Once your company is set up, you can create game-changing buildings such as hacker arrays which can be used to skew prices, or offworld markets which let you export your goods at a vastly inflated rate.
The advanced structures you can build only add to this sense of a shifting, malleable financial environment. To go back to that useful fighting game analogy, it’s like a game of Street Fighter in which your opponent changes every three seconds. No single tactic will effortlessly sweep you to victory. The sterile roshambo of simpler titles is almost completely absent here.
It demands a level of agility I’m unused to in strategy games, and that’s exactly what makes it exhilarating. You know that certain advanced goods generally sell at higher prices, but the circumstances leading to that point change in every game. No two games play the same, and it’s only predictable in an abstract sense. It’s built on a system that’s endlessly evolving, reactive and intimidatingly smart. Truthfully, ‘skirmish’ doesn’t do the competitive game justice. It’s fun, but somehow less rewarding than a skirmish without limitations. Many of the games I played came down to desperate, last-minute purchases of shares, racing to sell enough stock before the final buzzer. It forces you to play to each faction's strengths over a limited period of time, and it’s replayable in the same way as something like FTL: a self-contained, three hour story that’s different every time. You’ll have to invest money in engineers to build certain advanced structures, and every challenge is different. There are nine CEOs from different companies, each with their own identity and limitations. The campaign is an extension of the tutorial, and it offers a different way to compete. You’ll inevitably have to skip some resources and rely on your opponents for certain essentials, but it’s coexistence, not cooperation. You have a limited number of claims, and only ever control part of the market. Building every type of building is rarely an option. This is the foundation of Offworld Trading Company, and the thing that initially took me a while to understand. If your opponent is has a surplus of water, the price will drop and you can invest in farms, producing food you can sell at inflated price. You have to watch what other factions overproduce, then exploit them. That might sound like work-or worse yet, like something an awful investment wank with four phones attached to his face would love-but it’s one of the most immediate, intelligent strategy games I’ve played. Every resource has a fluctuating cost, and it’s your job to play the market, manipulate prices and ultimately put your rivals out of business. These resources are then used to create valuable secondary materials such as glass, chemicals and electronics. Your company requires essentials such as food, water and power, and you can mine metals and quarry chemical elements. You take control of one of four factions, founding a business dedicated to supplying new human colonies.
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