Sponsored By: An irresistible desire to be part of the conversation

Time Capitalism-ed: 108 minutes

Laffer review

Soren Johnson made a real-time strategy game that is four parts base-building and resource-gathering and zero parts unit-management.

He is my new favorite person.

Smith review

I have a complicated relationship with real-time strategy games. They always sound so interesting when I read about them, and the people who really get them always seem so happy with them. They're deep, they're usually quite beautiful, they have a lot going on. Then I try playing one and find out they're incredibly high-maintenance, demand all of my attention and expect me to know how to do everything they want without telling me how to do it or even that they want it.

There's probably a very instructive metaphor involving high school dating buried in there, but since I didn't date in high school I wouldn't know.

I keep trying to like real-time strategy games, but I never seem to be able to wrap my head around them. The problem usually revolves around unit management, or perhaps I should say micro-management. You know how it goes: You spend a great deal of time and resources making an expensive, powerful, can't-lose unit only to find that it has a path-finding algorithm consisting of an if statement that says “if (obstacle==true) then $stand_around_like_an_idiot=1”.

It's 2016 now, and real-time strategy games have yet to deliver units that aren't as dumb as a bag of chocolate hammers. But fortunately, human beings are ingenious – or at least Soren Johnson is ingenious, because he figured out how to solve the problem. Rather than failing to make units that navigate around puddles without shipwrights, he created a real-time strategy game that didn't have any units at all. It's all base building, resource gathering and tech-tree management.

Offworld Trading Company is also unique among real-time strategy games in that it has a tutorial that's actually useful. Each of the playable corporations has a series of increasingly deep missions that walk you through the basic strategies and tactics of growing your bottom line as that corporation. Each corporation has its own perks and abilities that may or may not synergize with your philosophy. I, for example, tend to pick the scientific corporations because I can get ahead of the competition on intellectual property and corner the market on high-tech widgets. Somebody else may go for the scavenger type, which can make use of lower-grade metals for early advantages in bulk goods.

At only 108 minutes in, I know I've barely scratched the surface of the strategic options available to me. So let's talk about the other value-adds that Offworld Trading Company brings to the table.

Like the graphics, for example. Surveying your facilities across the map is a delight. The game does a lot with a little. Every building has personality, right down to the construction animations, which I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching. The interface design, which manages to be intuitive without cluttering the screen with chaff. When a building needs carbon to run, you not only can tell largely by looking at it, but finding carbon is as simple as finding the gray chits on the map and picking the tallest stack of them. It brings to mind an intricately detailed board game, as if Puerto Rico were reimagined by the people who created the Zen Pinball franchise.

The game also brings a lot of humor to the table, which is always a welcome to me. A good example is during the energy generation part of the tutorial. Your teacher in this level is a robot, who has been handing out backhanded compliments on your performance the entire time. It takes a moment to explain why solar panels aren't the greatest power-generation option by telling you a story about a company with employees that needed sleep, and how that company was eventually bought and decommissioned by a company run by workers who didn't need sleep.

Maybe you had to be there, but it hit me just right. It probably loses something in translation from machine language. Let me try again:

01010100011000010110101101100101 0110110101111001 0111011101101001011001100110010100101100 011100000110110001100101011000010111001101100101

Ha ha! Woo! Who says robots don't have a sense of humor, huh?

If I had to pick one word for the mission statement of Offworld Trading Company, though, it would be "options." You have options for what kind of company to start as, you have options for how to generate power, you have options for how to make money, you may even have options for paying your executive leadership team in lieu of a salary. My favorite option is the wealth of difficulty choices available. As I said, I'm terrible at this kind of game. Offworld Trading Company allows me to set the difficulty so low that I don't even have to be at the computer.

My other favorite option is the ability to play skirmishes against the computer instead of forcing me to play a drawn-out story campaign to get my single-player fix.

Learn from Soren Johnson, strategy-game makers, for he has figured out how to make strategy games that are fun, deep and accessible.

Will I return for another fiscal quarter?

Considering that I am writing about Offworld Trading Company while wishing I were playing it instead, the answer to that looks like a yes. All of my favorite space games have either extensive economic side-activities or tech trees so deep you can't plumb them without liquid oxygen. Offworld Trading Company has both, which by default makes it my favorite space game of all time, even if it is a real-time strategy game.

Is it the Devil Daggers of Real Time Strategy games?

It's a real-time strategy game that I can actually play. So no, not even close on the difficulty front.

On the “pure game distilled to its purest form” front, I'd say that's a whopping great “yes” with five exclamation points, which Pratchett fans well know is the surest sign of a deranged mind. Offworld Trading Company takes all of the base-building and resource-gathering aspects of a good real-time strategy game, strips out everything else and still makes the game about strategy. That's impressive no matter whether you're a fan of the genre or not.