It’s billing is less, I hope, because of the game’s premise than the fact that it mechanically strips all of the gross combat metaphor from the RTS genre and lays bare the reality of how these games are really played: literally, Offworld Trading Company is a game of competitive economics.

I think you see where I’m going with this.Įnter Offworld Trading Company, the so-called “economic RTS” by acclaimed game designer Soren Johnson and his team at Mohawk Games. Economy of movement, efficiency of planning and reading the indicators of a player’s choices with their resources. But, in many ways, it’s all just economics. Of course, in a game like StarCraft or especially Company of Heroes, this often takes the form of epic battles where tanks or giant robot death-machines duke it out with one another.

Over the course of a match, both efficiency in utilizing resources (units) and efficiency in obtaining resources (economy) are often cornerstone elements of a player’s success. The more efficient a ratio of cost to damage inflicted, the more effective a unit will be. Ultimately, units should expect to do at least their resource cost in damage to the opponent before their destruction, otherwise they are a net loss.

A structure often exists to convert resources into units, which takes the potential implicit in the resources themselves and effects some change on the battlefield. Ultimately, the destruction of the player’s units and structures is a form of economic damage. They deal damage to the other units and structures in the game, which becomes a contest of who can produce the most units and utilize them in the most efficient manner.

Units, of course, are the typical means of player interaction with the other player or players in a match. Within the framework of a real-time strategy match, in almost every case players are asked to build an economy – building and growing an income comprised of 1 or more resources (often, 2 – 4 resources of varying application and scarcity) and commit those resources in various ways: expending the potential of those resources into production structures, upgrades of various types, and units. Real-time strategy games are, in a way, games of competitive economics.

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