Instead of assuming those players have no clue it might be a good idea to look at what they did to improve, rather than working off your own assumptions. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of extra punishment in debt, but as the game works right now in 1v1 most of the time if you don't have debt you've made a big mistake.

The best cheat code will always has and will forever be Ctrl+shift+backspace.

May it rest in piece.

And I thought this was supposed to be a life like experience. Sure I can adjust to playing terrible to work with the game as it is now but I would prefer if the game plays like a real business does. If you're in a crazy amount of debt you can't purchase many things.

If kingmorgan loses sometimes against a player who doesn't understand debt at all, I think that would be somewhat sad...

In terms of realism, I don't think OTC is meant to be a "life like experience", but OTC's handling of debt is actually quite realistic in its simplicity. I don't consider my understanding of bonds to be deep, but few people in the world know much better than I do, and I do see why people misunderstand debt as cash.

i'm pretty frickin good at this game. ranked 3

Have you encountered some of the finalists from the recent tournaments? If you are doing well, I recommend looking for matches against gameslayer, cubit, pbhead, and blues.

As a tip for finding matches, occasionally Zultar does streams, and Soren (Mohawk) does streams. You can join their matches, which are semi-regular. Zultar is probably still the best player despite focusing on other games now; he makes the fewest strategical mistakes out of any player around, and his micro is not bad either. Soren has really fallen off and just plays Science most of the time because it's easy, but sometimes good players show up in his stream, and winning his matches is nevertheless not simple.

Well, you're still strong, you just have room for improvement.

You are a start-up company new to mars sent by the government which are attempting to create long-lasting colonies through private enterprise fulfilling market forces. Your goal is to subvert the governments goal and eliminate all other players. So, who's providing the debt? There is no private enterprise already established, so you cannot take out a loan from them. Look at the clock, each tick is 10 minutes of ingame time. It takes 12.5 minutes on average for a communication to get from mars to earth, another 12.5 minutes to get back. This means you are not getting your debt from anywhere on Earth, indeed it is the colony governments themselves that are footing the bill for you, lending you money that was being lent to them as their own debt. Each government would be registered as an independant country, recieving funding directly from investors or from the governments of Earth. Now think about the interest rates as well, why are they daily? Because the rate of growth of the colony is a daily thing, everyones moving at lightning speed and your debt is paid by the investors of the colonies. Your debt is effectively a part of a countries debt, which is part of why the debt acts wierdly, any debt you take on is listed as the colonies debt overall back on Earth. The system of debt used here is not true debt, it is the governments lending you money, subsidising you in exchange for becoming self-sufficient with your help, and then you pay them back later. The more debt you have, the more debt they have so the harder it is for them to borrow money back on Earth, so the more interest they claim you owe the them and therefore the tax payer later on. This means the system is realistic, because it's a new and different system of lending. When you buy a company, you are not taking on their debt, instead the government just writes it off, they will probably be compensated by Earth for every failed private colony attempt later, since it was their idea, so it doesn't get reflected in your own stock price.

TL;DR: This debt system is neither a country nor a private enterprise system, thus it can be anything mohawk wants it to be, but it does make sense as a possible way a martian colony might handle debt.

The bond system is totally fine. Higher debt/asset ratio = higher interest rate. That's what happens in life too. The "realism" question is mainly why debt affects stock price so much more than cash does.

Debt writeoffs on purchase don't make any sense, but they're easy to grasp and hence not a problem for players to accept.

This, I disagree with. If it's called debt, players expect it to behave how debt normally works. That's the entire point of giving a concept a name, so that others can understand that concept by the ideas surrounding that name. If Mohawk called potatos "debt", players would still be forced to accept it, but I doubt they would be happy with it. At a minimum, the differences between the normal concept and the in-game one should be explained to the player.

Actually, making debt more punishing based on how many players are in the game ought to be a relatively easy adjustment to implement.  You just make the formula for bond rating factor in the number of players in such a way that you go into lower ratings more quickly with fewer players.  It is an additional level of complexity, but might not be a bad idea.

I think a good change to the game would be that debt interest comes out of you funds rather than adding more debt. They might have to adjust the amount of interest to not make this overkill but it would be Nice to see carrying a lot of debt slow you down rather than speed you up.

There can be a third category of outstanding debt and this is any interest owed. As long as you have outstanding debt you can't expand or but stock.