Hologram Black Market Quirk or working as intended?

from Offworld Forums

I had another question/issue with the hologram black market item this weekend. I built an engineering lab on a tile and then bought a hologram to disguise it. It was right next to carbon and so when i applied the hologram it disguised it as an elemental quarry. I was very happy since it was in a triangle formation with carbon and therefore looked like an awesome disguise. Everyone would believe a scavenger built a triangle of carbon next to their base.

Later on I check on the engineering lab (I hadn't changed it in any way nor touched any adjacent mines) and it had changed to being disguised as a patent lab.

Holograms aren't supposed to change as the game progresses are they?

 

My personal pet peeve with holograms is that they normally disguise a tile as something really good (ex. patent lab gets disguised as an offworld market). I'd love it if you could choose what to disguise it as. I think the real benefit in using a hologram is hiding that you have a secret offworld or some resource that's making you a bunch of money but looks like a lowly iron mine or something rather unprofitable. When you make the tile more valuable it opens you up to more attacks by other players that think you're farther along than you really are. Defeats the purpose of buying one if it invites more EMP's your way.

 

 

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Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

Soren mentioned changing the cd on holograms in future patches, but did not make any remarks on whether we would ever be able to choose what a hologram will be disguised as, or let us know before we place it what the hologram will be.

 

Drawing black market attacks to a hologrammed tile could be a strategy however. If you have a building that is losing money, instead of shutting it off, you could hologram it and use it as a lightning rod for other players to attack a useless tile. Imagine aluminum is $1, and its no longer worth the cost of power to extract it. You turn it off, and hologram it as an offworld market. Other players spam it with dynamites and mutinies, costing $5k+ and their black market cooldown, for a tile that was basically worthless anyway. While this is a cool concept, the limitations of knowing what a hologram will become/inability to choose, and the relatively high opportunity cost of getting a hologram makes this strategy impractical at best.

 

As for the bug you listed above, I have never witnessed any hologram just change, nor would that necessarily be a bad thing if it did. Players are expected to transition between goods and buildings, and having it change from time to time is at the very least an interesting feature.

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

If anyone else plays like me, they spend 90% of their time hovering over their competitions HQ (especially in 1v1). Holograms can easily be spotted for what they are. I think they are generally useless, especially because you can quite easily infer where they are placed and when based on the price of holograms.

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Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

Holograms will try to be like adjacent buildings, if possible. If those adjacent buildings change, then the hologram changes.

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting gduma, reply 1

Drawing black market attacks to a hologrammed tile could be a strategy however. If you have a building that is losing money, instead of shutting it off, you could hologram it and use it as a lightning rod for other players to attack a useless tile. Imagine aluminum is $1, and its no longer worth the cost of power to extract it. You turn it off, and hologram it as an offworld market. Other players spam it with dynamites and mutinies, costing $5k+ and their black market cooldown, for a tile that was basically worthless anyway. While this is a cool concept, the limitations of knowing what a hologram will become/inability to choose, and the relatively high opportunity cost of getting a hologram makes this strategy impractical at best.

End of gduma's quote

 

Interesting idea. Obviously the aluminum in your example would have to be adjacent to your base in order to make using a hologram worthwhile but ultimately it would still be worth it to build a special building (engineering lab, etc) instead of just faking one.

 

Thanks for the feedback Soren. I guess it changed because i had another lab nearby. It wasn't adjacent to any of the carbon tiles but somewhat close to another lab.

For the most part I agree with cubit. I typically ignore the hologram black market as it's not that valuable. I also never use the spy one. Those are typically the auctions that come up that are never claimed.

Reply #5 from Offworld Forums Top

Another odd bit of behavior: black market (a slowdown strike, in this case) exposes tiles that are hologrammed to be invisible, but have a goon squad. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Reply #6 from Offworld Forums Top

@Blues Could you explain what you mean by that? I don't understand.

Reply #7 from Offworld Forums Top

My understanding is that when you drop a hologram on an empty tile, it will be disguised as invisible, which I understand to mean it showing as an unclaimed tile. If I'm misunderstanding, then there's nothing going on here.

Otherwise, at about 12:42 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjwLVUnN7eE), I hit Zultar with a Slowdown Strike next near the hologrammed tile, which exposed the goon squad. Black market effects exposing goon squads is standard behavior, it just struck me as notable in this case that it also effectively undid the hologram. Unless I'm misremembering and the empty tile was always visible, then it seems like either aplacing a goon squad on an invisible tile is rather counterproductive, which doesn't seem like it should be the case, or a hologram defaulting to invisible on a blank tile can be worse than it pretending to be many other things.

Reply #8 from Offworld Forums Top

thanks, I'll see what I can do.

Reply #9 from Offworld Forums Top

How about switching the hologram around to make it look like the person deleted and built a specific building? (actually have the animation play) That would be powerful.

Reply #10 from Offworld Forums Top

Are holograms and spies exclusive to MP? I wasn't able to generate SP map with either of them in the game. 

I was trying to reproduce another Hologram related bug (feature???) that I noticed while looking into a replay file. Not sure if it's been addressed in Beta 5 (this game was in current Beta 4). When a building is disguised as ice condenser, the Nighttime status doesn't show up, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing. I'd assume the same applies to dry ice condensers and solar panels, however, as I said, I wasn't able to generate a suitable map to make sure.

 

Reply #11 from Offworld Forums Top

Will be fixed in Beta 5.

Reply #12 from Offworld Forums Top

Thanks Soren. What about spies and holograms in SP? Did I just have bad luck with map generation or was that intentional and they are not supposed to appear in single player games?

Reply #13 from Offworld Forums Top

Spies and Holograms are MP-only.

Reply #14 from Offworld Forums Top

Makes sense. Thanks again.