The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Auctions were an early element of Offworld’s design that were compelling from the beginning. Player interaction is the core of competitive strategy games, and one risk of making an RTS without combat is that players might feel they are playing competitive solitaire, focusing mostly on their own buildings and ignoring the other players. Thus, auctions are a great way to put players into direct conflict as they bid on items, driving up the price until all but one blink. Judging the value of an auction is tricky, and many players experience the “winner’s curse” common in auctions where the winner of the auction ends up losing the game from overbidding.

Initially, we implemented three types of auctions: a new claim, a specific tile, and an unclaimed patent. One mechanic we originally tried with auctions was creating a new resource deposit specifically for an auction if no unclaimed source existed. For example, if all the Silicon tiles on the map had been claimed, the game would create a new source of Silicon and auction it off. We had wanted to create meaningful auctions, but this situation was too meaningful. If a player had accomplished the difficult task of claiming all the Silicon on the map, she felt cheated if the game magically created a new one. The player had the painful choice of either overbidding to protect her monopoly or letting it go and losing a rare advantage. We didn’t want to punish players who went for the strategy of monopolizing a specific resource, so we took away the feature.

As development continued, we integrated new features to improve auctions. Once the black market was no longer a fixed set of seven items but a random selection from a larger pool, we could then auction sabotage items which were not available on the black market (if the item was on the black market, then there was little reason to bid much over the current price). Once special buildings (Patent Office, Hacker Array, etc.) could be built next to the Colony, we could then auction them off since they would be potentially valuable to all players (although we never auction off Offworld Markets because that would be insane).

One other important change was only possible once debt became a game mechanic. Originally, auctions were paid directly from cash, which meant that players were often selling all their resources to be able to outbid their opponents. However, at some point, players are simply going to hit a limit and have no more cash to bid on an auction. Further, if the auction comes at a point when most players are cash poor (possibly from recently upgrading HQs), one player might be able to win an important auction simply because he was the only player in the game with money on hand. That situation felt wrong, especially when a rival player was willing to bid if only she had the money. The solution was to instead pay for auctions out of debt, which solved the problem completely. Players were free to bid as much as they wanted to on auctions but knew that if they overbid, their stock price might crash to dangerous levels. In the days shortly after this change, there were some hilarious playtests where one player (usually me) overbid heavily on an auction and then saw his stock price immediately collapse to $1 and get bought out. Lessons were learned.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

One of the trickiest parts of the design was how to handle when the player needed to consume a resource but had none in her stockpile. Our initial solution was that every time a player could not supply the needed Power, Fuel, or life support, the game would lower that player’s stock price. If this penalty was applied too many times, the company would drop to a price of $1 and would soon be acquired by a competitor. The system worked, in that players would be afraid to run out of required resources, but the system was also obtuse and caused permanent damage to players; each stock penalty lasted for the rest of the game, which meant we were encouraging a very conservative strategy of always making required resources first.

The solution was the debt system, which kept track of each time the player needed to buy a required resource from the market, acting as an unlimited line-of-credit. The debt would also affect the player’s stock price but, significantly, a player could pay off the debt to recover later in the game. Too much of a resource shortfall early in the game was no longer a death sentence. The system now worked because it was transparent, players could see how bad their debt was getting and decide when to fix the problem.

However, as all game designers know, give players a new feature, and they will do everything they can to break it to their advantage. “Debt diving” became a term among the players for ignoring debt in favor of resources that produced straight cash in the hopes of buying out the other players before dying to too much debt. It was a dangerous strategy but, in the hands of the best players, also a dominant strategy. (Simply put, a player with $300K in cash and $200K in debt can easily beat a player with $100K in cash and no debt, even though their net assets are identical.)

The solution was bond ratings, which changed the interest rate paid on debt each day depending on the ratio of a player’s debt to his total assets. The better bond ratings (AAA, AA, A) had interest rates between 2% and 6%, which were quite manageable. However, once a player sunk to a D rating, the interest rate jumped to 30%, which meant that a player could die to debt as her debt might increase faster than she could pay it down. Finally, players with a D rating were also locked out of the black market, which meant they could no longer sabotage their competitors and were also vulnerable to sabotage without access to the defensive Good Squad. Basically, D debt is very bad — bad enough that while players would still use debt as a tool to accelerate their progress at times, they were also acutely aware that going too far could mean disaster.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

A game with 13 resources would not be very interesting if all 13 resources are basically different flavors of the same thing. Thus, when building the resource tree, we had to think about what purpose each resource served. The natural place to start is the primary resources which are found on Mars. We decided early on to have five primary resources which would appear randomly on the map (although also depending on terrain so that, for example, Iron is most likely to be found on Volcanic terrain). The initial five resources were Water, Iron, Copper, Aluminum, and Silicon. Our secondary resources would derive from the primary ones, creating a resource tree similar to those found in the Railroad Tycoon series:

• Greenhouse Farms turned Water in Food
• Electrolysis Reactors split Water into Oxygen and Fuel (Hydrogen)
• Plastics Manufactures turned Fuel into Plastics
• Steel Mills turned Iron into Steel
• Glass Kilns turned Silicon and Oxygen into Glass
• Electronics Factories turned Silicon and Copper into Electronics

This resource tree meant that certain resources were easier or harder to obtain. Steel was easy to make as it simply required Iron while Glass was much hard as it required Silicon and Oxygen (and the latter comes from Water). This difference kept the market interesting as players had to judge a resource not just by its price but also by how hard it was to make the resources. If Glass is $100, and Steel is $80, it’s not immediately obvious which resource is better to produce as Glass is harder to make and also sensitive to price changes in three different resources (Silicon, Water, and Oxygen).

Furthermore, the resources were differentiated by how they were to be used. Steel was the primary construction material, used to create almost all of the buildings and also to upgrade the HQ, which makes it a very important resource early in the game. Copper and Glass were also used to upgrade the HQ, which made them similarly crucial as upgrading was the primary method to acquire new claims. Other resources – Water, Food, and Oxygen – were needed as life support to keep one’s workers alive. These resources were consumed every turn depending on the size of the HQ, which meant that their price would rise steadily if no one was supplying them to the market. Similarly, Fuel powered the player’s ships as they moved across the map. Aluminum was used for building ships at the HQ (which was important in this earlier version of the game). Plastics and Electronics (as well as Glass) were cash crops that were not particularly useful to the player but could be driven up in value by onworld demand (a background factor that replaced the old neutral Colonies). A final resource, Power, worked completely differently from all the other resources because it could not be stockpiled and was constantly bought from or sold to the market depending on whether the player had a shortage or surplus of it. Power was important because almost every building in the game consumed Power while working, which meant the demand for Power would consistently increase until players ran out of claims for new buildings.

Thus, every resource in the game had a unique profile regarding how it was made and why it might become valuable. This diversity meant that players knew that investing in a specific resources meant different things for their overall strategy – claiming Water was important for ensuring access to life support, building Glass ensured that the player could upgrade and claim more territory, making Electronics meant that the player would be able to make cash by selling a rare and expensive resource, and so on.

Of course, the resource tree changed a few times before our final version. One concern was Aluminum, which wasn’t a particularly interesting resource as it didn’t lead to any secondary resources. Furthermore, we liked that the Metal Mine could sometimes produce multiple resources if the player found a tile with multiple deposits of Iron, Copper, and Aluminum, and we wanted the same feature for the Quarry. However, instead of cutting Aluminum, we cut Copper and moved Aluminum into its slot as an upgrade resource for the HQ. (By now, ships were no longer constructed by the player, so we also didn’t need a resource dedicated to that purpose.) To take the place of Copper, we added Carbon, which would also come from the Quarry so that it could ideally produce multiple resources (Silicon and Carbon). Electronics would now also come from Silicon, Carbon, and Aluminum, making it unique as the only resource that required three inputs.

The final change to the resource tree was to replace Plastics with a more interesting resource. Electronics and Glass were useful cash crops based on onworld demand, but they were also important for either building the Offworld Market or (in the case of Glass) upgrading the player’s HQ. Plastics, on the other hand, really didn’t have a purpose if the price was not high. At the same time, we had learned that the game was more interesting if costs were in resources, not in cash, so that their true price fluctuated depending on the market. Patents and optimizations had been priced simply in cash, but if they cost a resource instead, players could decide to make that resource to help themselves conduct research (or to profit from other players’ research). Thus, we replaced Plastics with Chemicals, which would now be used for patents and optimizations. Further, Chemicals would come from Fuel and Carbon, making the resource similarly difficult to make as Glass and Electronics.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Perhaps the one game element which has changed the least from the earliest prototype to the finished game is the claim system, which was borrowed directly from the classic economic video game, M.U.L.E. However, the way buildings interacted with claims in Offworld did change. Originally, each tile could hold four buildings, and the production bonuses were not between buildings in adjacent tiles but between buildings in the same tile. Two Steel Mills in the same tile got a bonus, three Mills got a higher bonus, and four was the best. However, this system was hard to manage, and the player mostly just built the same four building in each tile every time. Most importantly, players were not specializing in specific resources as they generally devoted one tile to each one, which was a big problem for the gameplay. If each player is building the same set of resources, the market is going to be less dynamic; players don’t have to make hard choices about which resources to skip.

The solution was to allow only one building per tile and to give production bonuses for buildings of the same type in adjacent tiles. (We also switched from squares to hexes around this time, which made adjacency rules much more natural.) The bonuses for two adjacent buildings was +50%, which meant that two adjacent Steels Mills produced as much as three non-adjacent ones (and, of course, consumed less power and iron). This dynamic strongly encouraged specialization, which led to more interesting games as players couldn’t just build one of everything and be safe. It was much better, for example, to commit to either Food or Oxygen but not to both, which meant that the price of either one could spike if players all ignored that specific resource (which would then reward the player who first noticed that no one else was making it).

The bonuses were initially +50% for each adjacent building, which meant that the ideal situation was a circle of 6 identical buildings surrounding a seventh building in the center, which would receive an amazing +300% production bonus. We initially thought that committing seven tiles to just one resource would be too dangerous for players if the price of that resources crashed (which was likely considering the oversupply), but players instead quickly cycled these seven buildings (meaning to scrap and rebuild them as a different type) depending on the market. It was a hectic experience, and we didn’t want the best strategy to be one of constantly scrapping one’s building – it felt wrong and also introduced an unwanted dexterity challenge to the game as cycling speed became important. The solution was to add diminishing returns to the bonuses so that the third building gave a +25% bonus, the fourth gave a +10%, and so on. Ultimately, the maximum bonus possible was only +100%, and a player probably would be better off splitting those seven tiles between two resources instead of committing to just one. Now, the triangle of buildings – each with a +75% total bonus – became the new sweet spot, which felt just about right for balancing specialization and diversification. (Interestingly, the final balance is similar to that of M.U.L.E., which also gave bonuses for adjacent building and for every three buildings of the same type.)

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

The reason we streamlined unit selection from the game was that we wanted to create room for the part of the game we cared about – the free market gameplay. Originally, this aspect of the game resembled Railroad Tycoon as well. Players did not have an HQ at all but the map had multiple neutral Colonies, and the player earned the most money by dropping off a resource at the Colony with the highest demand for that resource. Thus, Steel might be selling for $10 at a nearby Colony but for $100 at a distant one, so it was worth the effort to ship the Steel to the other side of the map.

Players had a hard time investing in this version of the game as they felt disconnected from the map, so we decided to add the HQ, a place for the player to store all her resources in a single stockpile. Once the HQ appeared, it also became the natural place to put secondary buildings that required input resources – Steel Mills, Glass Kilns, and so on. At the same time, the HQs replaced the old neutral Colonies (which would make a comeback later in the project), so the local markets were now gone, to be replaced by a single market. In this case, we were heavily inspired by the Market building from Age of Kings, which allowed players to buy and sell Iron, Wood, and Stone at prices that went up and down with each transaction. Thus, if one player bought Wood, the price went up for everyone. We built a similar game-wide market but developed one important difference.

The designers of Age of Kings hedged their bets on free market dynamics by forcing the purchase price of a resource to be always double the sale price. Thus, if one could buy Stone for $100, one could only sell it for $50, which meant that using the market too much would eventually drain away one’s Gold. This price relationship greatly hindered one’s ability to play the market, preventing it from becoming one of the core mechanics of the game; instead, the market was simply an interesting but inessential part of the whole. In our case, however, the resource market is the core of Offworld, so we wanted to encourage people to use it as much as possible. We did originally use the price doubling mechanic from Age of Kings but, fearing that players weren’t using the market enough, collapsed the buy and sell price into a single value; the results were immediate and positive as players started taking advantage of buying low and selling high; the market was now equally driven by the game’s rules and by the players’ strategies. This one change resulted in the first glimpse of what Offworld would become, an intense free market RTS that was unlike anything we had ever played.

The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Unit Selection

Our design intention with Offworld Trading Company is to make a real-time strategy game that rewards thinking over reflexes and adaptation over patterns. We want to make a game that focuses on the macro-level decisions of a traditional RTS but without requiring micro-level skill. In games like StarCraft, a player without high actions-per-minute counts could never compete at a high level. We want Offworld to be a game for people on the other end of the scale, who are competitive and love strategy game but who don’t want to be held back by a dexterity challenge.

It’s amazing that real-time strategy games ever worked at all. Most video games are about controlling one thing – a character, an athlete, a car, a plane, and so on. The obvious reason for this limitation is that input devices are primarily about direction and movement – consider the joystick, the d-pad, WASD/mouse-look, and even tilt controls. More diverse game interactions have been found primarily on the PC where the mouse gives players precise control over unit selection. Grabbing a bunch of tanks and sending them to wipe out an opponent has been the core of real-time strategy (RTS) games since the very beginning. However, unit selection is also prone to error, difficult to manage, and mentally taxing. Coupling this challenge with the other high-level demands of RTS games (scouting, base building, economy management, army composition) while also dealing with intense time pressure makes RTS games sound more like a stress simulator than entertainment for many players. MOBAs emerged from and then eclipsed RTS games because, while players enjoyed the scale and the competition of an RTS, they preferred the vast simplification of having to manage only one character, which – again – is what video games do so well.

However, just because unit selection is so frustrating doesn’t mean that RTS games should die. RTS games are the best place in video games for players who want to think. They require difficult choices between short-term gains and long-term goals. They require reading an opponent’s mind and predicting her moves. They encourage formulating a plan and then learning when to deviate from it. They are endlessly replayable as every dominant strategy has a counter-strategy waiting to topple it. They are the only way to make multiplayer truly work in a strategic game, avoiding the intractable problem of having to wait for one’s turn. Most importantly, real-time games must be played intuitively, by feel and experience instead of the painfully slow analysis possible in turn-based games.

Thus, RTS games should live. Unit selection, however, should die. An RTS game is, at its core, about making strategic choices in a real-time environment, about not just making interesting decisions but also about when and when not to make them. Unit selection is just not a necessary part of that formula and often keeps the player from engaging with the game’s actual design.

Having said that, it took us awhile to get there. Indeed, Offworld actually started as a much more conventional RTS with plenty of unit selection. The player moved Scouts around the map to explore, sent Probes out to claim tiles, used Engineers to construct buildings, moved Pirates to attack building and shipping lanes, and then moved Police ships around to attack the Pirates. In fact, the player even had to set up shipping routes to move the Freighters from building to building, picking up Iron at a Mine, dropping it off at a Steel Mill, picking up the Steel, and then dropping it off at the market – basically, Railroad Tycoon set on Mars.

Micromanaging the shipping lanes was the first to go. The demands of unit management were taking too much player time, turning the game from one about playing the resource market to one about playing the shipping lanes. Instead, Freighters now appeared as soon as a building was full and then went directly to the stockpile at the HQ (and buildings that needed resources were supplied directly from the stockpile). To make up for some of the lost functionality of manual shipping lanes, we added override buttons that forced sending resources to the HQ early or supplying a specific building from the HQ. One concern about losing shipping lanes was that players could no longer make choices to avoid the Pirates by taking a sub-optimal route; however, the immediacy of a shipping lane becoming a fixed, unchangeable part of the map had other advantages – that the map was now defined not just by the terrain but also the vectors connecting buildings to their HQs.

Automatic shipping improved the game experience immediately and immeasurably; players now had time to make higher-level decision, to look around at what other players were doing, and to predict where the market was going to go. Thus, we were encouraged to try to take more and more unit selection out of the game. For example, Pirates now could only be placed on the map but not controlled; moreover, they were temporary, so we could cut the Police entirely from the game as the Pirates would just disappear after stealing a certain number of resources.

Our original model for Engineers was directly from a traditional RTS; the player would train Engineers at the HQ and then move them around the map, constructing buildings on the way. Under this version, players often lost their engineers, which meant they couldn’t place new buildings until they found one. Thus, we took away player control of Engineers; they now appeared from the HQ automatically whenever the player placed a new building on the map and then helpfully disappeared when done working. The only downside was that the player didn’t have to optimize the question of whether he had enough Engineers to cover all of his tiles – which ultimately just encouraged players to build close to their HQs anyway, and we already had other game mechanics (fuel costs, travel times) to punish players for building too far afield.

Finally, the last controllable unit was the Scout, which the player used to explore the map and discover resources. It was difficult to envision taking control of this unit away from the player, especially since the player actually did have time to micromanage exploration before founding an HQ. However, having only one type of unit be selectable just seemed very strange, and we were afraid that having the player select the first unit set up expectations for selecting latter units in the game. Thus, our first attempt to take away Scout selection was by planting exploration flags on the map that the Scouts would aim towards when exploring, somewhat like the bounty flags that are placed in Majesty. However, every time a Scout didn’t aim for a flag in just the right way made the player yearn for the original selection method. The solution was to cut Scouts entirely and replace them with the scanning mechanic, which lets players simply reveal tiles by clicking on them. This mechanic was simple, effective, and fast, making Scouts completely unnecessary. With that last change, we had removed all unit selection from Offworld.