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RTS Offworld Trading Company - economic RTS from the designer of Civ 4

LESS T_T

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https://www.offworldgame.com




https://af.gog.com/game/offworld_trading_company?as=1649904300

Civ 4 lead designer Soren Johnson founded a new studio called Mohawk and making an RTS focused on economic conflicts.

"We are basically going back to making core PC strategy games. The idea is to try to achieve this with a very small team," he says. Mohawk will expand to maybe four or five people, says Johnson, but design-wise, the studio is aiming for the breadth and depth of strategy games from large developers, catering to audiences that play games like Master of Orion and Civilization.

In order to achieve the big game feel with a very small team, Johnson says Mohawk will avoid making a game that is so content-based, instead offering randomized maps and a wide variety of economic resources in order to encourage a wide variety of winning strategies. The studio's first game is a to-be-named near-future RTS set on Mars. Instead of focusing on military might, will concentrate on something that has long fascinated Johnson—in-game economics.

"If you think of the typical RTS being 75 percent military and 25 percent economy, our game is more like 25 percent military and 75 percent economy," says Johnson. Like typical RTS games, it will offer highly-competitive multiplayer. Mechanics will hearken back to titles like Railroad Tycoon, he says, and will have a heavy emphasis on good old-fashioned supply and demand.

"With our game, the backbone is the market itself," he says. "In typical RTS games, there's something like two to four resources. In our game, there are 12." Like other strategy games, the terrain and its resources will determine the kind of strategies players implement, but with so many resources, players have to remain highly-adaptable, and the way games play out can be widely-varied, says Johnson. Often in RTS games, players almost exclusively react to the actions of opponents. He envisions his design as one where players must react to that, plus market conditions and randomized resources in the terrain.

"I love RTS games, but they've essentially become one game," says Soren. "They have different themes, and might play out differently, but at their core, there are a lot more similarities than differences. I wanted to make a competitive multiplayer RTS that was significantly different than anything out there. I wanted it to be original."

The studio is funded through investment from Michigan game developer Stardock, which makes games including Galactic Civilizations and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. Stardock CEO Brad Wardell is offering business support for the new studio.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/2038..._lead_designer_caters_to_PC_strategy_fans.php

Mohawk developing the game with Nitrous Engine, which is new 64-bit "next-gen" strategy game engine developed by strategy game veterans and also funded by Stardock.
 
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Borelli

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The studio's first game is a to-be-named near-future RTS set on Mars.
Civ 4 in the title made me think this would be about a TB game but RTS? With a focus of economy? I haven't seen that since like ... Seven Kingdoms.
Like typical RTS games, it will offer highly-competitive multiplayer.
Economic strategy game and a "highly-competitive" one? Honestly i am intrigued at how this will turn out.

With the newly-announced Mohawk
soren.jpg
 

Malakal

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RTS, meh. :keepmymoney:

Real world works on real time basis you know. As long as there is pause/regulation of game speed it is not a problem.

Anyway I love economic games but usually they dont implement the most basic economic principles, like supply and demand affecting prices, effectively becoming what I like to call "arcade economics". Lets see how this one turns out.
 

kris

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Real world works on real time basis you know.

Except for a game like this the "real-time" is not really real-time. It is most like super speed time on steriods, which could very well make it more about Quick decisions and mouse handling skills than planning and thinking.

Few "real-time" games have ever been at a real-time.
 

Raghar

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Well from a professional point of view of someone who made a lot of research in dynamic eco/political large scale simulations.

The main problem which was missing from games like CIV V was lack of real military supplies and real weapon stocks. They abstracted too much and attack against supply/industry, were next to nonexistent. In WWI a next to nonexistent Russian infrastructure killed Russian attack, low efficiency of Russian agriculture caused massive problems when they moved workers from agriculture to army. This is what should be simulated. Wet liberal dream is something else.

Now if they simply use Mars colony as props and slap a standard economy simulation on top of that, then Patrician 3 did it better.

However if the are serious and wanna something for real, then retarded idea of market economy doesn't work for a new colony. First considering travel cost all stuff must be preordered and there can't be profit. In addition, the best way how to ENSURE things would be delivered is a state monopoly. I don't see any sensible way how to make free market game and use Mars for that.
 

Johannes

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Seems like a bad idea on paper, strategy games with resource production tend to be about economy by default. Now upping the number of resources to 12, and adding some random fluctuations to the deal, does not in my mind make the economics more interesting but just harder to grasp. More focus on turtling and micromanaging your home economy instead of said economy being in constant interaction with your opponent. Maybe I'm wrong and it turns out to work out fine, but I doubt it
 

laclongquan

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Johannes, have you played Patrician 3 or port Royale 2 at all? You can use military solutions, and they play a great part in your overall strategy.

If you want to make it big though, economy strategies is the key.

12 resources are about right.
 

Johannes

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Johannes, have you played Patrician 3 or port Royale 2 at all? You can use military solutions, and they play a great part in your overall strategy.

If you want to make it big though, economy strategies is the key.

12 resources are about right.
I admit I haven't played them, but aren't they more like city building games than highly competitive multiplayer RTS's?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Soren Johnson is tired of the popamole: http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=697

I am Giving Up on Giving Up
Posted on November 11, 2013
This year marks my thirteenth in the industry, and I have created two games (Civ3 andCiv4) which I consider roundly successful. Unfortunately, both games came from my first five years; projects from the following eight years were all either executed poorly or cancelled outright. How did I lose almost a decade of my professional life?

To answer that, I need to start in October 2005, with the release Civilization 4. The game was critically praised (94 Metacritic, highest ever for a Firaxis game) and hugely profitable, selling over 3 million copies on a modest budget. It won Game of the Year awards. The soundtrack, which I selected and edited, was acclaimed. The theme song, “Baba Yetu,”won a Grammy, the first ever for a video game. One mod, Fall from Heaven, developed a large following of its own. Civ4 was that rare project in which everything that could go right did go right.

I started the project from scratch, wrote every line of game and AI code, grew the team over two-and-a-half years, and shipped the game two weeks ahead of schedule. I gave everything I had to give to that game; my only regret was that I did not have the stamina left to contribute meaningfully to the expansions.

Six months later, after the patching process finished and my energy level returned, I needed to decide what to do next. Firaxis (or rather, the new owners, Take-Two) offered me the chance to lead Civ5, which I declined as I couldn’t make the radical changes necessary to justify a new version. In contrast, I was overflowing with ideas when Civ4began as Civ3 had been an incredible learning experience. Most of these ideas were now explored, so I didn’t have much left to give the series.

I did, however, have plenty of ideas for new strategy games, which I was very excited to make. I had proven myself as a designer with Civ4, and it was time to make a game wholly of my own. I pitched my favorite idea, and it was rejected. I floated a few other ones, and they were declined as well. The company couldn’t afford to put resources into a new project with Railroads! in full development, Revolution beginning to ramp up, and Civ5looming on the horizon.

Ultimately, Firaxis was in a bind. Because developments costs were rising and the window for PC retail games was shrinking, new IP had become increasingly risky. Furthermore, the company had a wealth of proven IP from Sid’s back catalog to develop, so the opportunity cost of producing new IP was huge. (In fact, between 1997’s Gettysburg and 2013’s Haunted Hollow, Firaxis released no new IP, with the possible exception ofSimGolf, which was certainly original but also traded on the Sim brand.)

My pitches had all been for smaller projects, with budgets between one and two million dollars. The problem was that, at the time, no distribution method supported games of that scale. We only needed to sell a few hundred thousand copies to break even – a very reasonable goal with the company’s reputation – but the retail channel didn’t support such projects. PC games had to either sell millions in a $50 box, which was only viable with a large budget, or sell in a $10 jewel case, which was the shovelware market. Steam had just begun reaching out to third-party publishers – by 2007, only id, Capcom, and Eidos were on the service – so digital distribution was not an option.

Today, of course, things are much different as a market exists for games of all prices, from free to $60, and of all budgets, from less than $1m to more than $100m. Digital distribution, microtransactions, and platform diversity have altered the landscape of the industry, and it is likely that if I was pitching a game inside Firaxis under today’s conditions, we could have made it work. At the time, however, my only option was to hang on as a creative director, giving advice to the active teams while prototyping games which might never come out.

In fact, if I had known then what the next six years of my career would be like, I would have likely stayed at Firaxis and assumed that something good would come of it. I loved working there and still love the company, but I am only human; I felt that my work on Civ4 had earned me the right make a game of my own. Being denied that hurt, and I made a perhaps hasty decision to go.

I interviewed at the companies I respected most – Blizzard, Ensemble, Valve – and settled on joining Maxis to work on Spore. Will Wright had amazed developers and journalists withthe surprise reveal at GDC 2005, and joining the team meant working on one of the highest-profile games in the industry. I have compiled my thoughts on Spore in a previous post, and despite the game’s flaws, I can’t say I regret working on it. The team was inspiring and immensely talented, and I wanted at least to ship something before too much time had passed. I joined to finish the project, and the game was done 18 months later.

The other reason I joined Maxis was that they wanted to support my future projects; if I proved myself with Maxis, some interesting opportunities existed post-Spore. Unfortunately, the game underperformed, and EA’s stock cratered shortly afterwards. (The two events, of course, were not entirely unrelated.) The company laid off a chunk of its workforce and retreated from new, risky IP towards fewer, safer titles. The chances of me pitching a new, innovative strategy game inside of EA, one which I could commit to fully and protect from compromise, dropped to zero.

I was at a crossroads again, and I didn’t know how to make a game my way inside of EA. I actually spent the months following Spore’s release pitching a browser-based strategy gaming company to various venture capitalists in nearby Silicon Valley. At the time,asynchronous and free-to-play games were hot investments, and the best way to control my next project would be to found a company to build it. Unfortunately, my vision was too niche for the VC’s – I wanted to make core strategy games that would grow from player modding – and I couldn’t find funding.

Instead, I found refuge at EA2D, a browser-based gaming studio at the Redwood Shores campus. Their main team was building Dragon Age Journeys, a Flash-based spin-off with tactical, turn-based combat. Mark Spenner, the studio’s GM, gave me the opportunity to prototype the web-based Strategy Station for a year, which was essentially the same project that I had unsuccessfully pitched to the VC’s. I built three different moddable strategy games that could be played online asynchronously, using the Google Web Toolkit as my browser engine.

I released the games with little fanfare; in fact, I never once mentioned the site on this blog although I did talk about it on one episode of Three Moves Ahead. In some ways, I was afraid of publicity or success; I didn’t know how to make the site viable, either scalable technologically or profitable financially, but I was sure that few decision makers inside EA would share my vision. I decided to make as much progress as I could on my own and hope for the best. (I rationalized that they couldn’t kill a project without a development team.)

The site never grew beyond a few thousand users although it developed a dedicated audience in Japan, with some players finishing thousands of games. (Here’s a popular Japanese blog dedicated to the site, and here’s a video of Kingdoms, the most popular game, being played with the Japanese language and art mod, which replaced the human soldiers with bunnies for some reason.) I didn’t know how to justify asking for resources from EA for such an odd project, and when it became clear that EA2D needed a success to justify its existence, I preemptively killed the project myself. (I did attempt, unsuccessfully, to take the project outside of EA, so that the Japanese community could continue playing. An independent Strategy Station could have served an enthusiastic niche audience, but I had created a personal pet project inside of EA, one inappropriate for a company of that size.)

The potential success EA2D needed became Dragon Age Legends, a loose sequel to Journeys, built within Facebook. Social games were hot, hot, hot in 2010, and I wanted to see if I could make one that respected core gamers yet took advantage of the new format. The results were mixed. The game actually tested quite well within the company, especially among the executives – CEO John Riccitiello and Games Label President Frank Gibeau both had very high-level characters and spent not a little money on the game. Nonetheless, the friction of the energy model, the core gamer hostility to free-to-play, and the mismatch with the Facebook audience ultimately doomed the title.

For myself, I genuinely pursued the project as an interesting experiment, but the game was clearly not what I would have developed if I controlled my own destiny. Sadly, I did not even try to make the games I wanted to make within EA. I was unwilling to engage in the politics necessary to pitch them, doubtful they could be approved anyway, and afraid of how they would be handled if they were approved. I was, essentially, giving up before even trying.

The summer of 2011 was probably my lowest point in the industry. One of my favorite sites, Rock Paper Shotgun, lambasted Legends for its business model, and the game’s audience had dwindled down to 20,000 daily active users. The game was not the success EA2D needed to support future projects, and the group became BioWare Social and began to bleed talent. I had no idea what I should do with myself inside EA.

Enter Zynga, or – rather – enter Zynga East. Brian Reynolds and various other refugees from Big Huge Games had founded a Zynga studio in Baltimore to make social games, resulting in the hit 2010 game Frontierville, which included a number of important genre innovations, such as the energy bar and story-based quests. Zynga was flush with cash, and Tim Train, the studio’s GM (and Brian’s old BHG business partner), recruited me with the promise of developing a browser-based game on my own terms. They wanted to carve out a protected space in their Baltimore studio in which I could prototype safely.

I worked at Zynga for less than 18 months, and it was, needless to say, an interesting experience. I was indeed given the freedom to work on the game of my choosing; it was playable within a few months and was quite popular around the office. In some ways, however, I had too much freedom. Since the game had little oversight outside of Baltimore, the game had no real political support. I did not push the game through the greenlight process as I was afraid of executive interference, so it lingered on as a mystery project, free from both the negatives and the positives of the company’s attention. Thus, when Zynga East wound down after CityVille 2 performed poorly, the game was easy to cancel.

Ultimately, I was given incredible freedom at Zynga, but the project was likely doomed from the start. However, the only person to blame is myself. When leaving EA, Zynga was the easy option for me to take – the pay was good, the personal risk was low, and I was making the game that I wanted to make. The problem is that the game I most want to make is one that actually ships, and excuses about external forces are just excuses. I joined Zynga knowing that I would not have control over my game – at any moment, it could be altered drastically or cancelled outright.

Looking back at my post-Civ career, I compromised the games I wanted to make with what my employers were willing to fund. With Spore, that compromise meant finishing someone else’s game. With Strategy Station, that compromise meant working without a team. With Dragon Age Legends, that compromise meant turning an RPG into a social game. With Zynga, that compromise meant making my game under the shadow of indifferent management. I was giving up before I had even begun.

Well, I am giving up on giving up. Only one option exists if I care about making games my way, one which will demand much more of my time, my energy, and my security. I have a backlog of game ideas, more than I will ever be able to make in one lifetime, which means that I am already running late.

It is time for a change.

It is time to go independent.
 

Abelian

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I hadn't realized that Soren Johnson designed both Civ3 and Civ4. I played both, but I prefer Civ3 mostly because of its old school isometric projection, but also due to things such as units having both an attack and defense and being able to switch progress to a different unit/building (yes, I know it's not realistic, but losing shields when the AI completes a wonder you're working on is painful). I'm surprised Civ4 was finished early, considering it required a 3D engine.
Speaking of isometric strategy games, I always liked Transport Tycoon economic model. Hopefully, he'll use that as an inspiration. He did mention Railroad Tycoon, after all.
 

DakaSha

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vanilla civ4 is nothing special at all. why the fuck does anybody give a shit
 

pakoito

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Brad Wardell is the business guy. He's fucked and he doesn't know yet.

Fuck you Frogboy, still owe me 50€ worth of Demigod content, and the people who bought the three disappointments of your Elemental bullshit. Or the people from Impulse he sold out to Gamestop who lost their games.
 
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DeepOcean

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Brad Wardell is the business guy. He's fucked and he doesn't know yet.

Fuck you Frogboy, still owe me 50€ worth of Demigod content, and the people who bought the three disappointments of your Elemental bullshit. Or the people from Impulse he sold out to Gamestop who lost their games.
I just hope that Frogboy doesn't fuck things up like he did since... well since Stardock started making games.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/02/soren-johnson-mars-interview/
Former Civilization IV Lead On Mars Game, Revitalizing RTS
By Nathan Grayson on May 2nd, 2014 at 9:00 pm.

mars.jpg


Mohawk Games is an excellent name for a company. And so it is that former Civilization IV lead designer and Spore man Soren Johnson approaches me sporting the company haircut. It’s a recent trim job for the old headshrub, he tells me, but he wears it well. However, the brain beneath the mohawk – the mind behind some of strategy gaming’s greatest greats – is the real main attraction here. Johnson’s goal is to design “core strategy games” in conjunction with Civ V art director Dorian Newcomb and in partnership with Galactic Civilizations (no relation) developer Stardock.

First on the docket? A still unnamed Mars economy RTS with no units and 13 different resource types. Is it madness? Probably, but it’s the good kind, the kind that drives a man to shave off most of his hair before a business conference, the kind that sounds wicked fun when people exchange fireside tales of their favorite matches.

Go below for a discussion with both men about how the game works, boardgame influences, how videogames might be able to replicate boardgaming’s face-to-face appeal, designing strategy that’s extremely complex but also accessible, release plans, and heaps more.


RPS: You’ve announced that Mohawk’s working on a strategy game, but what exactly is it? How fast-paced will it be? What’s it about?

Johnson: The current game we’re making, which we don’t really have a name for, we’re going to call it Mars right now. It’s set on Mars, and it’s an RTS. It’s about building a little economic engine. There’s 13 different types of resources. You have to decide “Well which are the ones I want to produce?” You accumulate some water, maybe turn that water into food, and then you have a stockpile, and then ultimately you really make your money based on the market. All these different resources can be bought or sold at any time, and the price just goes up and down totally dependent on players actions in the game.

So you play a four player game, if three of the players are all buying food then the price of food is going to go up. You get a lot of food, sell it, make more money. We don’t present what the price is. We don’t think the resources should be worth this much, this is totally dependent on the game. And sometimes players really forget about one specific resource, and they’re like, “Wow, can you believe the price of iron in that last game? It was ridiculous, what happened?”

mohawkgames.jpg


RPS: Do you think it works best primarily as a multiplayer game? Sounds like that definitely adds a layer of boardgame-style enjoyment to it.

Johnson: That’s what we’ve been focusing on right now. The nice thing about developing a game that has a muliplayer side is you’re able to try out the mechanics immediately.

Newcomb: You have the best AI starting, because you have the strategy that you can implement. Then you can see other asymmetrical strategies from other people. A lot of times in games when you develop an idea you have to wait until you’ve completed the AI to obtain that kind of advantage. If it’s multiplayer I can take advantage of an idea immediately and get feedback, like “That was awesome,” or “That was the worst.”

Johnson: One of our artists had an idea recently. A lot of RTSs, you choose a side before you begin, Protoss or Zerg or Terran or whatever. And that’s kind of what we did. There’s colony types. And one of our artists was like, “Well how about deciding what colony you want after the game starts? You explore the map and then you choose what you want to be.” And we said, “OK, that sounds really interesting,” and we tried it out the next day. And we got the experience immediately because you’re playing a mulitplayer game and it’s for real.

If you have a single player game where there isn’t really competent AI, you’re kind of pretending like you’re playing. You know you’re going to be able to run rings around the AI. That’s one of the advantages of multiplayer. Having said that though, once we’re really happy with the game design itself, at that point it’s time to really focus on single player.

Newcomb: It really sucks to try to learn a one player game, having your first game be a multiplayer game where you get your butt kicked, it’s very frustrating.

Johnson: And the truth with most RTS games, the multiplayer is the glamorous side, the side that gets a lot of the attention. Developers will tell you, 78% of their players really are just there for single player. We totally know that, but it’s a question of what order you take things. You know the nice thing about that is, once the game design is done, if you start working on the AI at that point, you’re not going to be wasting time having to continually rewrite the AI as the game changes. That’s what makes gaming AI so hard. If you’re making an AI to play chess, the rules are never going to change. If you make an AI for a game, and someone decides to rip out this one element, [it's totally useless].

mars2.jpg


RPS: So, it’s a game that’s largely about economics, but it’s a real time strategy. What do you from moment-to-moment? I feel like detailed economics management is often more the domain of turn-based games. Offers more time for chin-stroking, conniving, stat obsessing, etc.

Johnson: So one way you could describe it is it’s an RTS without units. You just focus on the buildings and the resources, and so obviously that means that aspect of the game is a lot deeper than you normally see in an RTS. Starcraft has two resources. Age of Empires: Age of Kings has a pretty advanced economic system. It has four resources, food, wood, gold, stone. So we knew that we would need to expand up on that. I think we have 13 resources: energy, water, food, oxygen, fuel, chemicals, iron, steel, copper, and so on and so forth. Each of those resources have different uses. Some are useful for building, some are useful for life support, some are useful mostly just to make money off of.

Newcomb: And how they’re useful is unique. We had a big set initially, and we’re trying that out, and over the course of it we’re swapping out resources, swapping out what they do, swapping out not their inherent value but their value in terms of the hierarchy of building things. We’re trying to balance things so that each of those has a purpose in the game, and each of those provides another wrinkle for someone to go in a direction, another choice to make as they play the game. So it’s providing the same exact environment with “What do you decide to do now?” Based on what the other players might be doing, what’s your opportunity? Which resources come together to form the best strategy?

Johnson: And there’s multi levels of resources. Which is something you don’t normally see in an RTS. You pick up a cattle and then you turn it into meat, then you go and you ship that to a city or whatever. In our case, you take the water, you turn it into fuel. You take the fuel, you turn it into chemicals. So there’s a whole resource tree. That affects the market, because it’s pretty easy to create water, so it’s easy to drive the price down, flood the market with water so to speak. But it’s pretty hard to turn that all the way to chemicals. That’s usually the reason why the price of chemicals keeps going up. There’s demand for it but there’s not enough supply.

RPS: You said there aren’t necessarily units, so what is the interface? How does it work?

Johnson: When I started the project I set a high level of constraint. “We’re not going to select units. We’re not going to move units around.” There were still kind of units to move around and do things, like, “I’m going to claim this tile,” then this little probe pops up from the colony and goes out and claims the tile. “I want to build a steel mill.” Then an engineer pops up, travels to the spot, and builds a steel mill. You’ve got a water mine. It produces water, then a little blimp pops up and flies the water back to your colony.

civ42.jpg


But these aren’t things you control, like in SimCity or one of the other city builder games. But at the same time we went back and forth on, well, there’s exploration units. Should you control those? We had pirate units. Maybe should you control those? Then we had defensive units to ward off the pirates. So at some point I was trying to make it work for exploration units, and said “Ok, you just set exploration flags, and the units will automatically figure out where they’re going.” Like the pirates and stuff. That wasn’t much fun. It was just a little bit frustrating. You want it to do exactly what you want it to do, and maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. There’s a reason why RTSs let you select units and do exactly what you want them to, because people like that immediacy.

So we tried that for awhile and was like, “I really want to get away from unit selection because I feel like that’s something that really makes RTSs hard for a lot people. That’s makes it very inaccessible.” And selecting units is not really core to our design. So I was like “Ok. Let’s get rid of exploration units. Let’s make pirates kind of one shot things. You just launch a pirate mission. Or you do exploration, you scan tiles. You have a certain number of scans, you click a tile and it reveals, you click a tile and it reveals. It’s more of a top level thing. So far that’s working out pretty well.

RPS: You mentioned simplifying that whole element of it. But I think a lot of people who are really into core strategy games like that complexity, that’s their thing. When they hear that people want to simplify it they immediately think, “Oh no! They’re gonna make it for people who don’t play our games. They’re gonna ruin it!” So why is that your core design philosophy?

Johnson: To me when I think about games, it’s like a bucket. You have so many rules and pistons and mechanics and content that you can pour into that bucket. For an RTS the bucket is a little bit smaller than it is for a turn based game. With a game like Civ, Civ originally was a real-time game, way back in 1990 when it originated. Sid Meier, because he was inspired by SimCity, was like, “Oh I’ll just do that, except at a global level.” The thing was, it was just too much for people to handle as an RTS, so he made a turn-based game.

And now people, if they don’t understand something they can take time to learn about it. So the amount of complexity you can put in a game goes up. Now if you make a real time game, specifically the Paradox games which are sort of real time games, but if it’s a game that’s fast paced and 30 minutes long and competitive, that bucket is a little bit smaller. And most RTS games fill that bucket with combat and units and special powers and abilities, and that’s great. We’re taking that stuff out of the bucket, but what we’re putting into the bucket is this complicated resource tree, and discovery system, and tiles, and auctions, and building chains, and free market.

euivwit1.jpg


Newcomb: Ultimately, what ends up having the most gains as a player, the way that you won the game is to focus on one or two things really well. And what we’re trying to do is to make sure we’re providing the focus on those two things. If I’m playing a multiplayer game with Soren and he does something, I need to respond to it or plan to respond to it. It may involve building something, it may involve watching the price of things go up or down, it may involve attacking him.

When you introduce the mechanic, especially in a pretty quick paced game, “How do I select these units? How do I move them from point to point? And if I’m getting attacked how do I handle that?”, that ended up just becoming a distraction. Instead of it enhancing the strategic possibilities, anything becomes a distraction from what your main focus is of how you want to win, how you want to play the game. Because if you’re just, “Man this is just another thing keeping me from playing the game that I thought I was playing,” then it’s probably not that important. The thought of simplifying, streamlining it so that it becomes a free to play massive timesink or something, that’s very different. I think a game could be very complex at its heart. What we’re trying to do is distill it.

Johnson: The simplification is a tool to put focus on the parts of the game that you care most about. And when when you play Mars there’s this market that’s always visible. Thirteen resources, thirteen prices, thirteen stockpiles, thirteen rates going up, going down. That’s actually a lot to keep track of. That’s actually where your focus should be because a big part of the game is interacting with… so there will be these random events. Suddenly there will be a food shortage, and if I don’t pay attention to that Dorian will be able to sell his food while the price is really high. Where as if you both see it, if we both see the price rise up, and I often have the sense that both of us have our finger on the sell button, and which one of us is going to sell? We both want to sell!

Newcomb: At the highest. You don’t want to see the price drop and know that’s when someone else got all of the money.

Johnson: The type of games were talking about right there, there’s not really a game out there that does this.

Newcomb: It’s interesting that we’ve been playing a lot of board games that have slightly dynamic markets where you can bid or out bid someone. inherently those games take longer to play. Once you introduce negotiations into the game it double, triples the time to play. The nice thing about this is we have a full negotiation system that’s up and running for everyone, but it happens real time. So if I want to sell stuff at a certain price I can do that at my choosing while Soren’s doing different task. And he can undercut me over time, and I’m like, “Crap, I’ll never get that value.”

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RPS: It’s interesting to me because you are making a very specific type of game. Mars Economic Simulator is very specific compared to, for instance Civ, which was the world, and Spore, which is evolution – these concepts that people can grapple onto very easily. Whereas this is a lot more, “OK, here’s this one thing that you’re going to do. Hope you like Mars! Hope you like economies!” So do you think this will appeal to people who like your work in those other games?

Johnson: Well I hope so. I think there’s two aspects there. One is, it is certainly a narrower scope. I think in some sense that’s more appropriate in general than Civ’s scope. The scope with a Civ game is somewhat insane, and it’s crazy that it even works at all. Usually making a Civ game meant just trying to plug all of the holes to try and keep it from totally bursting. This is hopefully more of the right scope for a game.

But more importantly as an independent studio, we’re five guys making a game. We have only a certain amount of resources to work with. When we worked on Civ 4 we had a big team and a big publisher behind it. There was a lot to draw on. There was already a huge fan base out there. The scope was like the blessing of the project, you knew that was part of it. You knew that you had resources to realize it. We can’t make something that huge right now. We have to pick our battles, right?

RPS: Boardgames are obviously a big inspiration here, and you’ve been talking about negotiation phases and stuff like that. But I think the real intrigue of boardgames – maybe the thing that makes, say, economies and management able to stand alone in games likeAgricola – is that you’re face to face with someone, and you’re really getting into it and talking to them directly. Personally, I almost always end up accidentally role-playing, pretending to be a character. So it’s not like, “I sure do love farming!” Instead it’s, “I like people. I like interacting with people.” For obvious reasons you can’t really replicate that in a PC game. Are you worried about not having that appeal in the game?

Johnson: Well we do and we can. One aspect of the game that works really well for that is the auction house. There are times during the game where the game will keep running, but there will be an auction pops up in the corner, and that will be for a specific plot of land, or an extra claim.

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Or a specific technology. Our technology is going to be a little bit different in that it’s more like a patent system, which means that there’s maybe twelve unique technologies, and if you get a specific one no one else can have it. So it’s not like you’re all going to spec into the same resource tree. It’s more like the game will allow twelve technology cards, and if I grab one card then I’ve got that technology locked down. But a patent might be held up for auction, and you know, I bid on it, Dorian bids on it, I bid on it, I know who’s bidding on it.

It gets really heated. In fact we played a game recently where afterwards me and Dorian talked about how it went down. We’re pretty sure that he lost the game because he won the early auction…

Newcomb: Yeah, I kind of cut my throat to get the thing I thought I wanted, and I was dying the rest of the game.

Johnson: Was it teleportation? I forget what it was. Anyway something important came up in auction.

Dorian: And it was a critical thing.

Johnson: And early in the game you don’t have much money, but you have some resources. So we both went all-in on resources, to try to outbid the other one. We both pushed ourselves to the total limit, and he won the claim, but then he didn’t have any resources to work with, so it was a really hollow victory.

Newcomb: Ideally this is a game that you want to play with your friends. My belief is that, I think this is one of the best games I’ve worked on. I want it to be the best game I’ve worked on, but there’s a lot of work to do to make that happen. I love all the games I’ve worked on in general. But the thing that’s great about this game is it reminds me of when I was playing games growing up, when you play boardgames with your neighbors or friends.

And in general, I’m not saying that this wouldn’t be a great game to play with strangers, but the best introduction to this is, “Hey, I want to play this game with you. I want to show you ’cause we haven’t played a game like this before. We’ve played tons of games where we shot each other. We’ve played tons of games where we raced each other. We’ve played tons of long-term turn based strategy games. This is a game where I want to see how you solve this problem, I want to see how you compete in this type of environment.”

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In some ways the best way to learn the game and play the game is on a LAN in, like, a college setting. You know, have a friend come over with their laptop. That being said once you get used to the game it has a really appealing just straight up competition level style of play. And a lot of MOBAs are doing that now, where you play something that… in general if you’re playing something like that your team has to be really good, otherwise it’s really frustrating. I think there are a lot of people who play with just their friends, against strangers. I could imagine this being that sort of game. I think those games are best played with a team you know well, not just random hookups, like, “Oooh! I’ve been paired for my skill set!”

RPS: At some point are you planning to heavily support voice chat, so people can really engage on that level? I guess what I mean is the difference between just having voice chat as an option versus it being like, “Hey, this is a pretty optimal way to play! You guys should try this.”

Newcomb: I think voice chat would be optimal. Actually, I would love to be able to even send video messages to people.

Johnson: Another thing I like to push is the voice chat not just for the game, but after the game. One of the best parts for me in Civ appeared afterward, when people got together and figured out what happened. Mars should have some really incredible end game screens, where it shows the prices that go up, and the crash tier, and what happened here? Why did it drop? A picture of the stock prices as they go up and down, to see what was correlated to what. This one player won, how did they win? Well they made this much money off this specific resource, that’s worth a try.

RPS: You initially said this was going to come to Steam Early Access. Is that still the plan?

Johnson: Yeah. We haven’t really made any official announcements or anything, but we’re definitely in favor of the Early Access concept.

Newcomb: What we’re trying to do is create a small studio that’s sustainable. We want to be sure that we’re able to take chances with our games. A lot of really passionate gamers wonder why aren’t the big studios making games like this anymore.

Big studios have never made games the way they thought they made them. Even games like Civilization II that came out, internally there’s, “Oh, we don’t think our game’s going to do well.” But then it’s a huge success. I think a lot of the time, large studios have a hard time understanding what the hardcore gamer wants, outside of the hardcore super market, and they can still miss that.

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So what we’re really trying to do is create a small studio where we can take chances. Small enough where we can make a Martian economics RTS game, and the success of each Early Access period will give us a taste of how successful we’re going to be, and do people actually want to take those chances and risks in the game design choices that we’re making.

Johnson: One of the big inspirations from board games is not even just the mechanics, but the diversity of topics. If you look at the top 100 games of boardgames you’ll see an incredible variety of types of game. Way more than the variety you’ll see in videogames, definitely in strategy games. If we’re able to keep our team small we’ll be able to reduce some of the risk of development. Like with Kickstarter, or Early Access or whatever, then yeah you take some risks and go out on a limb to start out with.

RPS: Do you have a general timeframe for Early Access, or are you still too early in development to be making those sorts of plans?

Johnson: I have it in my mind, but I don’t want to say just yet. I want to get it out there soon. It’s very playable already. It’s fun right now. It mostly is a question of can we get the game to production level that is good enough, but not embarrassing.

Newcomb: The first artist to join the team was an interface artist, because we really wanted to make sure the interface was very playable, and it’s laid out in a way that’s clean but also attractive. So we have all of those things that we want to make sure are good before we release it. You don’t want to release a game that’s obtuse or unclear and have people say, “I don’t understand what’s going on.” I’d rather them say, “I know what’s going on, I don’t know how to get there. Teach me how to play better.”

Check back soon for part two, in which we discuss Firefly as one of Mars’ primary influences, the (supposed) decline of RTSes, the weird state of triple-A development, and whether or not Johnson will ever do anything on the scale of Civilization ever again. Also mohawks.

Whisky
 

DarKPenguiN

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Well from a professional point of view of someone who made a lot of research in dynamic eco/political large scale simulations.

The main problem which was missing from games like CIV V was lack of real military supplies and real weapon stocks. They abstracted too much and attack against supply/industry, were next to nonexistent. In WWI a next to nonexistent Russian infrastructure killed Russian attack, low efficiency of Russian agriculture caused massive problems when they moved workers from agriculture to army. This is what should be simulated. Wet liberal dream is something else.

Now if they simply use Mars colony as props and slap a standard economy simulation on top of that, then Patrician 3 did it better.

However if the are serious and wanna something for real, then retarded idea of market economy doesn't work for a new colony. First considering travel cost all stuff must be preordered and there can't be profit. In addition, the best way how to ENSURE things would be delivered is a state monopoly. I don't see any sensible way how to make free market game and use Mars for that.

Use some imagination...

I am actually writing a story regarding this (or something similar) which answers the very question you asked.

To be brief- The initial set up of the colony and such would go exactly as you would imagine- BUT there will be a point where Mars will be nearly or perhaps fully self sufficient especially if there was a secret plan in the making by an elite organization with wishes to secede from Earth. I would imagine Earth launching a major war against Mars wouldnt be possible for Centuries if the colonies positioned themselves to defend against the few measly ships sent from earth with troops.

In the scenario I am proposing (which could fit this as well) there are resources on Mars which are needed direly for Earths survival . I like the idea of Gold since it would be worth the transportation and its been proposed that Gold dust sprayed in the atmosphere could help combat global warming in the worst fictional Al Gore catyclism that has ever been imagined. So a colony is set up on mars to mine Gold since we wasted a good portion of ours making wires for stereo systems and plating the negro races teeth. Mars gets a fairly functional set up going on and at some point declares independence.

You want the Gold? We need X resource and will trade but you are covering the shipping cost.

The technology at that point I would assume is not going to be advanced enough to swoop in with a death Star and blow the newly liberated martians to hell. Rather, it would be smaller cargo ship which would essentially be coming at predetermined times when the planets are closet together. Mars could defend itself... Thus Earth would have little choice but to bend over and take it or deal with Al Gores Ice melting and dead Polar Bears swimming in seas of red tide and shit.

So the 'war' would be one of trade, terrorism and sabotage coming from both sides but openly Earth would accept the deal or lose out on everything.

If the earth declined to make a deal, the Elites initially in charge of the secession have enough pull to save their own asses and will leave the colonies high and dry. They would obviously have the means of food production, obtaining water from the atmosphere (or other sources) and I imagine some form of nuclear power since the colony would be nearly impossible to resupply from earth as it stands.

Thats the abridged version, spin it how you like- But it works as a fictional scenario although this time of morning I imagine I am not explaining it well. Essentially once Mars declares independence they are paying noting back to Earth for anything and there isnt much Earth can do about it. =P

EDIT- Oh, but to clarify one thing. Real Time ruins the entire thing...Probably. The lead dev doing Civ 4 gives this major points but the real time part is just...uggg...
 
Last edited:

Abelian

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Messages
2,289
Soren Johnson said:
So one way you could describe it is it’s an RTS without units. You just focus on the buildings and the resources, and so obviously that means that aspect of the game is a lot deeper than you normally see in an RTS.
A game with no units that focused on resource gathering and trading and that's been inspired by board games?
So they're making Settlers of Catan in Space?
:troll:
Soren Johnson said:
With a game like Civ, Civ originally was a real-time game, way back in 1990 when it originated. Sid Meier, because he was inspired by SimCity, was like, “Oh I’ll just do that, except at a global level.” The thing was, it was just too much for people to handle as an RTS, so he made a turn-based game.
That's interesting, I never knew that Civ was originally meant to be real-time.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Long interview: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/08/soren-johnson-interview-civilization-mars/

Excerpt:
Once upon a time, Soren Johnson was the main brain behind Civilization IV. Now he has a mohawk. An indie mohawk. Also, he’s making a game about managing a crazy intricate (yet disarmingly accessible) economy on Mars. Last time around we talked about how a Mars economy simulator even works, boardgames, and the current state of strategy gaming, and today we continue that discussion with the future of strategy (and its alleged “death”), MOBAs, the advantages and disadvantages of working at a company like Firaxis, whether or not Johnson will ever make a game on the scale of Civilization ever again, and why Johnson is *glad* that big publishers aren’t paying attention to strategy games. It’s all below.

RPS: Your setting is Mars, but what kind of Mars? Because there are lots of Mars-es. Wacky Mars, pseudo-realistic Mars, entirely realistic Mars which is completely dead and really boring, Mars bars, etc.

Johnson: I think we’re probably somewhere in the middle. It’s not really hard sci-fi. The reason you colonize Mars is so you can supply food to people in the Asteroid Belt. You have people on Mars. They create water and oxygen and food, and they ship that to the Asteroid Belt, because Mars is a lot smaller than earth. It cost a lot less fuel to get ships off of Mars than Earth. So even though obviously it’s a lot easier to grow food on earth, it takes a larger amount of fuel to escape Earth’s gravity. So that’s theoretically one of the ideas behind the usefulness of Mars.

Though at the same time, we have some somewhat goofy technology. Teleportation, perpetual motion, cold fusion, just some stuff that type of futurism and whatnot. It’s not something I would ever put forward as, “This is an educational game about Mars.” It’s just a nice setting. What I really like about the setting is it’s a plausible empty environment that will get developed quickly with modern stuff. We could theoretically make this game in the new world of 1500, right? But you don’t really have an energy market to produce interesting resources quickly. Things happen a lot more slowly. This is a nice place to be able to start with an empty map, which is always a real nice thing in a strategy game.

Dorian: I think of it a little bit like a Firefly world, where you have sort of the wild west. Where you imagine Mal came from. Where they talk about his journey of having a pirate ship. That idea of it’s sort of the wild west, and it’s an emerging market. What you’ll learn isn’t so much of the actual practical details of space exploration. I think the actual education is a free market situation.

Johnson: To appreciate what supply and demand really mean. What happens when only one person has a specific resource?

Dorian: That’s how I imagine people rushing to California, and a lot of the West pops up. In the Asteroid Belt you have the platinum market, or the precious metals. The newly discovered metals that are now being used for all electronics are being mined in the asteroids. So you have a bunch of guys there that have nothing to spend their money on except the goods coming from Mars. That’s the opportunity.

Johnson: I could probably talk about this for awhile because I have a lot of experience working on Civ, and people looking at it as an educational game. I think one of the big mistakes when you look at games in terms of education is people often think it should be about teaching facts. You get this specific information into the players’ heads. That can happen in games, but what games really do is make you experience something. You get the feeling of what it feels like to be running a corporation that doesn’t have enough food, and the price is going up, and what are you going to do? Just internalizing that feeling, which is something that’s hard to do in a documentary or whatever, but easy to do here.

Whisky
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Officially announced: http://offworldtrading.com/

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From the designer of Civilization IV comes a new kind of real-time strategy game

Offworld Trading Company is a real-time strategy game in which money, not firepower, is the player's weapon. Players found a company on Mars and compete against other companies looking to become the economic power on the planet.

Loosely inspired by such classics as M.U.L.E., Offworld Trading Company forces players to make tough choices on what resources to acquire, what goods to build and sell, how to interact with the planet's thriving underworld, and when and what stocks to acquire.

Players compete against up to seven other AI- or player-controlled companies. The game is won when one player ultimately acquires all the shares of their competitors, thereby wresting control of the entire planet’s economy for the winner.

Gameplay

Money is the heart of Offworld Trading Company. Players gain cash by selling excess resources like carbon, fuel, and silicon on the open market, and spend it buying the resources they’re short on. Prices fluctuate in real time; dump a bunch of iron on the market and its price will crater, making it cheap for other players to buy up (and making their stockpiles worth much less in the near term).

Resources are extracted from the planet from concentrations visible on the map, or created by a player’s industrial buildings like a hydrolysis station turning water into fuel and oxygen. However, each building – extractors, processors, or special facilities like patent offices – requires a claim to be spent acquiring the land to build it on.

Claims are acquired by leveling up your colony (at a hefty resource cost), or for cash at the black market (at an escalating and significant cash price). Getting a new claim in Offworld Trading Company is a lot like claiming an expansion site in a traditional RTS.

Finally, the black market allows for more direct interactions than manipulating the price of silicon. Drop a wad of cash to hire pirates to harass your opponents’ supply chains, smuggle a crippling EMP device into their factories, or send a power surge through their facilities – but don’t be surprised when your corporation finds itself on the receiving end of some of these effects.

While fueling their rapid expansion by exploiting resource prices and turning the black market to their advantage, players must keep their facilities stocked with air, food, fuel. Your employees won’t die if you run short, but they’ll be forced to buy the necessities on the market – and your stock price will suffer.

Letting the basics slide to focus on making more money by extracting and processing more resources may sound tempting, but any stock price drop is a short path to failure in Offworld Trading Company. Buying out your rivals is the key to victory, so driving up your stock price while depressing theirs is critical.

A basic strategy in Offworld Trading Company might look something like this:

  1. Drive up the price of water by buying up the world’s supplies and hoarding them in your stockpile.
  2. Hit your opponent with an EMP that temporarily takes out his limited production capabilities, sending his stock price plummeting as he can’t fulfill his company’s needs.
  3. Meanwhile, water has become much more expensive on the open market thanks to the reduction in supply – giving you the perfect opportunity to dump your stockpiles and buy up a big chunk of his stock before he can recover.
Offworld Trading Company is a unique game that rewards thinking on your feet and adapting your strategy to constantly changing game conditions, not memorizing build orders and deploying hard counters. Every stratagem has a counter – literally, thanks to the real-time market pricing that is the game’s core foundation – if you can see what your opponents are trying to do in time to react to it.

Prototype, Beta and Release Schedule

In order to ensure that the final game is of the highest quality, we are inviting gamers who have longed to have a strategy game that focused on business and economic savvy to join us during the development cycle to offer feedback, playtest, and interact with the developers.

We expect to launch the first prototype version of Offworld Trading Company to our Elite Founders this fall. The beta/Early Access edition will follow, with the final release date coming when the game is done.
 

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