Advanced Guide to Advanced Buildings

An in-depth look at using the advanced buildings in context of strategy.

Introduction

First of all I would like to encourage everyone to check out the free OTC Almanac that comes with the game. That pdf contains several things the first of which is an excellent guide by Cubit32 containing many facts about the game, a whole bunch of numbers and many common tactical and strategic ideas a player can implement during the game. This guide, however, will concentrate on a thing that, in my opinion, is not covered sufficiently in the afore-mentioned Almanac, the advanced buildings and specifically, advanced buildings in context of the late-game strategy. It is also meant to be for more advanced players so this guide assumes that you:
1. Have finished all the tutorials and realize how most of the core mechanics of the game work.
2. Have won at least 1 Multiplayer Free-For-All (MP FFA) match.
3. Are familiar with how all the advanced buildings actually work and what they do exactly, as I will not spend too much time explaining mechanics.
In addition to that, I think this guide will be most useful for people who can consistently beat AI on Manager difficulty, i.e. who have firmly grasped all the basics, though I think beginners can take a few good tips out of it as well. Also, note that this guide is relevant to a) MP, b) FFAs (4 player FFAs in particular, though most of it is relevant to larger games as well, but not 1v1). This is due to the fact that the strategies you might want to use against the AI or in MP 1v1s are quite different oftentimes, especially in 1v1. I suppose most of what you’ll see below does make sense in SP though.

Offworld Market (OM)

The most basic of your end-game choices, an Offworld is usually a good building to choose to go for. However, nearly nothing in OTC is a no-brainer. That means you need to check the offworld prices relatively early (keeping in mind that these prices will increase over time), you need to make sure onworld prices are going to stay relatively low (people consistently producing most things and using optimizations would do that) and one more thing that tends to be overlooked – whether you can defend it. Indeed, if the goons are expensive and you are the first person moving into an OM, you should expect to:
1. Have your offworld be constantly under attack and likely be unusable for a while;
2. You yourself, not just your offworld, become the biggest target for everyone to pick on.
So there are two natural questions coming out of this dilemma: how do you avoid getting attacked and if you can’t – how do you minimize the damage?
The first one seems fairly obvious – holograms! However, what a lot of players do not realize is how blatantly obvious holograms can be to experienced players. So how do you see someone using a hologram, potentially without even staring at everyone’s bases 24/7? Well, the answer is simple. An offworld costs 100 glass, 100 electronics and 200/400 steel or 600 carbon. So whenever the price of these 3 resources suddenly spikes out of nowhere that should be a decent clue. To avoid that, be prepared to build an offworld ahead of time. Buy up all the necessary resources slowly, without spiking any particular one too much and then you’re all set. Next thing you can try to do is to time offworld building with a transition of resources: say chems are dirt cheap, might as well move out of them and go for fuel, though 1 of those chem tiles will become a hologrammed offworld. Last but not least, place your offworld next to the neutral colony. At least currently, even great players somehow tend to miss out on these holograms. Sure it will be masked as a different advanced building, but surprisingly few players notice such offworlds. (On the other hand, a very exciting play I have seen just a few days ago was one player building an Engineering Lab Optimization Center next to Warehouses, a spot where an offworld would belong and fooling others into attacking that, while his real offworlds were hidden next to his base... so there are certain mindgames involved around it and the meta lives and evloves.)
But suppose holograms are not available on the black market. In that case you have to bite the bullet; saving up as many goons as you possibly can before moving into an offworld can be a great move(or bulding an offworld under a pre-existing goon squad). Remember though, if you cannot defend your offworld (either due to goons being too expensive or due to D-levels of debt) the offworld that you build while mutinies are available is money for your opponents and if there’s dynamites/freezes, simply cash that is locked away and is unusable for a while for you. It is a tricky matter to decide when you go for offworlds in such situations. A good choice in that case (imo) is to delay a bit and try to make a play on something else.
One offworld is great but two are better, right? That’s a difficult question to answer. When choosing to go for a second offworld you need to consider 2 things:
1. It takes 2 minutes (almost a whole day) for an offworld to get a launch and if the building price is greater than the launch profits (which is likely the case most of the time) – even more than that to repay the building costs and start making profits. That means, if the end of the game is near you might want to not waste that money.
2. You are an even bigger target with 2 offworlds than with 1.
Now let’s talk synergy. Your offworld might be a great tool to make a lot of money late-game but oftentimes it will not be enough, especially if other players move into OMs. So what are other great tools to support your offworld play?
Patents. Patents can do a variety of things and we will discuss Patent Lab in more detail shortly. But when it comes to offworlds your biggest friends are Thinking Machines. We were talking about how to defend your offworlds – that’s a great way, grab Thinking Machines in time and make sure to build your offworlds directly adjacent to your HQ (in fact it’s a really good habit to always place them there. And if you have spare goon squads lying around, defending tiles right next to HQ is a good idea, keeping in mind that that’s the place for your future Offworld). Now, if you have an Offworld near the neutral colony you won’t get any benefit, but if you have Thinking Machines you might not care to build it there. Keep in mind that mutinies at this point are far more likely to hit your opponents rather than you, since that way their value is double from what they’d get from you. I suppose I should also mention water engine using water instead of fuel for shipments but it’s generally a minor boon and nothing other than Thiking Machines really helps offworlds too much. Engineering Labs Optimization Centers on the other hand, can help a lot with keeping onworld prices under control. Say, food is the undisputably best send offworld, an Engi Lab Optimization Center can help you upgrade the production of food greatly, dealing with constant and extremely high pressure on it. What I like to do is to move into OCs before I even go for Offworlds.

Patent Lab (PL)

Patent Labs are probably the most exciting building to play with – all these cool things that change the rules of the game and do so for you exclusively! I will not go in detail over every patent, in fact, I will not go over every patent at all, just keep in mind that if you want to go for patents you need to answer 2 questions:
1. How are they going to make me more money
2. Can I do without them?
Keep in mind that not all the patents actually improve your financial stance too much. One in particular, that is very strong but by no means essential to have every game is Teleportation. Everyone loves Teleportation! However, teleportation effectively removes your shipping costs, making your debt situation easier, which is not something you always have to care about. It can be extremely important for scientists though. Also it can be useful for repurposing distant claims.
Because I am not just giving a rundown of advanced buildings and what they do but rather trying to work it into strategic advice for mid-late game, let’s look at how we can treat PL as an option for late game strategy. In my opinion there are 6 patents that you can race to, to expect to make a „play on”, in other words, 6 patents that you specifically build PL to go after:
1. Superconductor. A cheap and powerful patent, usually guaranteed to give you lots and lots of power, best served when power spiked. A good way to make lots and lots of power money or at least repay lots and lots of debt. Pretty straightforward. Oftentimes people found next to geotherms planning to superconduct them into not having to spend more than 1 claim on power. Perpetual motion is another great patent that solves power issues but usually superconductor is preferred.
2. Virtual Reality. Will be discussed later
3. Carbon Scrubbing. Pretty simple, if you can’t/don’t expect to procure decent amounts of carbon or if carbon spiked and you don’t want another scavenger to reap all the carbon-based harvests, scrubbing some carbon is a great idea. Being able to predict carbon problems, of course, is the true art here, keeping in mind colony demand (chems/electronics), scavengers in the game as well as the overall carbon presence on the map.
4. Slant Drilling. Obviously, crucial when there’s a certain resource shoratge on the map. Not much more to say, really, also can be ok for scientists to get value from adjacent different recources (like silicon+aluminium tiles next to each other. Together with Carbon Scrubbing provides for essentially free electronics).
5. Thinking machines. Discussed before, also keep in mind that the effect stacks with the scientific freeze-resistance, meaning you can get SUPER resistant to BM.
6. Teleportation. As mentioned before, best with scientists shipping their secondary building production across the maps. Teleporation allows you to avoid pirates and magnetic storms, can make your distant aluminium claims great for some actual production when aluminium is worth 1$ and you have 500 units of it at HQ lvl 5 (which means you should’ve turned it into solar panels a while ago anyway).
1 more patent I should mention, which is rarely the goal of your patenting but can be sometimes, is Cold Fusion. Bypassing energy costs by putting them on water can be a great tool, especially for scientists as you will be driving the price of water and making it harder for non-scientists to produce life support due to high water prices which won’t mater to you. That being said, I’m not saying that other patents are bad (Nanotech can be superb, especially for a robot, Financial Instruments depend on how much debt your competitors have but can be great etc.). What I mean here is that I probably wouldn’t build a patent lab just to try to get anything other than those 6 patents. I would definitely try to grab whatever is useful that I can have once I have a Lab working but I wouldn’t prioritize any other patents over these 6.
The next question is: when do you build a patent lab? First of all, you can build PL at HQ lvl2 but in 99.99% situations you shouldn’t. A patent lab is a big investment of cash and at HQ lvl 2 you’re lucky to make even some remotely repectable amounts of it. In fact (and I am not that great at managing my patents so you can treat me with a bit of mistrust) I wouldn’t recommend really going for a patent lab until HQ lvl 4. One more thing to remember about PL is that PLs tend to crank up the price of chemicals, because they consume a lot of them.

Engineering Lab Optimization Center (OC)

Upgrade Labs Optimization Centers are awesome. Everyone should build them more. That’s it.
In all seriousness though, Research Centers Optimization Centers are a superb tool to boost your production long term. Effectively you can treat them as an invisible free claim generator that gives you more and more production that is not necessarily obvious to your opponents. One of the benefits of optimizations is that moving into them early will often not be considered a particular threat by your opponents, meaning that an early (HQ lvl 3) Research Lab Optimization Center can give you an advantage your opponents won’t punish you for. As mentioned before, optimizing production is great for offworlds and in general – for high onworld demands. The trick becomes – how exactly would you determine whether the prices will be high onworld? Low primary resources usually indicate that prices will be pretty high (expensive silicon leads to expensive glass etc.), HQ choices will affect it a bit (Expansives with their many claims can certainly produce a lot of things, keeping prices lower, same goes with Scientists with their claim efficiency, whereas robots generally concenttrate on only a couple markets at a time, though they also don’t consume life support and glass, meaning that pressure on the markets will be smaller; presence of „Bribe Claim” on the BM certainly contributes to this situation as well.) Keep in mind, that in larger games pressure on prices is lower, meaning prices generally tend to rise over time no matter what, as crushing a market becomes harder.
In regards to the quick HQ lvl 3: keep in mind that the Production Improver Optimization Center, as every advanced building, is an investment, an expensive one and one that takes the longest to pay off. That means that if you plan on using it, it should be done as soon is it is plausible, but not necessarily possible. Thankfully, optimizations cost fewer chems than patents, meaning they’re not too expensive to utilize. However, if you’re short on cash you should probably delay your optimizing until you’ve sufficiently upgraded your HQ and are making decent money. Expensive chemicals can certainly delay it even more. On the other hand, moving into EL OC late in the game can be a slightly questionable (though not terrible decision) as you won’t have much time left in the game to make good use of the optimizations.
In regards to expensive chemicals – keep in mind that Production Efficiency Facilities Optimization Centers, once they start popping up, start spiking the chem price. It is often a good idea to start optimizing your chem production (and move into it obviously) before you do anything else, including improving your offworld send resources. Eventually, however, the price of chems will drop off at which point I like to switch one of my chem labs into another advanced building (Offworld?) although these are just minor details.
I suppose this question needs to be asked: how exactly should you use the Upgrade Building Optimization Center? Because the optimizations only yield 25% at a time while increasing in cost by 20 chems for each next one, it’s generally not a good idea to max out on each upgrade but rather to have 1-2 optimizations for each resource that you produce, 3 at most (unless you REALLY have to go deep into a resource).
As a general rule of thumb, going for the Super Industribuff Thingy Optimization Center is rarely a terrible decision, provided you time it well enough. It might not always be a must-have of course, but choosing to optimize can be a good habit to have.

Pleasure Dome (PD)

Very little should be said about the pleasure Dome. You put it down, it makes you cash, you forget about it. I suppose it’s not a bad idea to mention that (without getting into exact math) a PD makes more money the more habitat modules there are at the colony as well as based on the HQ types and levels in game, with Expansive contributing the most, Scavenger less, Science only a little and Robots none at all (something like 15/10/5/0$ per level? I forget. Math is hard). In larger games a PD tends to be a very solid decision, in a 4p FFA you should probably not bother too much with it unless there’s at least 1 of each HQ type. If you count Robot as 1, Scientific as 2 Scavenger as 3 and Expansive as 4, think of it as having the total value of HQs in game as 10 being the minimal value for PD viability. Of course, if no one builds a PD, it will usually be at least somewhat profitable because a single PD takes all the income on the map and each new one will redistribute it, cutting into active PD’s income. A tactic that some good players (although not myself) like to use with PD is build 2 of them instead of 1. You do get more money from entertainment this way, however you have to devote an extra claim to it, as well as double the power costs. The idea behind that move is that it makes it so much harder for other players to establish a good PD themselves and also shields your income somewhat because in order to stop you from making entertainment money your opponents have to attack both of your PDs. Also, if you really want to make a „play” on the Pleasure Dome, you should seriously consider Virtual Reality from the Patent Lab. Of course planning to make a lot of money on Pleasure Dome can only happen if other player’s HQ choices at the start of the game makes it possible.

Hacker Array (HA)

Some players who have played a plenty with me surely might think that Hacker is my favourite of the advanced buildings. But no, I really love the Pyramid of Efficiency Optimization Center, even though I certainly use the HA more than most players. Part of the reason why so many players avoid the hacker is simply because it’s just so hard to utilize, especially in larger games. In fact, in a 6 player game it’s hardly viable, 7-8 players – and you should just forget about its existence. However, it’s usually perfectly viable in 4 player games (and pretty awesome in 1v1 but that’s not something we’re talking about). You do need a number of things to work out though:
1. A whole pile of cash. Hacker is useless unless you already have money to turn into even more money.
2. Because you need all your money in cash in order to use the hacker well, you need to be certain that you won’t need to spend it. In other words, you need to be certain that you are going to be safe and don’t need to concentrate on defending your stock in case of an attack. I mentioned synergy between advanced buildings before, you can generally make all of the above mentioned four work in a single game, improving your position on all fronts. But the hacker array almost interferes with other buildings because it presents you with a dilemma – should you invest into other buildings (or upgrade HQ) or save it all for the upcoming shortages. Note that Hacking is usually a short-time benefit, unlike most other advanced buildings, even though it takes a while for the first hack to go through, so usually you won’t be able to win a game just based on the hacks and you need to support your economy with other buildings.
3. You need a monopoly. Simple as that, for maximum efficiency you want to make sure that no one will cut into your production and mess up with your hacks. Of course your monopoly does not have to be permanent, you just have to make sure that the resource you are hacking is not being produced by anyone except you for the time of the hack and stop anyone who would try to move into the hacked resource. This kind of hacking is of course not as efficient but still possible to do, as long as you can reliably jump between resources.
How exactly do you make money on hacking? Choose your resource, hack it. When the building finishes the hack, there will be a pause, long enough for you to scrape all your available cash and buy as much of the hacked resource as possible. Wait for the shortage to finish, sell out of the resource, enjoy your profits.
Of course the best way to hack something is if you really have a primary resource monopoly; this happens most often with silicon and thus, glass. Founding a robot in the general silicon area, getting control of most of it (provided there is little of it overall) and hacking glass first, then as others move heavily into it because the price becomes just too high, hack silicon, abusing the natural pressure on it. It’s a bit of a specific scenario but as a general idea, this is when the Hacker Array is super effective.
To make the long story short, only ever hack when you think you have some spare cash lying around and only ever hack resources that your competition is not producing (and you are certain, does not have a stockpile of). Avoid hacking power as that is very difficult to monopolize due to the amount of time it takes for a shortage to go through. All of the above is important because HA is the only building that affects everyone in the game rather than just you, meaning others can benefit from your hacks, leaving you with a dunce cap. Remember that while HA does not synergize too well with other advanced buildings, you should not avoid building them. Another word of warning is that monopolies are generally very hard to come by. If you invest all your early claims just towards securing a monopoly, your only way to progress forward is by selling out of these monopolized resources, killing the whole purpose of the monopoly by making these resources readily available for your opponents.
An important question to discuss, since HA affects everyone, is how one should respond to a hacker array built by another player. If you know someone else is hacking something, you can usually guess what exactly they are hacking (or get a spy if one is available) and thus try to move into that resource asap. That should discourage them from the hack and if they are paying attention they will move into a different hack, meaning at least that you are slowing them down and making their hacker extremely difficult to use. Another idea would be to move into a HA yourself and simply surplus the resource they are hacking. In fact, if the hack is on the monopolized resource, surplusing is probably the only correct response, and the sooner you do it, the better. Furthermore, as you could have noticed by now, when I say „hacking” what I really meaning is creating a shortage, because making surpluses is hardly ever worth the time since all it does is hurt your opponents a little rather than improve your situation. The above-mentioned surplus on someone else’s monopoly is the only reasonable case that I can think of when surpluses are efficient (that and maybe a rare case of surplusing a resource you don’t produce and others do that simply spikes in price due to offworlds or something). Of course conventional ways of responding to an advanced building such as freezing, blowing it up etc. are perfectly viable as well.

Neutral Colony

One last thing I wish to point out is in regards to the building placement. Usually, placing advanced buildings directly next to your HQ is preferable as I had pointed out due to simply the possibility of Thinking Machines. If you are certain you won’t have TM and there are holograms you might consider hiding them elsewhere as right next to your HQ is the first place your opponents will expect you to hide them. However, as you should know, different modules at the neutral colony provide adjacency bonuses to your advanced buildings:
Habitats support Pleasure Domes
Laboratories support Patent Labs
Offices support Hacker Arrays
Warehouses support Offworld Markets
Machine Shops support Engineering Labs Optimization Centers.
So, shouldn’t you always build next to the neutral colony? Well, here’s why it’s a no:
A specific black market combination exists that can discourage you from doing so. A dynamite can easily blow a building in the center of the map and since repair drones travel at only half the speed of a normal ship it makes it very long until your building gets repaired and fully functional again (to potentially get blown up immediately again). However, magnetic storms can make it even worse as they also remove repair drones. Of course the drone will immediately respawn for free and start flying again but it is easy to get your offworld locked out of the game for several minutes especially if you’re dealing with a scav (believe me, I speak from painful expereince). And as we’ve discussed before, a non-operational OM (or any other advanced building) is a straight up waste of cash. Also, keep in mind that building something so far away from your base takes a long time even without sabotage and potentially leaves you with a not-so-useful tile once the specific task you built it for is done. In other words:
Patent Labs and Hacker Arrays are not worth building next to the colony since travel time and vulnerability usually outweigh the benefits and these 2 buildings are the ones you might want to scrap for something else eventually. Only exception is a patent lab that is also next to habitats, which can be transitioned into a PD. Whereas a boost for HA is generally not that important in the first place. Furthermore, keeping a HA late in the game becomes increasingly difficult as players get bought out and subsidiary AI kicks in. The AI will make sure to be producing the most expensive resource, reacting relatively quickly to most of your market manipulations, making a Hacker increasingly difficult to use.
Offworld Markets can oftentimes be worth it, especially if you can hologram them and shield from attacks because the actual bonuses in the form of faster launches are immense.
A Pleasure Dome should almost always be next to as many habitats as possible, since you will never want to transition it and nowadays the Domes aren’t percieved as massive targets anyway, unless they really do make huge piles of cash... in which case others will simply build their own Domes and even it out.
An Engilab Center Optimization Center, however, is a bit more interesting. Usually it is a great idea to build it next to the neutral colony because you will want to keep it running for a while and it is a low-priority target, as mentioned before. Besides, it lets you get a lot of value from just one Upgrade Researcher Optimization Center (and yes, otherwise it’s often a great idea to build 2 or even 3, though 3 to me is a little much). As such Upgradatron Altars Optimization Centers should be built next to the colony... yet unlike Pleasure Domes it’s usually not a crime not to do so since building them next to HQ means you can start reaping benefits immediately (and potentially scrap the building) even if it’s going to be weaker than a Neutral Colony Optimization Center (YES! Nailed it! Finally!) in the long run.

Closing Thoughts

Using advanced buildings is how you will most likely win games. So, do so. Indeed, an important aspect of using advanced buildings is actually using them. A lot of players, even amazing ones, forget to keep their buildings running 100% of the time which is usually a good idea. Obviously, PDs do work all the time, for OMs you can queue up auto-launches (by shift-clicking on a send-resource, though keep in mind that it’s pretty important to check up on it and see if there’s a better send). PLs, since the number of patents is limited, should be running at all times provided you have the money to support it. Optimizations are easy to forget about, but it is also very important to keep them going in order to get maximum value from those buildings. It is even trickier since it’s not a great idea to queue up three-four or even more optimizations, as it’s a large investment into chems, that might be getting produced and losing in price. Hacker array is somehow the trickiest to keep running though. Since once a shortage hack goes through the first thing to do is to buy into that resource, people tend to forget to queue up another hack (or maybe it’s a problem only I have?). This is especially true as you don’t want to queue up a bunch of hacks all at once because by the time they’re going to happen, market situation might change dramatically. Forgetting to use the HA completely is much more... silly though and less likely if you’re banking on making tons of money from it, unlike optimizations which mostly sit there, working quietly towards more efficient future.
The final point that I would like to make in this guide is in regards to possibly the hardest topic in OTC – „diplomacy” and deciding who to attack and when. You will notice eventually, while playing MP games, that often, the player who wins the game, is the player who had been attacked the least. They were probably sitting quietly in their corner, avoiding all the black market effects that were flying around, making money, optimizing production, building their offworlds and whatnot, securing their stock etc. If that is the case, you have done a bad job stopping them. And that’s when advanced buildings kick in. There are 4 measures of „success” in OTC, that help you decide who is doing well and just how well they are doing. These 4 are: HQ levels/claim count, their cash on hand, the stocks they own in their/other companies and finally, their advanced buildings. It’s difficult perhaps to calculate the exact formula of „success”, but it’s some combination of the above. Just remember that advanced buildings can be just as important as the cash; if 2 players have similar amounts of cash and stock but one of them had been running optimizations and patents (and owns Thinking Machines for example) it should be fairly obvious who you need to gang up on.
With that, I hope that this lengthy writeup was of any use for you, and I hope to see you beating me ingame sometime soon!

[iPlayFerFun]

@Yerand Great guide! It helped me learn how to be more effective with my advanced buildings, an interesting scav strat to use or avoid and the true purpose of the Hacker Array! Thanks!

[some moron]

Where is the Almanac? Can't find it in the menus...

[疑似拼好饭中毒前的幻想.]

Thank you

[[CPC] Pyrrhus]

Very interesting, ty ! Now i'll try to build the OC before the very expensive OM.

[Smitty]

Thank you, that was really useful!