Summary
You represent a corporation building mines and factories on Mars to assist a new colony. Competing for that business are other companies. You must predict the needs of the market, grow your business efficiently, and possibly sabotage your competitors.
Gameplay
The gameplay feel a little bit like a RTS in that you must make tough real time decisions about what structures to build and that greatly informs how the game will play out. There is a ton of strategy about these decisions. Each corporation consumes resources in different amounts, and you also want to provide for the needs of the colony. These means you likely want to create the resources you will need but also might supply resources that your competitors will buy.
In addition to building structures, you buy and sell goods on the stock market. As materials are consumed by corporations and the colony, the price will go up. When people sell their supply the price goes down. Generally market manipulation doesn't seem to work as well as predicting supply and demand, but it's all pertinent.
Exploration
At the start of the game the map is filled with fog of war. You click around to revel the map to find resources. Eventually when you find a good place to land your base you take it. Grabbing a landing spot early grants an advantage in that you get to claim the nearby resources. Also, your workers can start working while the other players are still exploring. On the other hand, the last players to drop their base are given a few bonuses, like extra tiles to claim. This is a neat concept, but I don't like the implementation. Once you place your base, all fog is lifted so you can see if your base is in a good location or not. Sometimes you don't realize there is a shortage of materials and your workers will have to move across the whole map to mine something rare. Other times you think you are monopolizing a resource to find there were two giant caches you didn't scan.
In many games, the positioning isn't very important. There are sufficient resources, or maybe fuel is cheap for remote workers. So in some games you want to drop your base early, others late, and often it doesn't really matter. This leads to and awkward system that probably could have been skipped. Perhaps it would be better if players could see the entire map and then got to bid on placement order.
Combat
There isn't really combat. Direct aggression comes from the Black Market where you can buy items that help you or hurt an opponent. This isn't my favorite part of the game, but it doesn't bother me. The game has a steep learning curve and this should have been introduced later, but you can disable it in the game options, so not a big deal.
The other form of aggression is price war. If you can monopolize a rare resource you can force the other players to pay a lot to obtain it. In my experience this is a good idea more because you can sell for a higher price, but it's also nice that the opponents must buy at a higher price.
Winning
Depending on the mode the game either ends after a certain number of days or when one corporations has bought out all the others. Both of these have a bit of awkwardness. When the game ends after a set time, you don't get credit for any stockpiles you have, so you have to be constantly aware of the time. Buying out corporations has its own set of problems. You have to figure out if you should buy stock early when its cheap, or invest that money into buildings to grow your economy. You can't buy your own stock from another company but they can buy it from you. This mean games often end with two companies trying to buy each other up as quickly as possible, and it feels weird.
Overall
This is a fun and challenging game. It took many games before I could win a stand-alone scenario on the hardest difficulty. The campaign is interesting but after losing twice I gave up. A few aspects of the game could be changed someone to make it more fun. In some ways this is the perfect game for me. I'm always looking for real-time crafting games with a strong economy and Offworld Trading Company nails it. For me, this game is 7/10 but I suspect most people would rate it lower.
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