would also be very helpful to have a sum total of all income/expenses at the top listed beside your income and debt because the text gets smaller as the numbers grow larger. It also forces players to do math on the fly and add up numbers to figure out their per-second income.

All three of these points are shown in the picture here. Income and Debt are presented separately because it is possible to have a positive income while still racking up debt. If you have no income, or no debt the number will simply be shown as "+/- $0".
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jM8Ft1o.png)

Continuing with the campaign I found myself picking between three maps with similar names. Syria, Solis and Thaumasia Planums. Syria Planum has an eastward wind which messes with blimps and increases wind turbine production, since I can only use solar this is of no benefit to me. Solis Planum has a glass kiln strike which halves production, this hurts me a lot and especially because both of my opponents here are robots and don't need glass.

That leaves Thaumasia Planum which has no adjacency bonus. I've run into this type of map before and it's always a huge challenge because it's so unlike every other kind of game of offworld you will play. The resources on this map are also rare which makes competition fierce. There is an offworld market available for hire, but I can't get any more harvesting engineers this week which is going to be a major pain in the ass here.

The first hurdle to overcome was the scarcity of resources. There was a moderate amount of iron on the map concentrated in the northwest corner. The number of nodes was small but highly rich with individual nodes dotted about the place instead of concentrated in a patch. There was also a decent amount of water spread around the map in small clusters. Where the map was exceedingly poor was everything else, there were 4 low carbon nodes and nothing else, and only a barely handful of silicon nodes no higher than medium. There was also one single geothermal vent, but none of us had the engineers to make us of it. My opponents for this map were Robot and Scavenger. The robot happily set up shop on top of all the iron nodes and the Scavenger really had no choice but to embark into an eastern crater containing just about all the carbon. My own HQ went in the middle of the map a little to the north of the colony.

Simply put I had a TERRIBLE time with this map. Having no adjacency bonus is a huge challenge all by itself, but on top of that I had to deal with my complete lack of water engineers and a scavenger with access to a black market with underground nuke AND mutiny. The final nail in the coffin was the scarcity of aluminium. There was only one high node on the map and a couple of low nodes, the entire match eventually revolved around it.

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It took me over 10 tries to beat this mission and figure how to overcome the unique restrictions. I really think that no-adjacency should be a skirmish mode option because it's just so unlike a normal game and requires entirely different strategies. Each time I retried the mission I attempted to refine my strategy and make changes just to find something that worked AT ALL let alone well. I did learn a lot doing it and my experience could be described as a series of slow realizations.

- The lack of adjacency allowed me to spread my buildings around instead of cluster them up. In the case of water deposits I would deliberately space my buildings out so that they had a one tile gap between each other. This reduced the impact of slowdown strike and made power surge much less effective. Slant drilling was particularly useful for this because it increased the "grid" area I could use.

- One reason why robots are so powerful is that they upgrade very fast. I've yet to meet a robot in campaign that didn't take longer than 10 seconds to make it to level 2. Upgrading earlier than an opponent is always an advantage because by doing so you pay less and drive the price of resources up. The tactic of making a profit instead of making the resources you need in the early game pays off in the late game because you can take advantage of the prices you just inflated while making it impossible for opponents to upgrade. The mistake I was making in initial runs was concentrating too much on upgrades like patents and bribing claims instead of simply upgrading asap. This put me significantly behind the upgrade curve because the other guys would hike the prices by the time I got to them.

- The random bonus for the 4th day was a choice between Cold Fusion and Nanotechnology. At first I went with Cold Fusion out of habit because it is one of the most useful technologies. However it turned out to be completely useless for a couple reason. Having no wells of my own I had no control over the price of water, at the same time I have superconductor enabled solar panels. So power became dirt cheap almost immediately while water only dropped in price after a couple of days.

Eventually I figured out that it would be far better to pick nanotechnology to start out and patent cold fusion later. What it allowed me to do was go all in on greenhouses and exploit the very high 250$ starting price. Then quickly swap over to electrolysis when the price crashed, using the recycled glass to upgrade my HQ.

- Having no Adjacency usually allows you greater freedom as to where to place your buildings. For instance instead of building steel mills in the typical triangle of three you can instead spread them all over the map and place them on top of resource deposits. This allows you to deny resources to the enemy and switch production to harvesting in response to market prices. However since I'm playing as Ilana Klamat I still have to place buildings according to the resources they harvest. In the late game this presents a problem. Water tiles can support greenhouses and electrolysis, silicon supports electronics and glass. But iron only supports steel, this means that late in the game when steel is virtually worthless you can't easily convert these buildings to produce other things because Ilana has little to no harvesting power. While most resources can be shipped in (easily, with teleportation) silicon and carbon remain an issue. Carbon scrubbing is easy for scientific players to get, but silicon is very difficult with only one element engineer.

Initially I ignored element quarries altogether, but after a few games I realized that this was my achilles heel. I shifted some of my starting cash away from steel (which is worthless in late game) and got a quarry engineer instead. Combined with carbon scrubbing this allowed me to switch my steel production over to electronics, glass or chemicals depending on the situation.

- Having faster patent speed on top of the scientific bonus to research turned out to be really handy. While having a free patent lab is great it's also a big magnet for trouble, especially with a scavenger in the game. Using the speed bonus I was able to get all of my research done quickly by day 3 at which point I demolished the lab and used the claim to make chemicals instead. I also noticed that it's better to research the most expensive patents first in most cases. When you buy chemicals off the market the price rises, but it's much easier to afford expensive chemicals in smaller amounts. So if you start researching from the bottom up the price of a 120 chemical patent can be out of reach and cause your lab to sit idle.

- This map was dominated by a single bottleneck: Aluminium. There was only one high node on the entire map and I found that if I didn't take control of it the map would be impossible for anyone to win! The AI is extremely nuke happy and I utterly despise nukes more than you could ever imagine. What tended to happen in the first couple games is that every single aluminium node on the map quickly got knocked down to trace, at which point the price skyrocketed. Since colony hab modules require a whopping 100 aluminium each this made it impossible for ANY of us to buy modules. In order to stop this from happening I had to change my strategy in quite a few ways.

The first thing I did was claim the aluminium node right off the bat and goon squad it 24/7. One thing this experience taught me to do (which I've been lax about before) was to buy items off the black market and bank them for later use, this allowed the cooldown to reset sooner. The second thing I did was give up on maintaining an Offworld market. Initially I was wholly focused on getting a market up and running, which is a sure bet in most situations. In this case however the market turned into a huge white elephant. It took all of my time and resources to simply protect my one and only high aluminium mine, and this left the market open to sabotage. Eventually I took the cash and just used it to hire more steel engineers.

The last thing I did, which made me feel a bit better about the whole nuke situation, was to brutally exploit my monopoly. My goon squads tended to catch a lot of nukes and mutinies, so I turned these right around and sic'd em on my opponent's mines. By day 6 it had gotten to the point that prices were skyrocketing above 300, which is insane for a basic resource. I could have sold the metal for a huge profit but I needed every ounce for colony upgrades.

- When picking out what engineers you hire there are many things to consider. But generally speaking it's better to cover your weaknesses before you try to excel at something. Having only one engineer is not nearly enough, weak buildings like this are almost a waste of a claim. Two engineers are a useful baseline, but choosing to hire more than two should be done carefully. Gathering buildings are always a safe bet because they don't consume anything and raw resources are always in demand and being able to stockpile resources yourself insulates you from market fluctuations.

Every CEO in campaign relies on a certain method of power generation. You always have to strike a balance between how much power you actually need and how many engineers you can afford. In Ilana's case she relies on solar power. I currently have two engineers and I feel that this is perfectly adequate considering that I can easily research superconductor for double production and perpetual motion for halved usage. Too many power engineers or structures are a waste of a claim and can even end up subsidizing your opponents.

Engineers for greenhouses, electrolysis and steel are particularly effective for science players. Engineers increase production AND consumption at the same time, so too many production engineers can outstrip your supply chain. But where another player would have to balance gathering ability with production, science buildings can draw unlimited amounts of resources. So you can effectively go wild here and not worry about consuming ridiculous amounts of water and iron. This also makes adrenaline boost particularly useful for science players.

- When purchasing colony modules the AI seems to be very conservative. It will not spend much on the colony until it sees other players invest more than it has. So an effective strategy is to bank a lot of cash and then dump it into the colony all at once on Sol 5. This allows you to scoop up a lot of colony modules before the price increases and the AIs start to invest more aggressively. The downside to this strategy is that you don't increase the population of the colony until late in the game, and the colony is your primary market for life support resources. But as far as ensuring you own the largest share I find this method to be the most effective.

In this particular case (after MANY failed attempts and false starts) I managed to upgrade the colony to a very respectable 28/31 module pairs. If the price of aluminium hadn't been so ridiculous I'm sure me and the AIs could have maxed out the colony between the three of us. One thing I need to remember for the future is that monopolizing resources needed to upgrade the colony isn't actually in my best interest. When I have a commanding majority share of >50% it's actually better for me to help the AI afford to purchase more modules since it benefits me more than them.

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No new bugs were observed although I did see that interface problem I mentioned earlier. When the number of notifications grows too large they start to "scrunch" inwards and overlap each other. Eventually they start to push the top right part of the interface off the screen entirely. This isn't a very high priority bug to fix because it only crops up in this very specific case. It's the end of the game and I demolished and recycled every claim I had so that I could cash out the resources and purchase one last colony module at the last second.

There are a couple of possible solutions to this. The easiest would be to have the notifications wrap around and begin a second line under the first one. Another would be to have all of the separate "You have an unused claim" notifications collapse into a single one that rotates between the empty plots when you click on it.

At the end of the game I also noticed that Financial Instruments only triggers at 24:30 instead of directly at midnight. Either it should trigger at midnight daily or in campaign mode it should trigger at 24:00 on Sol 7 just so that you have access to the money before the mission ends. I know there have been cases in the past were having that extra few thousand dollars could have been invested in a module and converted into several tens of thousands in weekly income.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440605165245640429/60A7CAB9314FDDF8E75A3A74BC441B11AF7EDABE/)

Thanks for the great feedback!

We're going to fix the notification overflow by capping the buttons at 12.

Also, Financial Instruments triggers on the end of the game, not at 24:30, and I think that is best because it's good that the player gets the money but using it in the last 40 minutes (4 seconds of real-time) seems awkward. If the game goes into overtime, you'll get to use the money like normal.

To help understand how much money you'll get from a subsidiary, we show the amount of money you will earn from one share in parenthesis - "(+$24)" - and I think it explains that as well on mouseover? It is just literally giving you one percent of their cash each second, so the money is going to fluctuate a lot.

Where exactly do you mouseover to see the share value? If I just hover over the bar it gives me the usual breakdown of net worth, cash+assets, debts etc.

I don't think 4 seconds is too little to use the last second cash injection. I play on Blazing speed and I still have about 5 or 6 seconds between 24:00 and 24:30 on the last Sol. What I usually do is spend those last seconds hammering on the build module button unless I have already maxed my colony out. Since I'm playing scientific in the campaign and have easy access to nanotechnology I also tend to pause the game just after 24:00 and recycle all of my buildings before doing the same thing. So it's plenty of time to act, even if I was playing on normal speed or ironman mode.

Mutinied offworld markets are still not providing two launches. The second shipment always gets cut short at 29 seconds even if I queue a shipment up ahead of time. When a market is built next to one or more warehouses the time (at blazing speed) drops from 29 to 26 seconds and you get two shipments instead.

I've been playing skirmishes on tiny maps with rare resources to mix things up a little. People have mentioned how unpolished the buyout warning percentage looks and I noticed that they even get covered up by certain notifications. So if someone launches a shipment of water it covers the number up with the "_____ has launched a shipment" tag. If the notifications were moved slightly to the left it would leave space for the numbers to appear while still being readable.

It would also be helpful to see a green buyout percentage number that indicates how much cash you have on hand versus the buyout price of an enemy. You can see these prices by hovering over the buy button but there is no way to quickly compare these prices to each other. In multiplayer this becomes even more difficult because you have no pause to work with. In other words when YOU have enough cash that other players get to see a buyout % notification beside your name it simply lets you see the same number on your screen beside their name. In the rare case that both of you are >50% towards buying out each other it could shrink the numbers a bit and show the green above the red.

Also here's a neat picture. This map has supposedly "rare" resources but this is still the most carbon I've ever seen in one crater.
IMAGE(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/440605165249424504/7011507F7D735057018D5BC7D7ABEBA72CF2FA6D/)

Tamren wrote:

Where exactly do you mouseover to see the share value? If I just hover over the bar it gives me the usual breakdown of net worth, cash+assets, debts etc.

That is the share value. Or, do you mean how much they will produce as a subsidiary? That only shows up once they are a subsidiary. (And there is functionally no way to calculate that before a buyout...)

Oh okay. I just played through a skirmish as Scientific. It took me a long time to figure out what you meant and here is why. On the top right of the interface you have the corporations panel that shows your competitors and their current share status. If you hover over a corp it opens up a tooltip that shows you things like their net worth, assets, debts etc. There is a second tooltip in there that you can access at any time, but it's invisible and the interface doesn't give you any indication it exists. When you buyout a corp a number appears in blue that says "+$0-3000", this indicates how much income you are getting per second from a subsidiary. There is a button you can hover over to see a more exact breakdown of this income at the top right corner but it's very small. If your income says $2345 a second, unless you hover over the 4 or 5 you won't find the tooltip.

This is one those things like being able to autosell resources that are really obvious in hindsight, but are nearly impossible to figure out for yourself except by accident. I had no idea this was here because it gives you no indication that there is a second button. Most people would just assume the tooltip you get by hovering over the bar is the only one and would never think to check the corner. My recommendation would be to simply combine the two of them into one larger tooltip instead of having one big one and a tiny hidden one.

The tooltip could also be a bit more informative as to how shares work. If I understand it correctly now, each shareholder receives 1% of a subsidiaries cash each second. It doesn't actually explain this in the tooltip and even more confusingly it also displays a number for subsidiaries you have no shares in at all. This number appears in brackets and I think it's supposed to show you how much the other companies are getting per share.

The number is brackets is how much each share will earn for that subsidiary.

Just finished my first campaign last night, reclamation. That was really a very different style of play from the training missions I was doing. I started a little confused at what I was seeing with the hiring, perks, colony building, which ones I should build. I probably just missed the training module that covered it. Looking forward to trying again this time starting with a little bit more "know how". Finally I am starting to understand Tamren's posts.

Soren, really appreciate how engaged you are with the community.

Reminds me of Moonbase Commander, which I loved. Certainly doesn't play like it, just tickles my memory banks.

Soren Johnson wrote:

The number is brackets is how much each share will earn for that subsidiary.

Have you ever considered having a separate colour coded number for each shareholder? I suppose that might get a bit cluttered given the theoretical maximum of 7 different shareholders.

Igneus wrote:

I started a little confused at what I was seeing with the hiring, perks, colony building, which ones I should build. I probably just missed the training module that covered it. Looking forward to trying again this time starting with a little bit more "know how". Finally I am starting to understand Tamren's posts.

Yeah it's very confusing at first and a wholly different ball game compared to regular skirmish. Depending on who you pick as CEO you won't have access to a lot of the things you can do in campaign. On top of that you have a totally different victory objective over the first 6 missions and you're trying to build up a bag of tricks that will help you out in the final mission. The tutorials cover the basics but you could probably have a whole series just about the campaign and how it changes things.

Once you figure it out it's quite rewarding, there are so many different factors you have to take into account. I learn new things about it every time I play a mission.

Igneus wrote:

Soren, really appreciate how engaged you are with the community.

So do I!

Tamren wrote:

Yeah it's very confusing at first and a wholly different ball game compared to regular skirmish. Depending on who you pick as CEO you won't have access to a lot of the things you can do in campaign. On top of that you have a totally different victory objective over the first 6 missions and you're trying to build up a bag of tricks that will help you out in the final mission. The tutorials cover the basics but you could probably have a whole series of just about the campaign and how it changes things.

Once you figure it out it's quite rewarding, there are so many different factors you have to take into account. I learn new things about it every time I play a mission.

Here i was thinking I missed a training on it. IMHO, I think a trainer on the campaign style of play would go a long way.

Now I need to try (and probably lose) at the multiplayer.