With Turmoil getting a new DLC it was time to check out the base game before heading into what is new. Turmoil is an oil mining strategy game. You can get to set up oil rigs and search for the black gold called oil along with gas as well.
The biggest thing about this game is just mining oil and hoping to strike it rich. While there is a little lore here or there from the character you select, there is a mayor and some other things. It’s just enough to put you in a time this game takes place in. Without bogging you down with a whole lot of other stuff.
I ended up picking Joshua as he was a rancher who was now looking to strike it rich. While he was hoping it be easy to make money. Things would start slow and as you progress into different lands in the game things start to get a bit more complex.
Before going out into a fresh site to start digging for oil yet again. There is a town where you can spend that hard-earned oil money on upgrades at different buildings. You can upgrade your technology to search underground for oil and other things like diamonds and gas. You can increase the capacity of pipes and storage. You can even increase how large of a herd you can manage for bringing oil to market.
I found it best to save my money until I have finished the land bidding and the share-buying activities have been finished. You need 2k cash as startup money for each site you head out onto.
You can borrow money for upgrades, bid on land to mine, or just cover a shortage to try your luck once again. The bank rates are rather insane with things like 25% APR. Which is downright criminal if you can’t leverage the cost to increase profit from selling oil during the up to a year's worth of time you have a piece of land for. Failing to pay off the loan after a couple of years results in game over. The greedy bank even takes the money out of your bottom line before you even get to spend a cent of it paying itself back.
The land bidding process is quite simple. In each region of the map, you are on you have to outbid the three NPCs for a plot. Once a piece of land has been mined you get to see an overall score for how much oil was on it. The NPCS tend to play it safe on easy mode and just go for land next to higher numbers.
While out mining you can find diamonds that can be traded in for some insider information on the next best plot of land to mine for oil. Oddly enough if it’s far away from any other lands that have already been mined the NPCS don’t even try and outbid you for it.
There is also a bidding war for pieces of shares. Getting to 51% is a win condition in unlocking a special island you get to mine at the end of the campaign.
I was not the biggest fan of this system. Instead of casting bids from lowest to highest. It starts with your max balance and slowly winds down. Showing you where others could start to enter into buying the shares with how much total money, they have to spend.
The first person who clicks buy gets the shares. Making it quite easy to overspend since you have no idea what the NPCS might decide to spend. I’ve seen them pay twice as much for a 1% share than I've paid to acquire a 5% share. Thankfully this system gets replaced in the DLCs as I'm not a huge fan of it. I’d rather be spending my money on upgrades not buying shares that do me little good till the end of the game.
Once all of that is out of the way it’s time for the usual content loop of the game. Entering into the piece of land you won a bid to go mining. You can only start with a budget of $2k and I found it best to be careful to not think too big before you have enough oil production to afford to have a large expansion plan.
Right off the bat I usually end up hiring two dowsers. While early on they can only find oil that is close to the surface. You can invest so they can find oil all the down. Since they only cost $100 each per use and will end up walking away if there is no more oil to find. They are a great and cheap way to discover new locations.
While it’s so tempting to want to overdo things and have lots of oil riggings going. Early game it is more time-consuming to find where oil is located. You also never know if you hit a large or small pocket of oil.
I had one round where I was quite greedy. I over-expended myself and as luck would have the oil pockets, I was mining were small. I ran out of oil and money. Leaving me without the ability to run more searches for oil, drill down further with piles, or even put in another oil well.
At the end of each round, you get to see everything underground. You can see in the early stages of the game where you don’t have a lot of upgrades unlocked and it’s not a full year. I ended up missing quite a few oil spots. From the ones I did find I did not even empty most of them out.
While time is progressing on the map so too are the oil prices. This is why it is important to spend some money on storage and even think out where you want to place things. Later on in the game you can place two storage silos next to each other and upgrade them into a super silo. Early game however that was not something I needed to worry about. As I had more than enough space above ground for the small oil mining operations I had going on.
It’s kind of funny looking back to some of my early games. Since I could not search underground. I was just laying down pipes hoping to find oil spots. It looks so funny now looking back at it.
Thankfully after testing out a few other methods of trying to find the oil and later gas pockets. I started saving for quite a quality-of-life upgrade of a scanner. While I'd end up paying nearly 1k per large scan. Along with 5-6k per map to search most of the underground.
I found getting the 1k bonus each for all oil, selling all oil, all gas, and finishing before the last month. Almost made up for the total cost of scans I'd be using. It also saved me a few times when I was not having much luck with my second dowser and the oil pocket I had found ran out.
You can see here I was playing around with the lower-tier underground scanner. I would then drop a dowser and hope he run off the map not finding another location. If, however, he did find another location I'd drop another scan to pinpoint its exact locations before spending money on piping and perhaps another oil rig.
After each round, you even get a nice breakdown of where you spent money. It’s no shock that I ended up spending a huge chunk of what I was earning off oil on scanners. I would start to spend on upgrading piping as well to quicken progress.
The nice thing is even once your storage is full if you have empty wagons, they can be used to store oil as well. I don’t know how many times I decided to just keep buying wagons over getting another storage silo. At the time I was waiting for prices to go above $1 and they were sitting at something like 30 cents on both the left and right where you sell.
After a while, the game would introduce further challenges or things you had to consider. There would be things like hitting rocks. While you could spend $750 per oil rig each time to drill through rocks. Most times it was just cheaper to go around. Having such knowledge also made me focus quite heavily on spending any money I did have on scanners.
After a while things like storage and having as many wagons as possible became quite a huge factor. The game introduced gas that could either be used to speed up mining oil out of a pocket or short-term skyrocketing a single oil price.
It was then all about being greedy. Holding out long enough you could connect all the gas pockets to a single selling side. Then try and offload it all before the final days of the run. I lost count of how many times it was the last day before the season ended and the last of my wagons had just offloaded what little oil I had remaining.
While the game gets a bit respective after a while. You do end up changing locations a couple of times in any campaign. Which ends up adding a little twist to things like needing to use magma to grow gas pockets as they were quite limited in the colder map.
In the end, I was able to both secure enough shares for the win and unlock all upgrades on my first playthrough. I’m also glad I played just the base game before jumping into any of the DLCs. There is a learning curve that the base game slowly takes you through in dealing with different situations.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Turmoil.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
