'20 learnings

[J C Lawrence]

Bruce doesn't like how loans are tied to income tax. The specific
intent of loans and income tax is that it is a tragedy of the commons:
mostly free money raises a penalty on everyone, that if maintained,
becomes even more expensive for the loan taker (loan interest goes up in
brown/red/gray as the economy contracts). Its candy on a string. Thus
there's a hothouse effect.

Everything else seemed to work with no particular problems of glaring
"this needs to be fixed". Specifically, the "privates can't run red or
gray trains" bit worked wonderfully.

I noticed that Daniel is starting to get a really nice handle on loans
and cycling money into loans, into trains/company buys, back into hand,
into share-grow-ups, back into loans etc. I wonder how well that would
work if multiple people did it? I suspect the technique is much
stronger if you're the only one doing it.

As discussed on the way back and on Sunday, I'm also interested to see
how no-public player would do. I suspect that it is a viable strategy
in a 4-player game, and possibly very strong in that mythical 5-player
game.

Proposals:

- Make London auto-upgrade (no track tiles) with an off-board-style
revenue track.

- Up the revenue values of most of the ports. Make them a bit more
interesting.

- Tokens for 10, 20 and 50 share companies are placeable (ie add
10-share to the mix).

- Simplify loans and income tax:

* Keep a track of the total number of loans in companies with
a simple marker on a scale.
* At the start of each PR determine how many more or less
loans there are in companies.

* > 5 income tax increases by 20%.
* > 0-5 income tax increases by 10%.
* < 1-5 income tax decreases by 10%.
* < 5 income tax decreases by 20%.

- When a public company buys a private company the public company:

- Must pay a fee of $100 to the bank for each station it keeps
from the private company.

- If the original private owner was a different player, then
$50 of the fee is paid to that player instead of to the bank.

- Any stations kept from the private company must first come
from any unplaced stations in the public company.

- The total station count of the resulting company cannot be
more than 50% over the default station allowance of the buying
company.

- The buying company must pay an additional fee of $100 per
extra token kept over the station limit, paid to the bank.

- Any discarded stations (public's or private's) are turned into
locking stations (same as usual).


Okay, not entirely happy with the last two, but something along that line.

-- JCL