Double Review: Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris (Part 1)
2016 is shaping up to be something of a renaissance for the strategy
genre, with XCOM 2, Offworld Trading Company, and Stellaris already out and the
king of the genre - Civilization announcing its next iteration for the end of
the year. It’s delightful to see many different minds in the genre delivering
unique titles that look worthy to stand the test of time.
Of the two new releases, Offworld Trading Company and
Stellaris, the former is easier to explain and so I’ll begin my review with it.
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| A view of the commodities on sale on the left, the rivals' stocks on the right, and the black market in the bottom right corner. The tutorials do a great job explaining it all |
Offworld Trading Company is easily the best capitalism
simulator I’ve played till date. It captures the raw essence of competition,
and is a love letter to the terrifying power of compound interest and
accumulation. Through intelligent (and bloodless) competition, you work to
nudge out (and ultimately buy out) your competitors through capturing and
commanding the Martian economy.
Games follow a distinct rhythm, an opening land rush gambit to
capture the best resource spots for yourself, a hectic building up of industry
that determines what products you want to sell to succeed (while dealing with interference
from the competition), and a late game frenzy to buy out the competition while
fending off hostile bids on your own business. The bigger you get, the bigger
you can get; having more resources means you can capture key resources ahead of
your opponent, and eventually there comes a point where it’s an exercise in
futility to compete with an opponent who played their cards right, where the
gap between your economy and theirs cannot be bridged. That’s that hard part of
capitalism. On the other hand, seeing a plan come together and being in a
position to dominate the market is a unique high, this is a game that makes you
feel smart when you succeed.
The rough part of capitalism comes in the form of a ‘black
market’ where players can buy one-use abilities that technically involve
non-price competition and give your team one time advantages, or stymie the
opposition (options include inviting pirates to shoot down their transports, or
perhaps inciting a strike at their factories, or better yet, a mutiny). The cost
of each of these abilities increases every time any player on the map buys one,
which means that as games get longer those who can’t afford to fight back commercially
will not be able to afford sneaky tricks either due to inflation. Goes to prove
that you can cheat to win, till you can’t afford to pay the piper. If you take
the moral high road and don’t use underhanded tactics against the opposition,
they’re less likely to target you, until the moment you start getting ahead. At
higher difficulties, I doubt it’s practically sane to play all clean (those who
disagree haven’t had their patent office mutiny just before they were about to finish
patenting teleportation) (Also, this is why we need disincentives to be
stringently enforced to penalize crime and promote fairness – to prevent a
descent into chaos).
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| The campaign mode makes you think very seriously about what area to expand business to: who are your opponents, what are the unique features of the area, which country owns the site, do you have the technology you need to succeed? Everything is a tradeoff |
Every action has a reaction, expanding your Base gives you
more land but increases your food and water requirements, selling too much of a
commodity reduces its price (hence the need to diversify), building a launch
pad makes you a target of sabotage and explosives, and so on. The game succeeds
in portraying every decision as part of a larger whole.
The titular off-world trading comes in the form of an end
game building - the launch pad - from where you can send rockets carrying your
goods to off planet colonies, where the prices for those goods are far higher,
and not linked to the price on Mars. The hard earned happiness after a spike of
funds from a rocket launch (think boat shipments from Tropico) is the fun part
of capitalism.
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| A successful buyout of the competition |
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| The post game helps understand what works and what doesn't |
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| It's not easy to stay ahead in this market |
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| You can make out exactly where the competition lost all chance of winning |
Offworld Trading Company launched through Early Access and is
the better for it - the polish shows in the smoothness of the design. The game
has a very welcoming and well-paced tutorial, skirmish modes, co-op modes, and
a lovely campaign mode which expands on the core dynamics through linking 7
maps with carry over progression (a good performance on one map makes the next
ones easier and vice versa). The campaign’s final level, where the four
strongest companies fight it out for a monopoly on Mars feels like a perfect
conclusion to days of commercial rivalry, and I strongly recommend the
experience.
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| Each character has a personality which adds color to the game |
Due to the nature of how losses magnify faster than gains,
at times it’s just better to restart, and this is a cause for serious
frustration when your gambits fail and you know there’s pretty much no way to
fight back. In game terms, this means that this game will lead to rage-induced
quitting. That said, the game is highly replayable and does what it sets out to
do extraordinarily well – give you the feeling of being a bloodthirsty
capitalist, and seeing corporate heads roll. Changing the setting from Mars to
Earth in 1910 (Offworld rockets replaced with freight ships) would not change
the experience one bit, and that is a testament to good, focused design.
Like Civilization V, the experience gets better and more
enjoyable as you get better (and start figuring out what works and what doesn’t,
hint: never be energy negative), when you challenge yourself to higher
difficulties (there’s a whole spectrum), and the fights become more lively.
This one’s a keeper.
>Stellaris review and wrap up in Part 2
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