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[Greenbane]

OMG but I loved MULE.  Dan* Bunten was one of the greatest game developers of all time, between this and 7COG.  Fucking visionary.

Even though I often finished games well ahead by controlling some sector of the market and extorting exorbitant prices from the other players (either AI, or friends and siblings) we never saw the best endings.  Years later, after the game came to the web as a free online offering, I learned from the high score boards that the most successful way to play is where everyone cooperates to make the colony successful together.  Just like in real capitalism and free market models based on the prisoners' dilemma, you do best by not screwing over your neighbor.

I also learned other things I never knew about the game -- as I had never read the manual:  You can intentionally buy MULEs and set them free to spike demand for ore and prevent others from maintaining their plots.  I never had any idea!!

Bunten made a ruthlessly capitalist game, where the best course of action was to cooperate.  Similarly in 7COG, it was ostensibly a game about exploration and exploitation, but you did best by cooperating with the natives.  he (I use this pronoun because it was correct at the time these games were made) was a genius.

I wonder  if OTC has similar activities?  Is it possible to cooperate so everyone succeeds together?  Or is it just "screw your neighbor for fun and profit" ?

Well, OTC is more aggressive, given how your ultimate objective is always to accrue enough wealth to buy out your adversaries and therefore knock them out of the game.

In my limited experience, it seems the black market sabotage options are the best (only?) way to really screw up your opponents, but their use becomes less advisable in free-for-all matches against several other companies. The reason is you can only damage one enemy at a time, and you invest wealth in that (more and more the later the game stage), meaning you hurt one and set yourself back a bit in relation to those you didn't hurt.

Any cooperation can only be temporary, perhaps to knock down an overly powerful, runaway company. But in the end, it cannot last. I haven't touched the multiplayer, but it's my understanding there's no diplomacy. Either alliances are fixed and unbreakable, or don't exist at all, and there can be only one winner.

[BigD145]

OMG but I loved MULE.  Dan* Bunten was one of the greatest game developers of all time, between this and 7COG.  Fucking visionary.

Even though I often finished games well ahead by controlling some sector of the market and extorting exorbitant prices from the other players (either AI, or friends and siblings) we never saw the best endings.  Years later, after the game came to the web as a free online offering, I learned from the high score boards that the most successful way to play is where everyone cooperates to make the colony successful together.  Just like in real capitalism and free market models based on the prisoners' dilemma, you do best by not screwing over your neighbor.

I also learned other things I never knew about the game -- as I had never read the manual:  You can intentionally buy MULEs and set them free to spike demand for ore and prevent others from maintaining their plots.  I never had any idea!!

Bunten made a ruthlessly capitalist game, where the best course of action was to cooperate.  Similarly in 7COG, it was ostensibly a game about exploration and exploitation, but you did best by cooperating with the natives.  he (I use this pronoun because it was correct at the time these games were made) was a genius.

I wonder  if OTC has similar activities?  Is it possible to cooperate so everyone succeeds together?  Or is it just "screw your neighbor for fun and profit" ?

Well, OTC is more aggressive, given how your ultimate objective is always to accrue enough wealth to buy out your adversaries and therefore knock them out of the game.

In my limited experience, it seems the black market sabotage options are the best (only?) way to really screw up your opponents, but their use becomes less advisable in free-for-all matches against several other companies. The reason is you can only damage one enemy at a time, and you invest wealth in that (more and more the later the game stage), meaning you hurt one and set yourself back a bit in relation to those you didn't hurt.

Any cooperation can only be temporary, perhaps to knock down an overly powerful, runaway company. But in the end, it cannot last. I haven't touched the multiplayer, but it's my understanding there's no diplomacy. Either alliances are fixed and unbreakable, or don't exist at all, and there can be only one winner.

Sabotage is not the only way but I don't know the keybinding to stop selling your production to competitors, which messes with pricing.

The campaign is all about building more colony buildings than your competitors and getting a larger share of its profits down the line. There's no competitor shares from what I saw. There's also no "we all did this in a great way" like MULE.

[Mephansteras]

PTW. Very curious to see how well people like this.

[forsaken1111]

The campaign is all about building more colony buildings than your competitors and getting a larger share of its profits down the line. There's no competitor shares from what I saw.

Campaign runs in stages, with the first stage being to build up colonies then an elimination stage where companies with poor performance are knocked out and then finally stages you are buying everyone out

[Greenbane]

Sabotage is not the only way but I don't know the keybinding to stop selling your production to competitors, which messes with pricing.

Is that kind of specificity possible? At least as far as skimishes are concerned, everything seems to indicate you sell to the general market and buy from the general market. Everyone's actions affect the general prices, but you don't deal directly with the other players. It is technically possible to hoard all the resources of a certain kind so that your competitors are forced to get them from the market, but that's not the same thing. And it wouldn't be usually advisable unless there's very few deposits.

I've yet to touch the campaign, which I understand is a series of skirmish matches tied by a fairly significant macro aspect and large-scale decisions. It's all dynamically generated in the campaign as well, right?

[forsaken1111]

So far my best match in the campaign consisted of me grabbing all 3 geothermal spots and going energy crazy while using my profits to buy nothing but offices for the colony, which use energy, thus keeping the total energy available low enough that the price stays high even though I am pumping out quite a bit.

Its not viable long term but it gave me such an early game advantage that the match was easy. Next round I didn't manage to grab the geothermals so went a different route (mostly supplying steel as I grabbed the good iron spots)

[sambojin]

Sorry for the incorrect info above, will edit. There's only 4 types of company you can be. For now.

Other than that, the game looks great. All the fun of M.U.L.E, with several extra levels of complete and utter barstardry to serve to your competition.

This game is good. There's Stellaris, which does stuff. Then there's this.


This is totally different and probably a more awesome ballgame. Fun to play. Fun to watch. Quick and good. M.U.L.E 2.0+++

It's fucking amazing.


Check out Zultar's YouTube channel on some of the multiplayer tournaments. This game is almost Esports'able.
https://m.youtube.com/user/Zultar327

[Paul]

Loving this game.

I had a funny multiplayer lobby game. Everyone else plopped down pretty quick but I was taking a few seconds to try and find a decent spot. The other 3 players went science, science, and scavenger. The scavenger guy dropped on carbon, one science on iron, other on silicon. I took a few seconds to go ahead and explore the map with some quick clicks. Then I noticed something amazing. There was only a single patch of water on the whole map - 7 tiles in a little cluster. So I dropped a robotics HQ right in the center of it, with a 3 tile triangle remaining of it. I quickly claimed those 3 tiles. Got a nice setup going and covered up all the adjacent tiles to the 3 water tiles to prevent anyone from slant drilling them. I rushed a patent lab and got teleportation just to keep anyone else from getting it.

Now at this point you probably expect that I made a fortune selling water. Nope... I never pumped any the whole game, even when its price was super high and the other resources became cheap. Why? Because robots don't rely on anything water related for maintenance, but everyone else heavily relies on water.

Fuel? Requires water. Only alternative? Patent to use... water.
Food? Requires water.
Oxygen? Requires water.
Glass? Requires o2, which requires water.
And of course water itself for upkeep.

At first I was behind - I started a little bit late and wasted a bit of resources claiming all the water without regard to better real estate. But I managed to keep anyone from buying me out and thankfully nobody made a dedicated attempt to ruin me. And soon the price of water had skyrocketed, along with everything that requires it. Soon everyone was struggling to pay their upkeep and the cost of fuel to ship resources was crippling for the two science guys who had most of their buildings out on the resource deposits.

[forsaken1111]

Did the map not have ice? You can get water from ice as well.

[Paul]

Nope, no water ice anywhere on the whole map either.

It didn't even have the option to build solar condensers (apparently the option goes away when there is none present).


Heh, and now I'm playing a single player map with NO WATER at all. No ice or water. Should be interesting to see how the AI responds to it.

[forsaken1111]

That's pretty rough. By restricting the water you also restricted food, oxygen, fuel, etc. Good strategy. I've never seen a map with so little water.

[Paul]

Yeah, with resource minimum set to None you can get zero water, and with ice type set to Random you can randomly get either no ice or dry ice.

[forsaken1111]

Makes me think there should be a new building which is the opposite of the offworld launch facility, where you call in resource transports from off map at a large expense. Might be worth it in such cases.

[Blargityblarg]

Makes me think there should be a new building which is the opposite of the offworld launch facility, where you call in resource transports from off map at a large expense. Might be worth it in such cases.

I mean, I think that's what the infinite-water-you-can-buy-despite-there-being-no-production represents anyway?

[forsaken1111]

Makes me think there should be a new building which is the opposite of the offworld launch facility, where you call in resource transports from off map at a large expense. Might be worth it in such cases.

I mean, I think that's what the infinite-water-you-can-buy-despite-there-being-no-production represents anyway?

I guess so. But there is already an 'offworld market' price in the game, ie the price you sell at when sending resources off. Why not let us buy at those prices too and call in supply drops? Seems obvious.