Moving through the Mid-game: a Guide

For the purposes of this guide, the mid-game is defined as the period between getting power online around HQ level 3 and the point where full-price buyouts become realistic. This guide is intended for intermediate-to-advanced players who have a good grasp on moving through the early HQ levels but don't necessarily know the best way to move through to the late-game. The advice here is mainly based on 4-player FFA, but a lot of this can be translated to other game sizes, with aggression generally being even more viable in larger games and securing yourself being more important in smaller ones.

So you've managed to keep up through the first 3 HQ levels, survive the inevitable power price spike, and have started to push towards HQ level 4. What now? Everyone's favorite answer: it depends. I'll try to walk through various options you'll have in the mid-game and when and why you might go for any one of them. The options are listed in roughly the order you should consider them. Some options are fairly equal, and there are situations which will make some options much more worthwhile to consider than they normally would be. Finally, these options are not mutually exclusive; you'll often want to do parts or all of several of the options, though you still do need to prioritize.

=The Pleasure Dome= By itself, the Pleasure Dome isn't generally an important enough building to base a strategy around, but it can be an effective complement to any strategy under the right conditions. Keep in mind how Pleasure Dome income scales (with HQ types and levels, colony size, habitats, and number of Pleasure Domes built) and if you build reasonably strong Pleasure Domes, they can be a strong source of income in the short run and the long run. You do need to be mindful that the high power costs of the Pleasure Dome do not drive you into large amounts of debt and there are times where the onworld prices are high enough to make Pleasure Domes relatively bad, especially given any costs of defending them from sabotage.

As a longer-term play, you could pursue Virtual Reality or build multiple Pleasure Domes to deter opponents from building their own. A second Pleasure Dome only adds 33% to your total Pleasure Dome income, however, while doubling your power costs. Having two Pleasure Domes does make it much more difficult for your opponents to sabotage all your Pleasure Dome income, though, so it can be well worth the second claim, especially if you get Perpetual Motion and Virtual Reality. It is worth noting that the introduction of auctions for claims next to the colony and for pre-built Pleasure Domes can increase competition for Pleasure Dome income, so you may not want to commit too much into such a play.

=You don't have a choice= Sometimes you only have one viable way forward, which makes your mid-game choices easy to make. Most often, this will be the case on difficult maps where your founding location or the resource distribution will force you to try to get Slant Drilling or Teleportation if you want to have a chance at winning. Examples: you're a non-Robotic faction and you only have access to a single water tile with no adjacency, you're a scavenger with very weak carbon (due to nukes or poor adjacency), you're consuming over 2.5 Fuel or Power/sec on freighters, or you're a scientist shipping valuable resources long distances.

You may still be able to survive and win without the key patent, but it'll be much more difficult. In this case, you're probably best off rushing the patent lab, defending it as much as possible, and hoping. There are likely other ways to approach a given situation, but these situations shouldn't come up too often (if they do, you may want to reconsider your founding choices) and they're too situation-dependent to cover here.

=Rushing stock= Picking up a subsidiary in the mid-game using a majority buyout can be a very powerful move. Not only does it secure a future source of steady income, but the extra stock owned increases your own stock price significantly. Knocking out opponents also removes potential future sources of sabotage.

If you're in a position to rush opponents' stock, or if you want to get into that position, the Hacker Array can help you finish the job. The Using the Hacker Array section of that wiki page explains how you might exploit a Hacker Array to increase earn money, and that bit of extra income can be the difference between finishing a buyout in time or failing to. There is a significant time and capital investment needed for the Hacker Array (40 seconds to construct, 60 seconds for a shortage to start, 20 seconds for the shortage to finish), so it may not always be appropriate or useful at this stage of the game.

Choosing a target
The single most important factor to consider when choosing a target to buy is whether you can actually complete the buy. Failing to complete a buy generally means that you have to sell your opponent's stock, which loses money due to how selling stock works. You do, however, want to sell stock if you cannot complete the buy because the money invested in stock is non-productive.

If you have multiple potential targets that you can safely buy, there are various approaches you can take:
 * Attacking your most dangerous opponent - if you can safely buy out your most dangerous opponent, you can put yourself in a much stronger position to eventually win the game. Identifying your most dangerous opponent is not always straightforward; while it will often be the one furthest ahead in HQ level, having a large number of patents (or just a single key patent like Thinking Machines) or optimizations, or having a strong monopoly or near-monopoly on a resource can also make an opponent very dangerous.
 * Buying your most potentially profitable opponent - this will often be very similar to attacking your most dangerous opponent, though short-term profits can make them different. If the power price is very high and an opponent has a lot of power generation, for example, then buying them out will generate a lot of money in the short-term, since that opponent's debt instantly disappears on buyout. Good Pleasure Domes or Offworld Markets are also important buildings to look for (though rarely present at this stage of the game), as well as strong regular production.
 * Buying a cheap opponent - buying a cheap opponent will get you to a buyout the quickest and leave you with the most cash leftover to do other things with. Perhaps as importantly, opponents who are cheap because of high debt will provide the same stock price boost as a more expensive opponent.
 * Buying an opponent whose production will complement yours - this strategy is somewhat less viable than it used to be since subsidiary AIs are more likely to transition buildings en masse than to leave all profitable buildings around, but you can sometimes cover holes in your production by buying out opponents. Because subsidiaries sell all of their production continuously, a subsidiary producing a large surplus of a certain resource you lack (often power, but possibly also something like iron) can cover your costs for those resources. Unlike paying $100 for iron when only your opponents are making iron, you can expect some of the higher input costs to come back to you in the form of dividend revenue. Obviously opponents can still make larger profits through good use of stockpiles and other resource manipulation, so you shouldn't rely heavily on this strategy, but it can be useful.

Other concerns
If you have enough of a lead on your opponent, you can make a buyout more profitable by buying up some of your own stock beforehand. You can likely get a sense of how this works by watching top-ranked daily challenge replays, where players will often exploit this mechanic to multiply their investment in their own stock. The idea is that buying into your own stock first allows you to own the stock while it's still relatively cheap (because you do not yet have the stock price boost from the stock owned modifier). Whether you keep the stock you buy to keep yourself defended or sell it for a profit after completing a buy, there's a lot to be gained. If you do not have enough money to buy your own stock and your opponent's, though, you should prioritize completing the buyout over making the most profit possible from the buyout.

The AI will be adjusted in the coming days to put a greater emphasis on construction costs, so some of the over-the-top building transitions we see from subsidiary AIs may no longer occur. In the meantime, if Power has any value, subsidiaries will often build many Solar Panels or Wind Turbines, so having a stockpile of Silicon or Carbon can be very profitable, assuming no one else has the same idea.

Reacting to other players' aggression
If other players have started buying your stock, you _need_ to defend yourself. Even if the aggressor doesn't have enough money to buy you alone, other players can jump in to push for the majority buyout. There are some cases where it'll make more sense to race your opponent to a majority buy, but you have to be sure that you're going to win the race and that no one will make you lose the race.

If other players are just sitting on a lot of money but not buying your stock (around 65%+ from a single player or 50%+ from 2 or more players, or less, depending on how quickly everyone is making money and how many other players there are), you need to be very wary of making large investments (Offworld Markets, HQ upgrades) and maybe even more middling investments (patents). The usual move here would just be to secure yourself from a majority buy. Protecting yourself beyond this point is generally unnecessary at this point; none of your opponents should be able to accumulate the 200k+ needed to complete a full in a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes buying up to 3 or 4 stocks owned is sufficient to deter aggression and normally the situation will resolve reasonably quickly because your opponents will either choose a target or invest in something.

If an opponent starts to buy into another opponent, there are situations where it would be a good idea to help push for the majority buyout and some where you want to avoid it at all costs. In general, I would avoid joining in on majority buyouts except in two situations: if the target is the clear leader or if the target is very heavily in debt (D bond rating). The rationale for knocking out the clear leader is fairly obvious: getting rid of the clear leader. Joining in on the buyout also prevents a single player from gaining a large advantage off of it; the subsidiary will likely be fairly profitable, so grabbing a larger share of that dividend income can be important. If the target is heavily in debt, you will be able to purchase stock in them cheaply and, because debt is erased once a player is bought out, will receive a large stock price boost once the buyout is completed. That sort of cheap investment is nearly always worthwhile and, again, joining in on such a buy prevents an opponent from gaining the full advantage from it.

=Pushing forward= If HQ upgrades are very cheap or if there are some very lucrative markets to get into, sometimes just upgrading into more claims and delaying other decisions can be your best option. Do make sure to check that you can't easily be majority bought if you upgrade, though. Expanding into lots of power or securing the last bits of a primary resource, in particular, can be very strong decisions if other players are not producing enough and are driving prices up. Paying attention to the trajectory of prices and opponents' production/consumption is very important in general, but especially if you're going to commit heavily into a market with this sort of move.

=Securing yourself and paying debt= If you cannot end the game with a stock rush, you'll have to plan for the long game. The most important part of setting up for the long game is to defend yourself from a majority buyout by owning 5 stock in yourself. Keep in mind, though, that money spent defending yourself is money not spent investing in profitable ventures. The advice in the 'Reacting to other players' aggression' section above can be a useful guideline for when to defend yourself, and you can typically continue building your own company until those types of threats arise. Once you do have good late-game income secured, however, it is nearly always a good idea to completely defend yourself by buying all your available stock.

There are times when you'll want to defend yourself before a tangible threat appears, namely when you have a large amount of debt. If you were late to the power price spike, you bid too much on too many auctions, or if life support costs got out of hand, you may find yourself in a unsustainable amount of debt for this part of the game. You may be able to get away with debt in the C-D bond range if all your opponents are similarly struggling with debt or if Cook the Books is available, but chances are you'll have to deal with it in the mid-game, before interest ticks overwhelm you. Moving forward, if you do not deal with debt, you'll lose access to the Black Market, which can be especially important as Offworld Markets and other power late-game production comes into play, and your stock price will be very low, making you a high-priority target, especially if you get your own powerful late-game production online. However, rather than simply immediately paying debt, you can take advantage of your lower stock price by buying your own stock first.

Ideally, you'll want your debt to hover in the A-B bond range, which has much more manageable 8-12% interest payments than the 20-30% of the C-D range. You need not be paying interest off continually when trying to control your debt; it is only important that you reduce your debt to below the relevant threshold before interest is calculated at 0:00.

=HQ level 4 Offworld Market= Moving into an Offworld Market on HQ level 4 can be a very strong move because it sets up a strong source of income sooner and, if holograms are available, it often comes at a time when players won't be looking for offworlds. The most important factor in deciding if this is a viable move are the profits available offworld relative to onworld, of course. If potential offworld profits are decent but onworld profits are barely available or if offworld profits are stellar but onworld profits are only decent, then you should strongly consider moving into an Offworld Market.

The Black Market is the other important consideration when deciding whether to building an early Offworld Market. As mentioned above, Holograms can be very effective for hiding early Offworld Markets. Dynamite not only stops the Offworld Market from being profitable, but also forces you to incur additional costs to being profiting. Circuit Overloads and Network Viruses are not often used in games, so they serve as cheap, effective "goon poppers" because their effects would not be as damaging as an EMP's or Power Surge's if they're used against you after getting caught by a Goon Squad. Mutinies can also make owning an early Offworld Market undesirable; if your Offworld Market is discovered, then you might expect multiple opponents to fight with you for control of what is likely the most profitable building on the map. The presence of these tools doesn't automatically make an early Offworld Market non-viable (luckily, since one of either Dynamite or Mutiny will always be available), but they do mean that it will be a much riskier move, and you should prepare to defend your Offworld Market by pre-buying an extra Goon Squad (which is generally not cost-effective with goon poppers available) or going for Thinking Machines.

=Patents and the long game= Sometimes, you're set up in a fairly strong position but have no clear targets to attack and no reason to go for an Offworld Market immediately. In this case, setting yourself up for strong late-game production through research can be key. Making moves to keep input costs under control (Perpetual Motion or Carbon Scrubbing on the demand side, optimizations or Slant Drilling on the supply side, for example) can be useful, as can preparing for Offworld Markets with Thinking Machines. Yerand's Advanced Guide to Advanced Buildings goes over how to use advanced buildings for the late-game in greater detail.

=Playing around your relative position= While all of the options explored here can be useful whether you're ahead or behind, there are situations which make some of them much weaker.

Long-term moves can also be an excellent way to catch up in a game where you're behind. While long-term investments can be costly, if you do manage to defend yourself and keep a steady stream of sabotage on the leaders, they can pay off nicely. If the leader already has strong long-term investments in place, however, you may need to pursue a more aggressive approach by moving for earlier Offworld Markets and attacking his stock (though you'll need to bail out of his stock if no other players help you). Conversely, if you're the leader but other players are gaining strong long-term investments, you may want to be more aggressive against them. These situations vary greatly from game to game, though, and as such fall outside of the scope of this guide.

Over time, as you get a better grasp of how to play out the mid-game, late-game strategy should become more clear as well, since it is heavily dependent on your mid-game actions. Until then, feel free to experiment with different strategies in the mid-game, which is the most open and flexible part of the game, but do try to keep the principles outlined in this guide in mind.