Buyout Button Question and Suggestion

I was doing the 3/13 daily challenge and had a decent playthrough going but lost as a single competitor bought out the other players. The dividend revenue from my rival's buyouts is the only reason I lost the game. I am relatively new and wanted to better understand what happened, so I watched the replay. I noticed at various times throughout the replay the % buyout indictor showed I was 100% of the way to buying certain rivals out, but I never noticed the buyout button turning red during the actual gameplay. If it did I must have been totally blind. Had I known during the gameplay about my missed buyout opportunity, I might have bought that rival out and lessened my final rival's dividend income and stock price.

I believe (?) the indicator in the replay is based on your cash and resources; however, when actually playing, do I have to have the required buyout amount in cash for the buyout button to turn red, or will it light up when I have enough of both cash and resources? If it lights up only for cash, how am I supposed to know (other than some crazy fast mental math) when I have enough money for a buyout considering both my cash *and* resources? I realize you can sell all your resources at once and find out that way, but if you don't actually make it across the finish line you could have messed up your whole strategy.

You can also hover over your HQ icon and find out your cash+resources, but do advanced players constantly poll that pop-up when considering whether to sell resources for a buyout? And again there is still the issue of mental math while trying to compute the actual amount of resources to sell to raise the cash required for the buyout.

I almost feel it would be useful - particularly for new players - if the area where it displays a red percentage warning the player of an impending rival buyout would also feature a small-font percentage for each rival showing at all times how close you are to buying them out considering both cash *and* resources. You could then hover over your HQ icon, look at your cash+resource total and do a quick ratio-proportion (much easier mental math for me - turn the percentage into a decimal and divide your cash+resources by it) to figure out how much more cash you need to raise via selling resources in order to complete a buyout. Once it reached 100% you would also then be able to determine which particular resources you want to sell, and how much of each to sell to get the amount of cash you need to finish the buyout. It could even go above 100% - say 150% (dividing the 'cash+resource' by 1.5 will tell you the *exact* amount of cash you need/will spend without over selling resources) so you wouldn't raise too much cash by selling resources or simply doing the 'Ctrl+Shift+Down' + 'Cross Your Fingers' technique that I currently seem to need. You could even click the percentage icon and have a pop-up appear with the result of the above calculation, much simplifying the process.

I also feel this feature would be very simple to implement unlike the 'Shipment Path Jump' I suggested in an earlier post.

Again - I'm new, so any insights are appreciated.

**Update: If needed I will upload the replay file. Feel free to criticize my gameplay mistakes, but more importantly, look at the missed opportunities in which I could have won had I known I had enough money tied up in resources, which, if sold, would have enabled me to complete a purchase of my rivals. This situation is disheartening at best and game-breaking at worst. I love this game and feel it is money well spent. I will continue to play it. The fix to this problem is very simple and straight forward. If it is not implemented I feel I will buy and instead play more of 'Surviving Mars' from Paradox that comes out tomorrow 3/15. Maybe it will be a more fulfilling way to colonize the Red Planet.

Please run this one past Soren. I liked Civilization IV, and that's part of the reason I bought this game. He is an excellent designer and I know he can fix this. I hope with his work on '10 Crowns' with a new publisher he is still able to put something like this into OTC - it would much improve the new-player experience and the gameplay of more advanced players as well. If properly explained in a tutorial it would be readily understood and enhance the gameplay greatly.

Thanks for the long read and consideration.

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Yes, good players constantly poll that menu for cash+resources, and sometimes debt, stock price target, and other information. The buy button only turns red when you have enough cash to purchase someone. Remember that cash+resources includes all cash, resources, and refundable resources. That is resources in buildings that are constructing, patents and optimizations researching, and offworld's queued for launch.

If you have nanotech there is another hidden source of cash for purchases: the construction resources that you'd gain from scrapping all your non-Offworld buildings. That value is not reflected in cash+resources (so the number remains consistent).

Cash+Resources already gives the value of all your resources assuming you sold them all at once. Also, I forget the exact details, but that percentage calculation in the replay isn't 100% correct until a player has purchased half of their opponent's outstanding shares. Maybe someone else will chime in with the details of why that percentage indicator is sometimes misleading.

There are some simple rules to remember when purchasing stock. Each stock pip is worth 1000 times the share list price. So a $20 will cost $20,000 to purchase one tenth of the stock. If the stock is defended, then purchasing stock costs double. So the $20K becomes $40K. The last five shares need to be purchased at once in a block, so $20 share price means you need $200K to buy out the remaining five shares. If you are splitting Player A with Player B you need to pay full price for the shares that Player B owns. If Player B owns five shares in Player A, then at $20 a share it will cost you $300K to purchase Player A.

Hope that helps.

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Thanks for the replay philothanic. Your explanation in the last two paragraphs of how the stock purchasing and pricing system works is much more succinct and understandable than what is available on the OTC Wiki website, and it will help me a lot.

I do however still feel the % buyout indicator shown in the replays is pretty reliably and accurately calculated. Obviously I hadn't considered all the factors you listed such as refundable resources and the nanotechnology related stores, and I'm glad you pointed that out. I also understand the replay system's % buyout indicator is not static, but is very dynamic and volatile, especially once players begin buying and selling shares in one another, but it never seems to hiccup or falter at the beginning, middle, or end of the game. It would be interesting to pause the game at various points during the replay and do the requisite math to determine its veracity , but that would entail getting into the innards of exactly how the pricing system works at all points and would be something only Mohawk would be able to reliably do.

Speaking of which, I do feel it would be useful if someone from Stardock or the dev team at Mohawk would chime in like you mentioned and let us know the exact nature of the replay system's % buyout indicator and whether displaying it during the game itself would be viable and/or desirable. Also important to note is within my envisioned system the % indicator could go above 100% for situations where you are saving to purchase a more valuable rival but might change your mind for some reason and go for the less valued competitor. It would also be important to be forward thinking and try to anticipate any unintended/unforeseen consequences such knowledge could have on the overall gameplay. This may have been something better suited to the early access phase, but its (potential?) simplicity to implement makes it seems feasible and the easing of polling the HQ icon would seem to make it an enhancement to the game. I may very well be wrong however.

One last thing: After I finished typing the original post I realized the section where I get all complicated with the ratio-proportion information and mental math is actually unnecessary as the calculation of the buyout % in and of itself requires the total 'cash+resources' (in all its forms) to be known by the game in the first place, so no further calculation is needed by the game; thus, it's impact on game performance would be near zero. It could simply be displayed upon clicking or hovering of the % icon were it displayed in game.

Thanks again for the response. I feel it is some interesting stuff to ponder.

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