Depth Improvement Suggestions

Hello!

These are some ideas I've had after playing for a couple dozen hours. I think these would improve game depth and add more variation to the experience.

Colonies pay dividends from their positive cash flow. This encourages stock purchasing earlier and not just spamming @ the end game with hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also encourages players to 'invest' in each other if they see an opponent is stronger than they are. Perhaps a rate of 10% of net income is removed/paid out, and players receive 1% per share? This also encourages purchasing of your own stock as to lessen your dividend payouts to others. It would also indirectly cause a disincentive to purchase less-profitable colonies as they won't return an income.
Implement an end-game building; perhaps one called a Recycling plant. This building could convert any 50 resources into any 1 resource. This will create an end-game possibility that is alternative to the Offworld Trading Company - no longer will a resource be $1 if you can buy 50 of them and trade them for one worth $200. This also increases 'playing the market' and arbitrage opportunities. It also creates unique uses of the hacker array. It also encourages colonies to spam a single resource if they want. If this is the case, you may need to nerf adjacency bonuses.
Eliminate the end-game building: 'Engineering Bay'. If it helps the UI, you could put the aforementioned 'Recycling Plant' in it's place! My suggestion to eliminate this building is to create more depth throughout the game. Rather than focus so many unique opportunities into these 'end-game' buildings, you could spread out this building's advantages into every resources 'minor building' slot. For example: Next to water, you could build the water pump, the de-icers, or a 'minor engineering bay' (the name doesn't matter). These improvements would have the same effect as if you researched them in the current 'Eng Bay', and could even cost the same to build/improve (I would suggest cutting the costs by 75%), but instead they would only improve the placements that they touch (much like an additional adjacency bonus), except they wouldn't cost any resources to have an effect, nor would they cost 'claims'. I feel this would create more depth in building the 'minor' buildings; it would offer more strategy in the early game; it would create more opportunities to block resources from your enemies through their placement; it would create more opportunities for adjacency bonuses where there isn't an adjacent resource.
Keep fog of war on. Have the players spend money to continue surveying the world. This will lessen black market spamming as players will first have to find opposing profit centres & resources first. It will also create more 'surprise' when you see what other people own and how the market is reacting to unknown production values. It will also create a larger pro/con comparison on whether or not a player should colonize their base immediately or if they should spend more time searching. If this is implemented, I feel the resources on each map should be buffed slightly. There's a lot of wasted space on these maps, and keeping fog of war on will eliminate your need to gimp the resource distribution so hard. Perhaps additional scans throughout the game would have an incremental cost? Say $500 for the first, and it goes up by $500 for each additional? Lastly, you could start a 'black market' item that could equate to spying/stealing someone's map of the world. Perhaps this would start at $5,000 and go up as the black market does.
Altruism end-game: Once again, just another victory condition to help expand the end-game. So you'd have the OTC / Recycling Plant options for cash flow. But why not create another opportunity that eliminates stock purchasing? Perhaps this victory condition is accomplished once you've paid off $50,000 of another player's debt throughout the game (going up by $50,000 per opponent in the game; so 5 opponents = $250,000). This number may seem low at first, but consider this: Let's say a standard 1v1 is over when someone generates $100,000 in cash near the mid-game and starts to buyout their opponent (stock purchase spamming could be slowed down more than it is). This $100,000 is twice the cost of the $50,000 in debt that you would need. However, you can only pay the debt if your opponent takes on the debt. This will encourage people to not take on ridiculous amounts of debt. In addition, by paying your opponent's debts, you're basically hurting yourself with a double-edged sword - you're helping them have free cash flow, and you're eliminating your own. Lastly, if you implement my above-mentioned dividend idea, then paying debts is even less valuable in comparison to investing.

My apologies if any of the above has been mentioned before. These ideas have been in my mind, and I thought I'd just submit them before reading through the entire forum. Oh, and grammar... there are a lot of grammar issues in the text. Did you want beta-testers to submit these? Or do you have someone who will correct all of this at the end?

Even if none of the above makes it into the game, I still love it. Or perhaps you can make these suggestions day-one DLC. lol

Thanks for your time, and keep up the great work!

Neizzle

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This is something that I would love, but I am not sure how to implement it, technically, the game takes place over days/weeks, not months/quarters.
This seems like a good idea. the market completely flatlines by the end and you are left waiting for rockets and trying to take advantage of ANY increase in price
I dont really use the engineering building, so I have no comment.
This should just be another setting like the existing "Reveal Map".
I do think that there should be another win condition, but I dont think the Altruism one is the way to go.

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Cool, thanks for your response! I'll comment on your comments in the same format.

The dividend cycle doesn't have to follow our traditional Earthly format of months/quarters... it'd be 10% per second, as this game is mostly formatted around the 'per second' upticks. Yes, the top of the screen technically shows "day" with "hours/minutes", but how realistic is it to create a multi-million dollar business within days/weeks? In summary, the in-game timing is way off... it should technically be counting months/years if you wanted to get into the semantics of the lore.
I'm happy you liked it - don't forget about the added intricacies in the mid-game, as well as the added strategy to spam a resource and use the conversion process!
Exactly; almost nobody uses the engineering building... but the concept is good. So trash it as a 'major', and add more depth with it being a 'minor' throughout.
Yeah, that's a good point. And we all win from the increased variety of map options!
The problem with having just 1 win condition is the game becomes repetitive. Imagine playing Civ 4 and the only win condition was a scientific victory. But in this game there are only so many ways you can create these conditions. I'll create a list of a few I'm thinking could work:

Existing win condition - Hostile takeover - be the only colony on Mars
Altruism - Basically the same thing as hostile takeover, but more subtle and more difficult to pull off
Market dominance - Have your stock price be valued at 65% of the combined market (also helps with the issues in other threads re: debt/poison pills, etc.)
Buy Venus - Buy another planet for $500,000 and win the game. Firstly, when would you ever save up $500,000? The only time is if you're in a 1v1 stranglehold where both player's stocks constantly rise and neither can ever buy the other out. Therefore, first to get $500,000 can just outright win the game.
Hoarding - stockpile 10,000 of any one resource and win the game. This will help justify spamming one resource, and will encourage others to drop EMPS on these otherwise uselessly developed areas.

Imagine having just those 5 different win conditions in a game. Now there's more strategy, variance, and continued interest to play another, and another, and another. You have to remember, we're talking about the game in it's current state, with only dozens of hours spent on it. Could you imagine having only one win condition for 400+ hours of gameplay?

What do you think of this?

Thanks!
Neizzle

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Good point. 10% of What per second? 10% of the stock price, 10% of the resource sales? Dividends are usually from the quarterly/whatever period of time's profit.
Should the conversion of resource X to resource Y affect both, X's, or Y's market price?
What could be some other Minor Buildings?
What are some other option ideas?
In most games I have played, buyouts routinely get above $500k, Stockpiling should be 25k-50k.
We also need the ability to trade resources and buy/trade claims with other companies. Mr. A desperately needs Water for his Food production after an EMP took out his pumps, Mr. B is running low on Silicon for Glass after his high producing plants got hit by Dynamite and Mutinies, Mr. A gives Mr. B 100 Silicon and a Tier 1 Mine for 50 Water and a tier 2 pump.

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Yeah, as I mentioned originally it'd be a 10% reduction on your colony's net income per second, and would payout this 'dividend' to players who own your company @ 1% per share.
Converting doesn't need to affect price. The price will be impacted as soon as you buy/sell on the market.
That's the thing... there's technically hundreds of different building types available. The game is good with the basics right now, but perhaps it could use a few tweaks. The easiest way to do this is introduce incremental returns. i.e. place a basic farm that uses no water, but returns much less food; vs. a regular farm = regular consumption and food production; vs. a super farm that = more food but exponentially even more water. That method alone would add 24 new buildings, in addition to the 'engineering bay' add-on per resource type.
This isn't a map option, but more of a game mode option: Resources start more rare on the map, and they appear over time throughout the game; sort of like 'supply drops' being sent from Earth.
Yeah, the stock piling options should probably be higher, especially with the current stage of adjacency bonuses. And yes, $500k would probably be a bit high; perhaps $300k is more proper? Don't forget that in an 8 player end-game, with two OTCs rolling and a massive resource dump you could easily gain $300k in a day or less. Wouldn't even need to buy anyone's stock (I'm worried it may circumvent the 'main' victory condition).
The ability to trade resources is why the stock market is there. That's the exact purpose of having a market! The exchange of goods. The players actions will naturally influence the prices over time, so that trading mechanic is already there. What you're writing is more of the barter system, which would be archaic and slow the game down. But trading/selling claims?? That's interesting, but I feel it's already indirectly in the game through the market. If you have a high-demand claim, you will be producing a high-demand resource, so you will be remunerated accordingly. No need to worry about exchanging hands. See what I mean?

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Okay.
Fair enough.
A leveling system could work, they already implemented it in the Campaign.
I actually would like a map option where resources are very rare, forcing you to rely on the market to buy base resources that you use to refine into chemicals, electronics, glass, etc. This could be balanced by you starting with $10k and 100-200 of each base resource.
That will probably end the game before it even gets close to the final buyout.
This mostly would be useful for selling unused claims for less than the Black Market, conspiring with other weaker companies to take down the leader. as it stands, I can easily get 1000+ aluminum, but I could sell that claim for a water that I could use for my farms. It would just be another option for players. Trading resources would work well with large games, my brother and I routinely conspire to take down the AIs in 6-8 player games, because we know we cant do it alone. Usually, we each end up needing a resource that the other monopolizes. This would open up a less aggressive way to gain resources besides Mutinies and pirates.

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1. I don't need encouragement to buy stock any time I am able to. The returns on buying stock midgame for $4-$5 are huge, and it also drives up the price for others to buy shares.The first share bought will be worth 2x just based on the stock purchased multiplier before factoring increases in assets.

2. this seems weird and will just force everything to be priced to the same amount. Free money for the first person to build it.

3. The engineering bay is a really good building. I'm sure people will figure it out its uses eventually, like the hacker array. Remember, claims are the scarcest resource, so anything that improves the efficiency of them is a good thing.

4. It's already not easy to figure out whats going on in the limited time without fog of war. Not that fog of war can't have a role, but I can see it being a scanner building that consumes high amounts of power. Just buying scans seems like an arbitrary addition to create an interference to gathering information.

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