offworld trading company scientific guide

Often the best resource might simply be the resources no-one else has gotten to yet. The game is also tile based which means it’ll be familiar to someone who plays Civ, but at the start you can only claim five tiles and there are 13 resources, which means you’ll have to figure out which resources you think are the most important.

When you start the game you only get four or five claims. Soren Johnson: In fact there are more resources than you’ll be able to get on your own. GameWatcher: As the player we’re not just trying to expand and grab resources like we would in a traditional RTS though, we need to look at the market and prices at all times?

There are all sorts of different type of building that produce one resource, or convert two resources into one other resources with different levels of costs and starting prices. Instead of four resources we have thirteen and some of those resources can only be created from the primary resources. In Age of Empires, that mechanic is an interesting sidebar to the game, what we’ve really done is really zoomed in to that one mechanic then expanded it out to fill an entire game. In The Age of Empires games, they have a market building and if you select it you can buy or sell the resources and the prices will go up or down depending on what everyone else in the game is doing. It’s sort of a small step away in some cases, most RTS games have resources and each of the resources maybe have a different purpose. But of course you don’t build units, you don’t attack the other player, it’s about running a business and that’s a huge difference.

It’s very much a symmetrical strategy or RTS game. Soren Johnson: So, when I say it’s an economic RTS what I mean is that it very much plays out like an RTS, you can sit down with people and play a game in 30 minutes and have a really competitive experience that supports team-play as well as free-for-all. GameWatcher: You’re describing Offworld Trading Company as an economic RTS, In some ways that gives us more questions than answers as to what the game actually is, how would you describe it to someone who has never heard of the game?

We spoke at length with Soren about the game’s mechanics and the decision to launch into Early Access at this point in the game’s life. Now his new studio Mohawk Games are showing their hand as Offworld Trading Company - their economic RTS - makes its way into Early Access. Soren Johnson as a developer rose to a level of fame within the industry for his work on Sid Meier and Firaxis’ Civilization series, designing the AI for Civlization III, before his role as the lead designer on Civilization IV.

Offworld trading company scientific guide