Some suggestions

from Offworld Forums
  • Have a visual cue that a building is losing money. A red exclamation mark similar to the "no inputs" indicator would work.
  • It's rather counter-intuitive that you can place a building on top of pirates to destroy them. It's also the kind of thing that's incredibly frustrating to new players - you invested in pirates, and were counting on the resources they stole, then someone gets rid of them in a way you didn't think possible and had no way of anticipating. Having pirates block the placement of buildings would make more sense, and add interesting strategic opportunities. I don't think it would be a balance problem.
  • It's also counter-intuitive that trace resources are worth 0.25 (compared to 1, 1.5, and 2 for low, medium, and high), making nuking medium resources the best option. Having them be worth 0.5 would fit the pattern, while also making nukes less devastating to scavengers and newer players. On the other hand, it would make it more difficult to use nukes to establish a resource monopoly.
  • Speaking of nukes, it's not obvious where the nukes are landing. An animation (or a more obvious animation, if there's already one I haven't noticed) would be nice.
  • The power surge/EMP ongoing animation on your disabled buildings is difficult to notice.
  • The hacker array takes so damned long to get online. It's by far the least popular advanced building - making it either build or hack faster would go a long way towards making it more useful.
19,765 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

1) This seems a little bit irrelevant to me. If you don't know that you're losing money, you should be in trouble... 

2) Pirates are already very strong, especially in 1v1. Having them be smashed by buildings is a feature, not a bug, which is meant to mitigate their power ever-so-slightly. 

3) I'm not sure about this. On one hand, it is strange that nuking medium gives you the most bang for your buck, but on the other hand you could see it as a blessing that your resources are entirely destroyed from medium or low. *Shrugs*.

4) I completely agree with those one. 

5) I haven't found this to be the case. 

6) Hacker array has some niche uses (as YerAnd would love to tell you). It could maybe be buffed slightly, but I would be worried about disrupting the balance of the game—I think a "slightly" faster hack could easily make it OP. 

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

I was watching a tournament game today and one of the players lost a considerable amount of money due to leaving their buildings on losing money for a fair while. Hovering over your buildings to make sure they're profitable, or doing the math on the market, takes attention you might want to spend elsewhere.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

About the hacker array: It is a very tricky building to balance, and for most of offworld's alpha and beta, it was over powered.  

Ahhh. the days of lv 4 double hacker array wins. anyone remember those?

 

And then after they were nerfed, remember the 2v2 tounry? where roler and I brought em back! (and funded by power debt shenanigans.)

 

The problem with hacker arrays is that it is a multiplicative building, unlike everything else which is additive. They multiply your money. hack something, put all your money into it, hack finishes, sell out, now you have ~twice as much money.   Hopefully you can see how that can get out of hand very quickly.  

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

I'd be tempted to replace the hacker array with some sort of derivatives market.  You can cause *all* kinds of price chaos with perfectly legitimate financial instruments... say each one lets you have +2 open contracts, where a contract consists of borrowing" 200 resource from the colony (while only having the price effect of purchasing 100).

Now you have a debt of 200 of a block of resource, which stays on your books as a liability and you pay interest on those resources at their market valuation until you close the contract and reverse its initial market effects.  Everybody can see some sort of UI mark on who owes what resources, and hilarity ensues when you take a contract in your opponents money maker, then immediately sell it, then get to worry about producing it later.  That, or just take contracts on something they need, and quietly sit on the resources for a bit to keep the price inflated.

 

It gives you the same (albeit weaker) price manipulation power as the hacker array, but with the added fun of having to actually deal with the eventual market correction.