The first thing to understand is that all the changes in prices of everything are determined by supply and demand. Roughly speaking, every 10 units of something bought will raise the price by $1. (Also, each click of the buy/sell buttons will purchase/sell 10 units)



The first place that demand comes from is the players. They will buy materials they need to upgrade their HQ, build buildings, and the inputs to the buildings (such as water and power to make food). Players can also buy and sell resources to stockpile for later or to try to make money on speculation (buying resources they expect will go up in price). The players HQs' (except level 1 HQs) require some food, oxygen, and water, except for robotic HQs which don't require any life support. Players also use fuel when transporting resources, except robotic HQs which use power instead of fuel.

Another place demand comes from is the colony. Mouseover the colony to see what it demands. It buys that amount of goods each second. Each day in the game is 148 seconds. So if the colony is buying 1 unit of something every second, it will raise the price by about $15 each day. In most game modes, the colony will grow randomly on its own. In the campaign mode of the game, the colony grows by players buying the colony structures. In either mode, the colony will have a greater effect on the game as the game progresses.

The last place demand comes from is random shortages and surpluses, or players using a hacker array to create shortages and surpluses. Shortages and surpluses generate additional demand or supply each second for some amount of time.



This all means that the first thing in high demand early in the game will be the things players need a lot of to upgrade their HQs. These are Aluminum, Steel (or carbon for Scavenger HQs), and the iron needed for the steel mills. As the colony grows and HQs are upgraded, demand for other things will start to rise too.

Selling a lot of something that is not in demand will cause the price to keep dropping and lower your profit over time. But if something starts the game with a very high price but is not in demand, you may be able to still make a good profit producing it right at the start and then use the profits to buy the materials you need to upgrade your HQ.



Prices of base materials (water, iron, etc.) will tend to be more volatile (faster changing) than prices of the more advanced goods. This is because it is easy to both use a lot of the base materials (causing a price increase), as well as to produce a lot of them (cause a price drop), compared to the resources produced in factories. For example, at default game settings, a single mine/quarry/pump can produce 2 units per second with a level 3 resource (and more if you have adjacency bonuses). And most factories will use 1 whole unit of the resource each second.

On the other hand, a single factory will usually only produce about half a unit of the advanced resources. Or in the case of electronics, a single factory only produces 0.25 of electronics each second.

What this means is that it takes a lot of factories to make a big change in prices of advance resources, but the simple base resources can change in price very quickly as supply and demand change. This is a big reason why having a lot of electronics factories will only very slowly change the prices.

So don't panic when the price of base resources you are producing plummet. When the prices of those base resources aren't worth selling at, you can usually just stockpile them and wait for them to be in demand again.

You begin the game with a handful of resources. Sell the ones you don't need to upgrade your HQ (sometimes an exception can be made if the price is really low, like 10 or below). Even if you need something, like aluminum, but you have more than you need to upgrade the HQ, sell the extra so that you can buy the other things needed to upgrade. You can often upgrade your HQ immediately at the start just by selling your extras.

Generally, you should always be selling what you don't need. An exception would be when you expect the price of something to rise, and you know that selling it now would not give you enough money to complete your HQ upgrade. In that case, you would benefit from holding onto it longer, or even buying more of it if you can. Even if you do need something, but you expect the price to fall, you should sell it now and buy it later when needed.

Don't be afraid to sell things! Your stockpiles of resources should be there because you purposefully chose to invest in them. If your stockpiles are there just because you have incoming resources and haven't yet decided what to do with them, in most cases you should sell them before someone else sells theirs and lowers the price. You can set resources to auto-sell by holding ctrl + shift and clicking the sell button for the resource. You should usually do this for anything you are producing for profit, unless you have a specific reason in mind about why you shouldn't.


As much as possible, build identical structures in groups, ideally in a triangle of 3, but 2 isn't bad. This gives you adjacency bonuses.

Not only do adjacency bonuses allow you to produce more with fewer tiles, it also does it cheaper.

2 identical structures next to each other produce as much as 3 individual structures, but with the input costs of just 2 structures. That's a 33% cost reduction, and 50% greater output compared to 2 separate structures.

3 identical structures in a triangle produce as much as 5.25 individual structures, but with the input costs of just 3 structures. That's a 43% cost reduction, and 75% greater output compared to 3 separate structures.

Larger groups of structures provide slightly more efficiency, but the efficiency gains fall off greatly compared to the triangle. 4 structures in an ideal diamond formation produce as much as 7.2 individual structures, but with the input costs of just 4 structures. That's a 44.5% cost reduction, and 80% greater output compared to 4 separate structures. As you can see, having 4 structures together isn't much more efficient than just have 3.

Note that Robotic HQs structures also get adjacency bonuses from being next to any structure that produces something they use as an input. So for example, a greenhouse would get adjacency bonuses from being next to structures that produce power, water, or other greenhouses. This makes it easier for robotic HQs to diversify their production more without giving up adjacency bonuses.

It's often better to build 3 or 2 structures together even if you produce more than you ideally need. Just stockpile or sell the excess production. If your stockpile gets high, you can just change all the structures to something else at one time.



Anytime you have spare money or extra resources, it's usually a good idea to buy up the resources you expect will go up in price (because demand is higher than supply), while selling the resources you think will decline in value or won't change much. At the beginning of the game, it is usually a good idea to buy up all the aluminum (and steel) you can unless someone is really overproducing it. You shouldn't wait until you have enough to upgrade your HQ. You should get what you can now, before the prices rise as everyone is trying to get enough for the first HQ upgrade. It doesn't matter if you need the resource or not, just buy it as an investment you can make money on.

Similarly, you should buy up really underpriced resources that are so low that no competitors would willingly keep producing at that price. The price can only really go up at that point, as the producers would be changing production at such a low price.



Many people seem to think the only way to play properly is to produce everything you need yourself, especially at the start of games. They assume that since you need a lot of steel and aluminum to upgrade your HQ, you need to produce as much of these yourself as you can. But in my games, I rarely have made both of these things. I usually find it's better to produce one thing more efficiently (especially if it is not convenient for the other competitors and so I have a competitive advantage), then sell the excess that I produce so that I can buy what I'm not producing but need. For example, if iron is rare, I'll produce just the iron efficiently, and buy the steel I need.

Similarly, people often think you need to produce your own base resources before start using it in a factory, such as producing your own water before you produce food. But this is often not optimal. You generally should just produce what you can produce more effectively and efficiently than others can. (Look up the economic term "Comparative Advantage" if you want to learn more about this concept in the real world.)



Imagine a map where there is a lot of water nodes (so a monopoly is not possible), they are far away from you but near the other corporations, and (in the campaign mode) you do not produce water efficiently (you only have 1 engineer). You do NOT want to produce your own water in this situation. It'd be an inefficient use of your claims. But maybe you have an efficient greenhouse and want to produce food, so need the water. What can you do?

It is very possible to encourage competitors to produce the water you need. Just drive up the price of water by buying up a stockpile of water. Then, when enough competitors start building water pumps because of the high profits, you can sell off your stockpile (basically getting a refund on the expensive water you were holding) and then start buying the water at the low price that stays low because of the all the water being produced by the other corporations.

Even if you don't drive up the price of the water to encourage the competitors to produce water, you shouldn't need to worry about water prices getting too high, since there are plenty of water nodes available, and the other corporations are interested in their own profits so they will produce the water if it seems like a good profitable option. You can focus on using your claims for things that you have an advantage in producing.

One of the best ways to get huge profits is to get yourself a monopoly so that nobody can compete with you.



If one of the base resources nodes are quite rare on a map, you may be able to claim all of them yourself. This will allow you to basically set the price of the resource by how much you choose to sell or not sell.

Sometimes you can get more claims quickly at the beginning of the map by founding your HQ on top of many valuable resources so that you can immediately sell those resources to get the money needed to immediately upgrade to HQ level 2.

You can also found your HQ on top of some of the nodes of the resource you want to dominate so that there are less nodes you need to claim to get your monopoly.

You don't need to get all of the nodes to get most of the advantages of a monopoly, but a complete monopoly is ideal.

If you don't have a complete monopoly, you can help improve your dominance by using the black market on the structures that are competing with your monopoly. The best option is using underground dynamite to destroy the resource nodes of competitors, but other kinds of sabotage help too.



New players make the mistake of selling everything they produce regardless of the price. When you have a monopoly, you want prices of the resource to be high. You can wait for the price to rise before selling any, or better yet, you can force the price up instantly by buying up stockpiles of the resource. Or keep the price low to entice other competitors to build factories that use the resource, then jack the price up once they start using your resource.

Also, with a monopoly, it is better to not produce the products that use the resource you have a monopoly on. For example, if you have a monopoly on water, you are much better off if the other corporations run the greenhouses and electrolysis reactors. Then you can basically set the price on water so that you get most of the profit, while the greenhouses and electrolysis reactors make just a small profit (due to the high cost of the water they need). In fact, you can even buy up the food and fuel/oxygen to raise the prices of those further, allowing you to raise your water prices more, maximizing profit and giving you a stockpile of valuable goods you can sell later when needed for something.

If you do produce the final product, you are basically taking away your monopoly advantage, and the only benefit you get is that other competitors will be unlikely to compete with you because of the high price of the base resource.



If you use the Hacker Array to raise the price of the base resource you produce, you will be able to sell a lot more of the resource and still be able to maintain the same price.

However, a more efficient way to be able to sell more of your resource at a higher price is to raise the price of the factory-produced resource that uses your resource as an input. For example, imagine that a shortage will cause 250 units of additional demand. If you have a monopoly on silicon, causing a shortage of glass will cause 250 units of glass to be "bought" from the market, but it takes 2 units of silicon to make 1 unit of glass. So doing this is similar to causing 2 shortages of silicon, and you will be able to raise your prices more. This works especially well if you are also buying up stockpiles of the glass, since it raises the value of your stockpile.



You can also get a "soft" monopoly just by being the main provider of a resource at a reasonable price so that other competitors won't bother to produce that resource themselves. This will allow you to take advantage later in the game by pushing up the prices after the other corporations have already used up all of their claims and so will have difficulty changing their setup to produce what you have the monopoly on.

If the resource nodes for a resource are all far from the other competitors' HQs, but you have some close to you, you have a competitive advantage. You can allow the price to be a bit higher than normal, and competitors will be reluctant to produce that resource themselves since the transport costs may be high.

In the campaign, it's good to try to get a soft monopoly on the resources you are good at producing. Selling something you produce efficiently usually gives you better profits, so ideally you want to be the only one providing that product.



The following strategy is best done with normal resources which can stockpiled, but it can even be done with power (which cannot be stockpiled). For example, Reni-6, the Robotic HQ character in the campaign, is very good at producing power because he starts with the superconductor patent which gives 100% power production to buildings connected to the HQ. With a triangle of solar panels or wind turbines (especially if he has additional engineers), he can produce all the power needed for everyone on the map. Because he can produce power so efficiently, he can try to make sure he is the main producer of power because he will earn a great profit on power, but the other corporations will only produce power based on how profitable it is for them. If the price for power remains reasonable, the other corps will choose more profitable options (for them) to produce, allowing Reni to maximize his sales of power. Then late in the game, Reni can cause a real headache for the other corps by turning off all his power production in order to quickly jack up the price of power to 5x or more of the normal price, causing them to have to invest resources into their own power production, while Reni still benefits the most from the high prices when he turns his power production back on.

This works even better with resources that can be stockpiled. For example, if you are the main producer of food and you start to drive the price of food down, you can instead start to stockpile the food and allow the price to rise until competitors start producing their own food. You can then sell off your stockpiles for a great profit and switch production, leaving the competitors in a market they thought would be much more profitable than it actually is.