'20 now...

[J C Lawrence]

Current concerns:

-- Not enough cross-investment. Which is admittedly a characteristic
of 3-player games, but still, even in 3-player games it is enough to
help dilute positions. And yet, strong mid-game early cross-investment
is rather clearly central to winning even in 3-player.

-- I also note that we have not yet discovered the power of
cross-investing in a company you're aiming to hostile take-over
(capital efficiency/money laundering: you'll get some of the purchase
price back to your hand for your share). I fear the result of
mentioning this tactic to my current players.

-- Stock price movement on sales is still not clean enough. Once per
share seems right.

-- Probably not quite enough starting capital in 3-player. This is
mostly a product of two future trains being sold per SR taking away
money from company floats instead of just one. We had a 15 company
start yesterday, which is acceptable, but really should be closer to 20.
Somewhere among $1,500 and $1,550 starting capital seems about right?

-- Maybe make Dover a BigCity...with a river/terrain cost. Track in
the area is almost completely formulaic, as-is the sale of the
resulting orphan company (and for good money). I may want this to work
more than it will work.

-- Another side of my head is saying to remove the big cities of
Birmingham and Peterborough from the map. Let the middle of the
country really be a free-for-all. I'm strongly tempted to listen.

-- JCL

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 01:57:35 -0700, J C Lawrence <cl...@kanga.nu> wrote:

> -- Stock price movement on sales is still not clean enough. Once per
> share seems right.

I've waffled on this a lot. Per-share is too weak in the early game,
but pool shares are rightfully rare then, so maybe that's Okay.
Per-share is a bit over-strong in the end-game, but the race to get
paper, any paper (and then to deny pool share income) is strong enough
then as well that it mostly doesn't matter as well.

> -- Maybe make Dover a BigCity...with a river/terrain cost. Track in
> the area is almost completely formulaic, as-is the sale of the
> resulting orphan company (and for good money). I may want this to
> work more than it will work.

I talked this over with Shelby on Monday evening. Felixstowe and Dover
are both located in O17, as suggested by their two ports beside that
hex. I've attached a PNG of the map to help frame the conversation.

If Dover is an OO city (as Daniel and Shelby both proposed), then as
Dover only has two free edges it will always be placed as a sharp
yellow OO tile pointing back into the South of England. Additionally,
as blue phase only opens one more edge of the hex (the blue water
barrier), the green OO tile must connect that edge -- across an
expensive terrain...to dead-end port. Not interesting. Worse, as the
hex has a blank edge on the English Channel, it can never upgrade to
brown. More not interesting.

Historically there was a big tussle over whether Dover or Felixstowe
would become the shipping and passenger gateway to the continent. Both
were well positioned and make strong runs at it and both succeeded
significantly, though Dover won the larger share. But it was not a
forgone conclusion and Felixstowe remains a significant shipping port
to this day.

The more immediate concern is that making Dover a Big City might make
the south too strong, especially with Chatham and its access to the
London Docks there as well. Arguably, it would at least need a
terrain cost added to the hex.

But I'm unconvinced there's a problem with a richer Dover there. The
track development in the south is currently almost entirely rote and is
really only rich enough to support one company (which ~necessarily
starts in Chatham). With a richer Dover, there's now reason to start a
company in Dover, even as a competing player, and there's now
much more reason to fight early and hard over the three edges between
Portsmouth and London that control all access from the rest of the map
to the south -- which seems a Good Thing. Not least because
opening that edge also opens the south to early hostile/contentious
take-overs. The problem per se is that I expect Margate in N18 to
never be developed in many games as the track lay in N16 will prevent
a route going both in and out of the Margate hex. Sigh.

Maybe N18 also needs to be forced to a pre-printed yellow #7 to the
gray sharp? But then the southern track is back to being entirely
processional. Or I make the Margate port unreasonably richer in green
so that there's strong interest in running a 2+T from it...with a token
from a second company... Choices choices.

Mostly, it seems enough for Chatham & Dover to be taken earlier in the
lobby sequence, and that's not a Bad Thing at all.

> -- Another side of my head is saying to remove the big cities of
> Birmingham and Peterborough from the map. Let the middle of the
> country really be a free-for-all. I'm strongly tempted to listen.

Bruce suggests leaving something in not quite in the middle as a key
around which to position other cities. Daniel suggested something
similar, but specifically named keeping Birmingham.

I see five basic choices:

1) Do nothing, everything stays as it is.

2) Remove only Peterborough.

3) Remove only Birmingham.

4) Remove both Birmingham and Peterborough, but put back some other city
(perhaps ~Oxford, the big city that is often placed in J8 or J10 (a bit
north of London).

5) Remove both Birmingham and Peterborough and leave it all open.

For outsiders: the rules again for BigCity placement are that they may
be freely placed on any rural hex which has at least two non-city hexes
between it and every other city at the time of placement (or are marked
on the map as BigCities (B): currently Liverpool, Birmingham and
Peterborough). In practice BigCity placement key off two things: the
predefined cities on the board and the big ports/off-boards like
Bristol, Great Yarmouth, Grimsby, Southend, Southhampton, etc).

First up, I'm not convinced that something has to be done, but I am a
bit irritated by the fairly predictable placement of big cities
in every game -- a pattern which is largely forced by the requirements
for Birmingham and Peterborough to be BigCities. It would be nice if
things were a bit more dynamic.

History of course has Peterborough occupying a central role in railway
development, especially in the routes from London to the north. And
Birmingham also featured strongly, as might be noted by the handful of
companies with "Birmingham" in their name.

But...dynamism also adds the noticeably real ability for a higher bidder
to drop a BigCity in an unhelpful place (eg the center of Essex/ a few
hexes NE from London) thus devaluing a great chunk of the board in one
shot: "good for me, bad for everyone else". Maybe that means that
Parliament rounds are more contentious? Not such a Bad Thing either.

But if they are more contentious, the players who spend so much and are
early in the order are arguably incentivised to spoil the pot for all
the still-expensive-but-lower lobbies in the pipe. And then the whole
game runs poorer...but they're poorer too (as there fewer good
locations to run to and track development is slower). And if they are
more generous, then the whole game is richer and they are richer too in
pretty much the same proportions?

It seems more a stylistic thing more than a forced thing, and one that
also puts additional value on pars and operating order -- which is
maybe too much of a burden at the start of an already dizzying game.
Tough call.

Which mostly means that I'm leaning to #2, #3 or #4, and specifically
toward leaving Birmingham in the game and precisely where it is now.

The reasoning has to do with track development and competition. A early
bidder could grab Birkenhead/Chester in D4 and then put a BigCity in G3
(right beside the gray track hex). In the first OR they put a broad
curve dit beside Manchester going south (killing that edge of
Manchester), then a straight to their BigCity, and then a straight or
sharp to connect the Big City to the off-board -- and voila they've
just blocked off one of the legs of Manchester and are one green tile
lay away from securing North Wales as their private domain until
brown. And that seems..too good. That's an $18+ 2+T (50 + 30 + 10 + 40
+ 50 in yellow) and a $26 3+T (60
+ 40 + 20 + 40 + 40 + 60) with ~zero competition or ability for anybody
to interfere/piggyback. Not cool, not with the lobby system's
inability to do price enforcement.

With Bimingham where it is now the same thing can be done of course,
but only with a small city that anybody else can also drop a token in
and thus start sharing the wealth.

Peterborough...offers less immediate rewards in any direction. It is
just in a positionally strong location (ie I expect there to be a
BigCity roughly in that location in many games -- and for roughly the
same reasons that Peterborough became such a nexus historically).
That's cool. I'll let the incentives govern where/if it goes and leave
it open.

-- JCL