Got the replay, it worked fine - I'll have a look now:
Found: your found is a little dicey. Macro-wise it's fine - you have most of what you'll need early game, but I definitely wouldn't have founded early with that. The bigger issue, though, is your base positioning and HQ1 claims. You only have one carbon tile (and it's remote!) and the two aluminum tiles aren't making enough money to get you to HQ2 quickly enough. Better would have been to found next to the carbon (which also saves on fuel costs, because of the volumes of carbon you'll be shipping in eventually).
HQ2: 3 carbon claims probably too much. It is nice that you'll get very quick upgrades indeed, with the cheap glass and double aluminum, so it's perhaps defensible. I'd have preferred to see a pair of farms instead of the third carbon, though - you rightly identified food as the market to go into, and by committing that extra tile to it you're producing three times as much. (Also side note: you're not making much money at all from the food, because some of it is going toward servicing your debt.)
Oh but then you didn't supply the farm with water!
Go into your options settings and turn auto-supply on. This is very important.
Adrenaline boost on the carbon was wholly unnecessary - 7/sec is more than enough. By all means buy it, but sit on it instead.
HQ3: Double water claim is probably ok - but now you're looking at large shipping costs. It's fine if you can get the fuel online later in the game, but with limited claims you may not be able to consistently. This is where the third carbon claim will hurt in the long term. Also you should be building a second farm as soon as you can - it's absolutely necessary for income at this point. I think it's a mistake to take the geotherm instead - although another option would be to turn your medium aluminum tile into a farm. That farm is now doing nothing to give you cash, as you're consuming 0.6 food/sec and only producing 0.5. Also fuel is now starting to seriously climb; HQ4 will need to be triple reactors, probably. Even that might be too late.
You're stalling out a little here because you don't have access to cash, and that's because you're overproducing both carbon and aluminum. Those two extra claims that you spent on those resources could be used to turn your single farm into a triangle, which would be very profitable right now.
HQ4: You scrap the farm and go into triple reactors. You need to be in food as well, although there's a dust storm on the way so it's probably ok for now. Instead you build a patent lab, which you definitely can't afford. And an optimisation centre too! That's definitely a mistake - you're not producing enough stuff to really make that pay off. Finally you scrap the second aluminum mine for a reactor, which is a good move.
Going teleportation is fine, and is probably the best patent you could have gone for first, given your shipping costs. But notice that had you founded right next to the carbon, you'd have had much less to ship in the first place. (You'd also have been closer to the water in the north east.) A lot of new players overrate teleportation for this reason - it makes up for positioning errors, and has a lot of value in non-ideal found locations.
Because you went into the patent lab and teleportation, though, you're really struggling for the HQ5 upgrade. You'd have had it much much sooner without those two investments.
PD auction for $24k is very questionable - with the price of power so high that's not going to pay off for a while, and your debt climbed into worrying territory at $94k with that purchase. It's particularly worrying as food is so expensive and you don't have the claims to commit to it until you hit 5 - and you also will need to cover your power as well.
You had the upgrade for a long time before you hit the button, had you sold your fuel and oxygen. There was some value in keeping the price high, but your first priority should have been the HQ5 upgrade. And you're manually paying debt here, which is a huge error - with that money you could have upgraded and gone into food and power, which would have kept your debt in check and put you in a strong position.
HQ5: You're still holding a large stockpile of fuel even as the price crashes. This is a major error - you should have sold down and used the money to invest a while ago.
Too soon for an Offworld! You have major problems to address before then. Your debt is now up at $150k, which is unsustainably high - at that level it's usually urgent to pay that off. What you should be doing is going into power and food, which are a) both very high and b) are the sources of your debt. The Offworld is an investment you certainly can't afford right now.
And I hadn't noticed that you replaced the carbon with reactors. This is another mistake, I'm afraid - you were already producing enough fuel to crash the price with the four reactors + optimisation. Now that you have seven, that fuel is going to be worthless almost immediately. Plus, you now need the carbon!
You're being bought into on the stock market too because of your debt. The AI will always go after someone in D debt, so this is expected. You could easily defend yourself though.
Replacing the reactors with three glass and one carbon. You need more carbon than that! Two carbon tiles is usually enough for a scavenger through the whole game, assuming at least one of them is at least medium. Also the glass is very profitable, but you don't have the silicon to support it, which means you're effectively giving money to whoever is producing silicon (Nekrasov, in this case). It's not a sustainable market either, because not enough silicon is being produced globally, and the price will climb as a consequence. So you'll have to transition those buildings again very soon.
In response to the above, you've taken two silicon tiles in the northeast, which on one level is really sensible and a good way to address that problem. On the other hand, that's *another* remote claim that you're not going to be able to use for production. You're scavenger and there are no claims on the black market, which makes claims in general very hard to come by this game.
You didn't goon your Offworld, so it got blown up - always goon offworlds! Goons were 6k, so really no excuse here. (You were in D debt, but you could easily have paid off enough debt to get out and buy the goon. Given the cost of the OW getting blown up, you definitely should have done this.)
You took a very unnecessary D debt tick at the end of Sol 4, which honestly might have killed you. Although instead of servicing the debt, another option here was to kill Nekrasov. He has a lot of your stock, and you'll get the stock back if you can buy him out. He's pretty cheap, and you almost have the cash right now.
$36k for Slant feels like too much. You're only using it on the one tile, the medium water (which is now high). Although it would be extremely useful if you were in a second carbon tile, which you really should be!
The four reactors are now losing you money, even though they say they're profitable. You have almost 700 fuel, and could crash the price any time you wanted - the excess you're producing now is effectively worth $1, and the input is expensive water. They're only useful for oxygen, which is the launch - but honestly they'd be much better off as farms instead, especially as you can also launch food.
Again you have the money to kill Nekrasov, and this is your way back into the game. You get a bunch of your own stock back and (crucially) 2 extra claims, which are very valuable for you right now.
You took a C debt tick at the end of Sol 5 - while better than D, this should probably have been a B tick, unless you're going to commit to the buy on Nekrasov. Your cash is sitting there doing nothing right now.
It's worth mentioning at this point (early Sol 6) that you're actually probably still leading this game. You have a lot of cash (almost $300k) and plenty of options to move forward. Your second OW is being built, and you have a couple of really good patents and optimisations. You probably should still win from here - I'm interested to see how you end up losing.
Major error not to take your mutinied water tile back. $4.5k for a high water tile with adjacency with water at $200? No-brainer. That's worth a $70k mutiny.
You killed Nekrasov! Bravo. Excellent decision. You should definitely win this game from here. Starting by buying up your stock and keeping your debt in check.
The boost on the reactors does much much more harm than good. As mentioned they're losing you money, and the water is now very expensive (and will continue to climb). So not only is it costing you money, but it's giving money to whoever is producing water (mainly Joji). At this point you must get a third water tile. You should also be optimising power - it's continuing to climb, and you have enough production to make it worthwhile. The debt is killing you.
Sol 7: You're buying into Valencia, which is 100% the wrong decision. You need to kill Joji. He has the money to threaten you, and he has more of your stock as well. You almost certainly could have killed him, which would have won you the game. Instead I think you're going to die to Joji because you went into the wrong person.
Yup! Joji killed you. Unlucky. I'll try to sum up the main points now:
The good:
Good general choice of HQ
Early claims, while not optimal, showed a good market sense
Patent choices were strong
Optimisation choices were strong
Good stock sense to buy Nekrasov
Quick on the Offworld trigger (although make sure you goon it next time!)
I'll talk a little more generally about what you can improve on, because it's worth talking about the why rather than just the what. First of all, your found was ok, but not the best it could have been. The reason is that you needed at least two carbon tiles throughout your upgrade path - and the shipping for carbon is very expensive, because it's such high volume. You want to minimise that by founding next to it, instead of next to the aluminum. That would also have had the effect of putting you closer to the water, which would have helped even more with shipping.
You took a third carbon tile and a second aluminum tile before HQ3; and later, a second silicon tile and a second geotherm. This wasn't so bad in the case of the aluminum because it was next to your base, so you could transition it whenever you wanted to. But in the case of the others, these claims are important because
you can't move them into anything else. Even with teleportation, there's a significant cost to doing that, in terms of time. At the end of the game you only had 8 claims adjacent to your base -- because you were claim-starved in general, you really couldn't afford them to be so far from your base. (Ironically, you did need one extra remote claim, on the water, which you were never able to take.)
These remote claims made it imperative that you get teleportation, and that was a detour you really didn't need at that point, when you were so cash-starved. Much better to get up some farms and power through to HQ5 with the profits.
Speaking of farms, they were a good market for the whole game - you never went into them, save for the single farm at HQ2. The reactors were great at first, but they outstayed their welcome; you held the price of fuel high for a while, which was an ok move, but then fuel lost value and you kept producing it. (Moving the carbon tiles into reactors was an especially egregious error.)
And speaking again of farms, at least tangentially... you were in D debt for almost the whole game, and you really didn't need to be. A couple of solar panels at your base would have done wonders once you hit HQ5 - although again, you'd have needed the claims to afford it. You also never optimised power, despite it being high for most of the game and despite having two geotherms. Finally, you easily had enough cash to power through the debt and keep it under control - but you never did. Instead you sat on the cash and let the AI take advantage of your stock price.
Finally, the mistake that actually lost you the game - going for the wrong target at the end. It's worth checking people's cash by mousing over them on the stock menu here. At the point you bought into Valencia, he had $50k and Joji had $350k. Joji was much the bigger threat. Had you gone for him instead, I think you probably would have won that battle, which would have put you in an excellent position to clean up Valencia at the end.
Overall you were actually very close to winning - and if you can improve on some of the above points, you'll be there no problem.
Also, come and join the OTC discord - there are tons of helpful people there:
https://discord.gg/0pQ0rgV4DDFxO2rD
