itch.io

Thanks for the comment!

Several other people have already mentioned that it is too easy to start losing, and the negative loop fed by market prices makes it harder to get back if this happens. I think it is a major cause of situations when the game becomes un-fun for people, and yes, this is my fault. The engineers in the early game are likely too far and few to allow for decent running builds (and the engineer count in the endgame is too high by comparison, so I should have dropped the initial prices in favor of faster scaling after some point). The jam deadline is over, so it would be improper to actually go and fix balance issues; but you can try and give it another go tomorrow (if you had the stock exchange upgrade for 600 research, it would clear the upwards trend in the market, so the prices would start to fall after a significant amount of time spent offline). The game would continue to screw you up after that point, but less and less with each passing upgrade, until the market becomes completely irrelevant around e6 research or so.