Offworld Trading Company is one of the best and most unique strategy games ever made. It differs from almost all other Strategy games in that there is no combat, instead, you play as a (mostly) legal corporation seeking riches through space colonization. The path to intergalactic riches is paved with rivals, though, and although your warfare is economic and not militaristic, it's no less cutthroat.

At its core, OTC is a game about the production and trade of various resources. Some simple resources like Iron and Carbon can be mined from the ground, while more complex resources like Steel and Electronics have to be produced using other resources. All resources can be bought and sold at any time, and every transaction affects the price of that resource. If you sell a lot of Iron, the price goes down, and if you buy a lot of Steel, the price goes up. Of course, your goal is to be selling resources that are expensive and buying resources that are cheap, but this is vastly more complex than it sounds. For starters, you can't just build as many mines and factories as you can afford. Offworld real estate is expensive, so each corporation is only allocated a certain number of land claims, each of which allows you to claim a single tile on the map. You can only get more claims by upgrading your HQ, which costs a lot of resources, so you need to choose every claim wisely to succeed. Obviously, tiles containing high quality resources that you need are great to grab, but the location of the tiles matters too. If you build multiple buildings of the same type next to each other, they work more efficiently, and if your buildings are not connected to your headquarters, you'll have to fly the resources back and forth, which is both costly and time-consuming. Due to the fluctuations of the market, a once-useful factory can quickly turn into an economic liability, and while you can choose to demolish it and build something else in its place, you can't give the claim back and move to another tile, so planning ahead is extremely important. In the long run, victory is mostly about planning ahead and being able to predict and adapt to the market.

While the core mechanics of buying and selling have no shortage of depth, there are many further wrinkles to the gameplay as well. For starters, there's 6 different factions you can play as, all of whom have their own little twists on the formula. Scientists can build factories directly on top of resources to gather and refine simultaneously, while robots gain bonuses for having production buildings adjacent to supply buildings. There's also a black market where you can spend your money to purchase various attacks and boosts, such as an EMP to freeze an opponent's buildings or a claim return ticket, which lets you refund a claim you made previously and choose a new tile. There's a lot of nuance to the black market as well, every time any particular item is bought by any player, the price goes up for all players, so sometimes it's worth buying and holding onto something just to drive the price up for your rivals (speaking of which, you can do this with resources as well, buying resources you know your rivals will need to buy and selling them after they drive the price up). On top of this, there are also special buildings like the Patent Lab that can change the rules of the game. Have a bunch of buildings that are spread out? Patent Teleportation and that no longer matters, but only so long as a rival doesn't patent it first. Or disable or steal your patent lab. Or drive the price of Chemicals up to the point where it becomes prohibitively expensive to research. Despite the simplicity of the game's core mechanics, there's an almost infinite number of variables to consider and a ton of room for creative and skillful play.

Another commendable aspect of Offworld Trading Company is that it has a massive amount of content and replay value. For starters, maps are generated randomly, with random allocations of resources and terrain features. In pretty much every other Strategy game I've played that attempts random maps, the maps generally either all feel the same or are frequently so unbalanced that they essentially hand victory to one player, but it works fantastically here, ensuring that the game feels fresh pretty much every time. Capitalizing on this, the game has a very unique campaign mode. In most strategy games, the campaign is a sequence of predetermined battles against the AI, but here it's more like a collection of randomly generated skirmish battles subject to some extra rules. In the campaign you choose to play as one of 11 different characters, each with different strengths and weaknesses. For example, Paolo Rubini starts with the Cold Fusion ability, allowing him to use Water instead of Power for his buildings, while Frank Dawson gets one free Black Market item every time he upgrades his HQ. Before each stage of the campaign, you can use your earnings from previous maps to purchase upgrades to your production buildings and other unique powers to give you the edge. Some of the characters are clearly a little better than others, but there's a ton of content and replay value here. Should you get bored of campaign mode, there's also a number of challenge maps that impose unique win conditions or restrictions upon you, as well as the Daily and Infinite Challenge modes, which task you with winning maps as quickly as possible, complete with leaderboard and replay support so you can see what strategies other players used. Of course, there's also multiplayer support, which features both ranked battles and extremely customizable lobby battles. Even after 100 hours, I've still barely scratched the surface of this game's single player content, which caused me to keep putting off writing this review.

There is basically only a single drawback to this game, which is that it has a significant learning curve. Offworld Trading Company is almost wholly unique, with no other game in any other genre playing similarly to it. While this does make it fresh and exciting even for those who have played hundreds of other strategy games, it also means that you're going to be starting from scratch in terms of skill regardless of how much experience you have. The game does provide some basic tutorials, but for the first half-dozen hours you play the game you're almost certainly going to get smoked and have little idea why. A quick tip that can help you improve faster is to learn to use the X key at almost every opportunity, which shows the profitability of your buildings. If that number is high, things are going well, but if it's low or even negative, you need to take action to restore profitability (this usually involves replacing those buildings with something that would make more money). Once you start to understand how to plan ahead and adapt your production to remain profitable throughout the game it becomes very fun, but there's no question that it's a bit of a slog at the beginning. There's also quite a lot of DLC to the game, but the complete edition goes on sale pretty often, so I wouldn't consider this to be too much of an issue.