Offworld Trading Company
At last an RTS with no combat at all! Except for the dynamite, armed mobs, and underground nukes
As my rival’s buildings burned in the aftermath of another successful dynamite attack, and as space pirates shot his transports out of the sky, and as I readied an underground nuclear detonation, I reflected how refreshing it was to play an RTS without any combat.
Because, see, all these things are just perks you buy from the Black Market rather than being core to the experience of Offworld Trading Company. And anyway, the AI will use them on YOU. So it’s fair.
OTC is an RTS that doesn’t PRESCRIBE familiar gameplay, geddit? Because OTC also stands for Over The... Phew. Tough crowd. Anyway, it’s ostensibly a conflict of economics and business acumen, while at the same time NOT being a super-dry business SIM.
Quick precis? Ugh, okay: Earth dying, Mars ripe for exploitation, arrive, set up colonies, step three, profit! In a bold move, developer Mohawk doesn’t have the player take the role of a fledgling colony. Rather, the Companies which do their Trading Offworld, are sort of parasitic opportunists - the new colony needs food, fuel, entertainment, volatile chemicals, and rather than get these things for itself, for some reason it instead buys them off half a dozen or so companies all competing on the same map.
Yeah, the setup is more board game than internally self-consistent virtual world. Each company has an HQ and builds its structures on a hex-based map. The number of structures is restricted not just by available resources, but also by “claim rights”
Earth dying, Mars ripe for exploitation, arrive, set up colonies, step three, profit!
- each time the HQ is upgraded, you get an additional five claims, and can only build five more structures (plus the odd claim here and there on the Black Market). Will you invest in mines, in processing plants, or something more exotic like a Pleasure Dome to entertain the colonists? Perhaps even an Offworld Market that will allow the base to launch resources to the Asteroid Belt and ensure the title of the game actually makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is why a trading company that is prepared to clandestinely nuke resource sites to deny rivals access to raw materials would ALSO respect some kind of colonial building code by not putting up too many pre-fab greenhouses. Still, whatever.
This weird system works though, because unlike every other RTS ever, there’s no area control in OTC. You can build a structure anywhere, on any tile on the map. The whole map is revealed (after a weird scanning minigame at the start of each skirmish) and if you spot, say, a geothermal vent, you can slam down a power plant even if it’s right next to an opponent’s base.
It’s even possible to “claim” a tile before building on it, denying the opponent access while you save up Steel or Silicon.
Right about here is where the Black Market comes into it. Functionally,
it’s like the “midi-weapons” of C&C Generals. Choose from one of several effects, pay a price, and unleash moderate inconvenience. There’s stuff like EMPs (shut down buildings), Worker Mutinies (get control of an opponent’s structure for a limited time) and the aforementioned Pirates, Dynamite, and Underground Nuke (which actually destroys resources, not structures).
Meanwhile, each Trading Company is producing food, fuel, iron, aluminium, carbon, silicon, power, chemicals and electronics which it either stockpiles or sells to the colony.
Again unlike other RTS where having zero space-credits means a freeze on unit production, in OTC it’s possible to go into debt (needing to purchase electricity at night seems a common source of red ink) and keep on rockin’.
The whole left of the screen is taken up with a list of resources, each showing its market value. You can sell stockpiled resources with the click of a mouse but the more you sell the lower the price gets. Or you can buy them to quickly gain the materials for a new structure or an HQ upgrade.
There are no units. Transports flit about the place, but they’re just window dressing. The Pirates are the only thing that can interact with the transports (by shooting them down), and the player can’t interact with the Pirates.
Anyway. What’s not immediately obvious in this game of no direct conflict is how to, you know, win. It’s simple. Victory comes to whichever Trading Company buys a majority share in all the others.
So really this isn’t an RTS at all. It’s a kind of puzzle game where you anticipate what your opponent is likely to do and attempt to make smart decisions about exactly WHEN to do the next thing in a fairly rigidly defined sequence. When should you buy shares in his company? Early game when the stock price is low, but leaving you short on cash? Or in the endgame, when you’ll have a huge pile of money, but your opponent will have a controlling interest in their own company, so you’ll have to spend double the stock price in a “hostile takeover”?
Look, OTC is a bit of fun, and it’s different, but you know what? This could be an app. It really could. A tappy-tap game, I mean. Some reviewers have gone NUTS with praise for OTC, but for a PC game it straight up lacks depth. There are different factions with slightly different flavours, but without the clash of armies, this game is all about second-guessing an opponent and not over-spending on spacefarms.
You’ll feel smart the first time you figure out how the game works. After that though, you’ll probably start pining for a Mammoth Tank and a couple of Zealots.