czartim: By definition, all the non-winning players did equally well (or rather, poorly) - they all lost. OTC is played for victory, not score. Algorithms like TrueSkill can determine ratings for players based on a wide variety of game schemes, including a scheme like OTC uses: multiplayer games where only one player wins and everyone else loses.
The price you paid when you bought something should not factor into your decision to sell it.
Sir-Rogers - I think Soren meant to say that it works the way that I described it (resigned players are replaced with an AI). It looks like he had a cut-and-paste error while quoting and replying.
Will there be any difference between a resigned player and a dropped player? ... and relatedly, any plans to allow for a dropped player to come back in and resume play?
Right now if you leave, you're replaced with an AI who fights until the bitter end. I think the best way to handle resigning is to replace the resigned player with an AI who fights until the bitter end, but is marked as "RESIGNED", and if there's only one non-resigned player left then the game ends and that player wins.
Executing buyouts is its own little mini-game, and the only one that really counts (although if you don't do well in the "generate lots of cash quickly" mini-game you'll lose the stock-buyout game too). The rules for this mini-game are not explained, and the implications of those rules are not intuitively obvious even once you learn them. Figuring out how the stock-buyout game works and learning to play it well is part of the challenge of OTC. It's a shame that it's so
[quote] It would nice to have the final cheque value of being bought out to be linked to your final stock price. A difference in that figure gives more trash talking opportunities. [/quote] This is a great idea.
"L ook at all the money!" I never, ever, ever want this to change. Never. It's perfect.
It's a game, not a documentary.
I don't like this idea. It seems like it would place too much importance on a random event. If you're lucky, you get a big advantage; if you're unlucky, you get screwed. In a strategy game, a risky move should be one that exposes you to potential punishment from other players' actions, not from a roll of the dice. OTC does have random events, like Marsquakes and duststorms. But they mostly are things that players have to react to, not things
Tickets, from Ticket To Ride. Great mechanism.
They don't produce income. Instead, you get some initial resources from them immediately, and then the tiles are effectively dead. How many and what type of resources you'll get is displayed above your HQ while you're placing it. Hover the unplaced HQ over a spot and you'll see how much that placement will provide.
I really, really like the idea of one claim drone at a time. It introduces additional important and difficult decisions. Maybe two at a time so that players don't get too frustrated waiting for something to happen right out of the gate.
I think this is a good idea. With few claims to start, the priority is always going to be on ensuring you can upgrade. With more claims to start and fewer to be gained immediately from upgrading, you'll have more viable options and more opportunity for making both good plays and mistakes. I'd take this even further, though. As it stands, claims are the one sure path to victory, and upgrades are the one sure way to get claims. So even if you make L2 and L3 provide fewer claims
I'd suggest that it's almost never wanted to turn off Iron AND Aluminum, or Carbon AND Steel. So turning off "all mines" or "all quarries" should only turn off all mines or quarries of the type that was selected. And if the one selected happens to be doing both due to a lucky tile placement, then sure, turn off both.
[quote who="indczn1" reply="3" id="3530965"] I don't think it should be possible to instantly upgrade to colony size 2 ever, even with a good founding location. I say this because the jump to level 2 doubles your claims. How can that ever be a wrong decision? [/quote] Seconded, whole-heartedly. Cash Is Life. Claims Are Victory.
Tigershark: Yes, if X has lots of shares in Y and Z, then when you buy out X you get those shares in Y and Z "for free". It's not really free, though, because the price you pay to buy out X includes consideration of the value of X's shares in Y and Z. Actually, now that I think about it... those shares are not free, but they are dirt cheap. Because of the odd way that stock valuation works, you're only paying about a tenth of the actual price of the Y and
Mars will of course be settled by Americans. :)
They already have that.
[quote who="indczn1" reply="15" id="3529770"] Problem with that is the more claims you get at level 1, the more of an advantage the person who founds first will get. [/quote] That's a self-correcting problem. There's always a trade-off between the advantage from founding quickly vs. the advantage from finding a good location in which to found. Deciding when to make that trade-off is part of the game. If we increase the advantage to founding quickly, that just means t
Thanks for the feedback; I hope you'll reconsider. I find the idea of playing without autosupply to be pointless micromanagement - busywork for the sake of busywork with no real decisions to be made.
In the opening moments of the game, you need to: Grab rare high-value spots that will be in contention Produce resources that will be in high demand (= high value = high profit) Ensure you have enough of the right resources to quickly upgrade You don't have enough claims to do all three. So you have to make some trade-offs and decisions. Getting the resources to upgrade is the most important. Otherwise you'll get stuck without
I'd like all my factories to default to autosupply-on. This can be dangerous, since a factory running in the red can run you out of cash in a hurry if the market shifts and you don't notice it. So this should really be an option that you can set (autosupply on by default: yes/no), and which defaults to not-set to protect the newbies. And I'd also like to have a UI element somewhere that lets me turn off autosupply for all my factories at once, so that if the market is goin
Over here node10 noted that the "colony dies, everyone loses" condition is unsatisfying, not just for its suddenness but because of the gameplay that it incentivizes - someone who is losing can try to force the game into a loss for everyone. I noted that it's really a catch-up mechanism, because the leader has to spend effort trying to prevent that. But I've thought about it a bit more, and I think we can do better than
Agreed wholeheartedly.