The primary game mechanic in Offworld Trading Company is the dynamic market. Specifically, the price goes up when players are consuming more of a particular resource than they are selling, and the price goes down when players are selling more than they are consuming.
The biggest mechanical issue I currently see with Offworld is that players are too productive and do not consume enough resources. With skillful management you can end up with enough resources that selling is the predominant activity, driving the price down and it stays down.
To address this issue, players need more ways to productively spend resources. Particularly methods of expending resources continuously.
Population
One mechanic that might be added to Offworld is a "population" or "colony" claim improvement. This structure would be living quarters for people on your colony, and would create money but consume electricity, water, and food.
Population tile improvements should cost aluminum, steel, and glass to build. And population tiles will consume electricity, water, and food continuously as long as they are active. Instead of creating a resource, population centers grow over time, up to a certain maximum value. As the population in that tile increases the amount of money it produces increases, but so does its consumption of electricity, water, and food.
Insufficient electricity, water, and/or food will reduce the amount of population in the tile, reducing its money production. As a result it is important to keep your population adequately fed, and this should be a priority for players who build this type of tile improvement.
As an aside, Robotic population would essentially be treated the same way as the robotic HQ, consuming electronics instead of water and food.
The gameplay effect of this type of tile is that resources can be productively spent in return for money. Population produces money directly, which gives you a lot of strategic options for buying commodities without financing your purchase through selling first. A money source that does not involve depressing the price of another product makes it possible for prices to actually climb, rather than only fall as production rises.
Essentially, population acts as a useful resource sink to pull resources down off the board.
The Residential Economy
Population actually opens up a new gameplay mechanic using population revenue to purchase resources. However it is inefficient to use population revenue to purchase electricity, food, and water, because the price of those commodities is just going to keep rising until it is no longer economical to keep buying them.
The yield of population is fixed, but the price of those goods is variable. So depending on circumstances it is entirely possible that you will be forced to buy goods at a loss, anticipating your population will go up, and eventually food prices are going to fall. But this is a poor situation for the population strategy.
The population-focused strategy will involve focusing primarily on some combination of electricity, food, and/or water production, and secondarily on aluminum, steel, and/or glass, for the purpose of building additional population tiles. Large-scale production of food and water can actually be usefully spent on population, at a limited rate. As your population rises, you will be spending more and more resources on feeding it.
The revenue from that population will then go towards purchasing steel, aluminum, and glass necessary to build more. More industrial-focused players building steel or electronics will be glad when the price of those goods rises to finance building more residential capacity. Other players producing excess electricity, water, and food will be particularly pleased at the possibility for players to increase their consumption of those goods.
Workforce
In addition to resources, you also need employees. Employee tile improvements might be called distribution centers or whatever, the name does not matter. These tiles cost money to maintain, but they increase the productivity of your other tiles.
Employee improvements produce nothing by themselves. However, they provide an adjacency bonus to any type of productive adjacent tile, and do not need to be placed on the same type of resource unlike normal adjacency matching.
This means you can place employee facilities in between two different tile blocks, and both will benefit as though they were adjacent to a matching claim improvement.
For example, a line of tiles (Iron Mine) (Distribution Center) (Steel Mill) will give a 50% bonus to the output of both the iron mine and the steel mill, in return for a fixed cash cost to run the distribution center.
Conclusion
The biggest issue with Offworld right now is that smart, careful players will generally be selling a lot more often than they buy, particularly as production increases into the middle and late game. This will drive down prices in a way that is very difficult to reverse.
The solution is to have a resource sink that allows players to choose to usefully increase their consumption. Doing so at an inopportune time, or in a bad market, will end badly for you, since you will be spending more on inputs than you receive. But market manipulation in the long term can make it profitable to be a net consumer of resources by buying from other players on a regular basis.
Alternatively, if you don't want to engage in that kind of ongoing purchase strategy, you can spend that money on employees to increase your own production using cash. This also opens up the possibility of investing in infrastructure around a resource site to increase its output after it is no longer possible to build on more resource sites.
