Regarding WoN: Do you not consider something like “building lots of farms in expectation of their demand” speculative exploitation? Maybe I misunderstand you.

On the post as a whole: It seems to me that making money on “the market” comes down to 1) luck, 2) research, 3) insider info, 4) taking margins on the fluctutations over time. Within the context of a game, 1 seems unsatisfying, 2 seems difficult but might translate to a simple divination of the game state plus a little psychology, and 3 may or may not work as a mechanic. Many games have the concept of margins, even those that aren’t market-based. Squeezing out a dollar here, a dollar there. It often feels like guess-work.

So what does it all come down to? If everyone has all the same information, and there’s no randomness, then there should be only one best play. Whoever makes it first (turn order bias?) gets the best position. You can add randomness–which I think is good in small amounts–but it shouldn’t be the “answer” to the problem. I think you might need small amounts of per-player secret info. It eventually gets revealed, but players have a short period of time where they can react to a “moving window” of information.

Just talking out loud.

Wealth of Nations implements a decent market system and part of any good market system is predicting demand, yes, but Wealth of Nations doesn’t support direct manipulation of those future predictions ala a futures market. For instance, there’s no direct ability in WoN to:

• purchase from a player the promise to sell red cubes in two turns at price X, and to then manipulate the market so that red cubes are worth far more than X at that time, thus forcing the player to take a loss against the market
• purchase the promise from one player to sell red cubes at price X in two turns, then purchase the promise to buy red cubes at price X+delta and pocketing the difference in the middle
• corner the futures market for a commodity without actually controlling any of the sources of production for that commodity

They seem interesting relationships to create in market-driven game. I’d like to do something in that direction that with Modern Mogul and slightly differently again with Trade Winds.

I worked the futures markets for grains for some years as a youth and made and lost fair amounts of money there. Yeah, there’s luck, research, not-so-insider (but still obscure and uncorrelated) information, and a lot of margin and hedge bets. While there are and have been a few quick strikes, it is not a game for eagles (cf Silver Thursday). For Modern Mogul I’m toying with a structure ala:

• Basic market trends are randomly established pre-game; a basic graph over time (curve or wave)
• Random events in-game will change the velocity and volume of the market by marginal deltas without dramatically affecting the basic market trajectory
• Players can affect the basic market trajectory through investment and overt/covert manipulation
• The game provides a limited pool of simulated backdrop market players who buy/sell at a linearly extrapolated price from current market numbers

The hoped for result is that the normal random vagaries of the game would provide opportunity for margins in the hysteresis between the simulated players and actual market, with much larger deltas available through focussed manipulation of the market future against the simulated and real players.

My additional hope is that the single-best-play problem can be addressed by spreading it across time. There are short term plays leverage exploitations, middle term plays opportunity exploitations and long term manipulation/market dominances which will need to be played against each other with the value balance of each being a function of player position and investment.

But yeah, I could have player-private information such as, say private event/news cards which cycle through the player hands and when played kick the appropriate market a bit. I’m not keen, but it is a possibility.

All good stuff. Do you have thoughts on the implementation of “covert manipulation” outside of insider information? Do you mean stuff like having a player’s own corporation make plans to supply or demand a certain type of good?

That’s pretty much what I was thinking of: control and timing of supply and demand.