Hi Guys,
Congratulations on a great game coming. I want to share some thoughts after about 50 hours of play.
First of all, the overall design is impressive. The "issue" of snowballing which some players are mentioning I consider a good thing. I would even go as far as to say it's one of the best things about this game. When someone gets that significant break, it's all over. That's the game. No hour-long end-game sitting around waiting to get killed eventually. When everyone knows who is going to win, the game ends quickly. That's good design.
Now some of my issues I feel I have spotted:
Three-player stale mate end-game
It sometimes happens that three evenly strong players end up in what I feel is a stale mate. Assuming they all have invested some money in the others' stock, the first of the three to buy out another (the purchaser) actually loses, because the payment for the shares the third player gets is normally enough to allow him to buy the purchasing player. The correct tactic is to wait, but if everyone does that there is a stale mate. Think about if this can be avoided and/or resolved.
Nobody buys the last share of a crashing company
It happens sometimes that a player with a really low stock price does not get bought out, because none of the others wants to buy that players last share. Buying the last share prevents you from being able to buyout that player for five seconds, but everyone else can do it. The situation feels a bit strange and is probably not something you want by design. One way to solve this would be to have the market timer of the last share being for eveyone, possibly even reversely proportional to the amount of stock owned in that company, meaning the player with the most stock gets the shortest timer, giving him the first crack to buyout that player.
Similar offworld prices in every game reduces replayability
Food, oxygen or fuel are normally the resources with the highest offworld price, meaning you need to get water at some point if you want a competitive cash flow when you reach the offworld part of the game. My feeling is that more variation in the offworld prices could lead to more variation and replayability. Of course they should not be totally random, but for having for example either electronics, chemicals or glass hiked to the $500-800 range offworld would allow for some more interesting directions of play (and allow robotic to become a more attractive choice). PS Is there a faster way to check all offworld prices than to hover over each of them?
I think I'll stop there for now. I have some more thoughts, concerning how to improve player matching, handicaps, ladders, etc. But I'm sure you have your own thought on that.
Again, congratulations on a great foundation. I'm looking forward to the next months of progress. Peace out.
