Mohawk Games, the independent studio cofounded last November by Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson, has given Ars Technica early details about its first project, a fast-paced, economy-focused reimagining of the real-time strategy genre called Offworld Trading Company.

In a recent interview with Ars, Johnson describes Offworld Trading Company as an economic real-time strategy game. “I’m trying to describe it as an RTS because there’s nothing out there that’s really like it. [It’s] sort of ill-defined. It is an RTS in that it matches the format: two to eight players, 30 to 45 minutes… you could almost describe it as an RTS without units, where the focus is on resources and buildings.”

This idea sounds odd initially—real-time strategy games like StarCraft are built almost entirely around combat—but Johnson is deliberately trying to reclaim variety for the genre. “If you look at the top 100 games on BoardGameGeek, you’re gonna see an immense variety of topics, an immense variety of mechanics, different pacing, different scales...and I want strategy games, or [real-time strategy games], to be that varied. And Offworld is like an attempt at that.”

Johnson has a track record of taking difficult game concepts and making them simple, transparent, and entertaining. With Civilization IV, for example, he took previous games’ frustrating limitation on over-building cities, the complicated “corruption” mechanic, and smoothed it into the simplicity of paying gold for more cities. Johnson’s lesser-known Dragon Age: Legends combined the usual arbitrary convince-friends-to-play-with-you mechanic necessary for “social games” and made it an entertaining RPG recruitment device.

Offworld Trading Company’s premise is that you control one of several companies attempting to take over the colonization of Mars. The goal is to earn money by exploiting Mars’ resources, then use that economic dominance to buy out every other player in a hostile takeover. Players make claims on land to gather raw resources and then use constructed buildings to convert those raw resources into others. So water can be converted into food a hydrolysis factory, or into oxygen and fuel through electrolysis. There are 13 resources in all, to be used for life support, building, or just for selling.

This places Offworld Trading Company snugly into the “pure capitalism” subgenre of games, where success comes from the ideals of the market: the player who can understand which products will be overvalued and undervalued and are able to manipulate their competitors will win. This leads to one of Offworld’s biggest diversions from conventional RTS forms: randomness. All maps in the game are generated randomly, so players can’t fall into habits like optimal build orders, or camping the best resources/starting points on familiar locales. Johnson and Mohawk cofounder Dorian Newcomb said that this randomness should mean that each match is different enough to introduce a bit of unpredictability in winning or losing, even among players of different skill levels.

I often find competitive multiplayer games can often be unpleasant to play, both in terms of specific matches (losing when I feel like I should have won) or in terms of a general toxic environment. Offworld’s randomness could help mitigate some of the anger and toxicity in the community (“Oh well, they just got lucky that time.”), but Newcomb said the non-destructive nature of the gameplay may also make players more accepting of their defeats.

“Playing Age of Empires, you build this great thing, and half the time you watch someone destroy it,” said Newcomb. But because Offworld Trading Company is about economic takeover instead of violent conquest, you can still get a sense of accomplishment even when you’re defeated. “If someone beats you, and they take what you’ve built, you still feel like the only way they won was because they used what you built.”

A modern M.U.L.E.

Another crucial strategic element of Offworld is the limitation on the number of claims that a player can make. Players can’t produce or convert every resource, so they’re forced to buy and sell from each other on the resource market, where price fluctuations occur purely based on player action. “The big center of the game is the resource market,” Johnson said.

Hearing about the limitations on claims and the need to buy and sell from others immediately brought images of the famous 1983 multiplayer strategy game M.U.L.E. to my mind. When I mentioned this connection, Newcomb’s eyes lit up. “M.U.L.E.’s almost a miracle in terms of when it was made, what it did, how it did it. There’s something astonishing about that game, and our hope would be that we could do something almost as astonishing.” Despite the timeless quality of Dani Bunten’s classic simulation, Mohawk thinks it can make some improvements to the formula from a modern vantage point. “If you were going to make M.U.L.E. today, knowing all the things that happened in the last 30 years of game design, this is how we would do it,” Johnson added.

Johnson and Newcomb also took pains to stress that Offworld Trading Company matches would be tight and focused rather than the multi-hour slogs of some similar titles. “The mechanics are more of a tycoon game. But most tycoon games are paced differently. They’re built as purely single-player games” which makes them last 10 hours or more. But Offworld is built around 30 to 45 minute matches. “It’s [for] people who like to play Age of Kings or StarCraft over lunchtime,” says Johnson. Still, that length will likely be customizable: “We’ll probably have some knobs. I like having knobs in games, so people can have much longer games if they want.”

Even outside of the player experience, Johnson and Newcomb said that the shorter play times have value in the development process as well, allowing the team the chance to see every facet of the game and tweak it through frequent matches. “We’ve been playing it every week, because as a multiplayer game, that’s the core of how you develop the gameplay. You can try out a feature right away because you have people on the other side.” When I noted that I rarely finished a full game of Civilization but restarted regularly, Johnson said there’s a game-design reason behind that gameplay pattern: “That’s why the early game of Civ is so enjoyable, because that’s what the developers have been able to play over and over.”

Offworld Trading Company may be conceptually ambitious, trying to take combat out of a real-time strategy genre built solidly on top of it. But Johnson and company sound like they’re trying to stay grounded to the genre’s roots, both in its development and in the play experience itself. It’s gonna have an arc, it’s gonna have intensity, it’s gonna have a resolution, and we’re all gonna get together to talk about what happened. That’s the type of game we’re making. The difference is, it’s not a combat game.”

Offworld Trading Company will be published by Stardock and released on PC for $39.99. It can be pre-ordered from offworldtrading.com, with some tiers offering playable builds in the fall. Mohawk hopes to have an Early Access version later this year as well.