Offworld's black market system exponentially magnifies your strategic options, making each round different from the last.Ī big piece of that is the black market. Even with only a smattering of basic resources-water, power, carbon, silicon, iron, and aluminum-you'll find a complex web of interesting choices and decisions that you'll have to make on the fly. More fuel means you need more money to secure the same resources as another company and that cuts into your profits. If you found your company near good supplies of carbon, but you need to send transports halfway across the map to access silicon, you'll need a lot more fuel. And just about everything factors into that decision. From there you'll sort out which goods would be most productive to crank out given the situation at hand.

Your first move is to pick a founding location-and get to work organizing your supply lines. In that sense, Offworld works like a microcosm of real-world economies. Stock and commodity prices are your tools, and hostile corporate takeovers your strongest weapons. Much like the colonial trading companies from the Age of Sail, your aim is to outsell and out produce everyone else. But you're far from the only company on the block. You assume the role of a CEO of a new company eager to take advantage of the virgin Martian landscape and turn massive profits.

Offworld Trading Company isn't like any other strategy game I've played. The campaign will have you investing in a series of colonies to maximize your weekly income in the hopes of building the first Martian monopoly. I sold off some assets and bought my competitor's shares up. My debt evaporated in seconds and I crippled my foes, causing their stock prices to tumble. Soon I was the only supplier of power around and I was selling it for ten times what I'd paid just a few minutes before. Then I used a series of black market options including labor strikes and dynamite to disable the power plants of my competitors. Then I built some new geothermal plants-the most efficient and productive energy producers available-before employing hackers to jack up the price of power even higher. I bought up some land on prime locations, taking care to keep them far apart so I couldn’t lose control of my critical buildings all at once. Even as it seemed like my neo-capitalist empire was on the brink of collapse, I was plotting my comeback. Within a few minutes I'd gone from a solid AAA credit rating with negligible debt to a lousy D and millions in the red. As the market for electricity boomed, I had to purchase it at increasingly higher rates to keep my company afloat. My Mars-based colonial corporation had invested into energy production, and one of my rivals detonated an EMP through my plants, disabling them. Like failed empires of the past, I found myself caught in a hyperbolic debt spiral in Offworld Trading Company.

Offworld trading company debt