Ok. So it's real-time, complicated but cool, very market driven, with quite nice graphics. Being from the lead designer of Civ IV tends to put me (and everyone else) at ease with its potential depth.
There's 4 different company types to begin with, and robotic is one of them (using energy instead of food). The others seem to be expansive, science and scavenger, probably giving bonuses to different fields. You can start with various engineers, etc, in the SP campaign, giving you more control on how you want to play from the outset, and what path you'd like to go down to win. A bit of longevity to the title worthwhile exploring. There doesn't seem to be a tech tree per say, more-so upgrades of buildings with production lines to set up with bigger "stuff" at the end of the line. These can either be awesome or redundant depending on market prices, need for that resource and competition. Research is more about future tech benefits, giving you something that others don't have, fully patented. Think of Wonders of the World, but !!science!!. Yes, you can also buy out other company's stock to end another player's run, with that pretty much being the "over-all" win condition if there's no others.
Resources can be used to support yourself, sold to others, or to support asteroid miners off-world (which is essentially the outside market, and the reason for putting stuff on Mars in the first place). You can choose to sell to your competitors for profit, or turn off the taps and watch the cost of that resource skyrocket if you've got a monopoly on something (they'll have to ship everything in, and you make a killing on the market at the appropriate time). You can also sabotage other players by encouraging worker strikes, etc as well. There's pirates and bad space weather to consider too, throwing a curveball at your plans of market domination.
There's a single player campaign as well as multiplayer, and I've seen it mentioned that it's in short-play format, so you might actually finish a game of this (no Civ4 marathons lasting months when you just want a couple of hours against your mates). Games like this are amazing in multiplayer, so I'd rather the ability to actually win it in one play session, rather than having weeks of scheduling woes right near the end-game. Good for single player too. Yay!
The interface looks pretty slick, with most necessary information right there on the main play screen. Building positioning is simple but strategic. Any other info or options all seem to be a mouse click or two away, without slowing down gameplay too much. There's plenty of fun sabotage shenanigans to mess with your opponents, and lots of synergies available for your production line and setup, without it all being overly complicated.
It usually costs $40US, but is on -25% sale until 16th May. So it's $29.99US for now, and you get a free Almanac DLC for that price (I don't know what that does, but I like early adopter bonuses, rather than pre-order or EA stuff). There's a $5 Real Mars Map DLC, which I might actually consider, because I'm a bit of a space nerd and there's no other trading games actually set on Mars. It'll be a fun way of really learning where stuff is.
78% positive reviews on Steam, which tends to mean it's not bad. And it can mean it's pretty damn good in this sort of genre. 9/10's and glowing reviews from plenty of journalists, for whatever that's worth these days.
Here's a Steam page for it, with trailers and stuff:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/And a Let's Play by Arumba:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWb_IsM1HU
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Topic: Offworld Trading Company - Out Now - outsell your competition (Read 5285 times)