About
Commentary and processes of J C Lawrence:
systems architect,
contrarian,
theorist,
sailor,
hacker,
virtual world designer,
linux-user,
aquarist,
disquisitor,
cat breeder,
raconteur,
game designer,
ludophile,
bibliophile,
numismatist,
speculator and
theologiser
License
Ploughing submarines
The new map fits on 18″x12″ paper easily enough with broad empty swathes down the edges. It is a bit tetchy at that scale. A few of the short links such as York/Selby, Preston/Blackoool and Dover/Canterbury get to be awfully short — going smaller would present significant clarity problems. For the Europeans printing on A3 is the best bet despite being a smidge shorter than the not-quite Super-B I’m working with here. (I’d test that conjecture here if I could find a reasonable supply of A3 or Super-B paper about San Jose).
I’ve updated (increased) the port costs back to within reason. If ports are too cheap then they are used exclusively rather than mergers. As the goal of ports is to a provide way for minor shareholders to drain gobs of cash from companies and to thereby ensure that they are not able to cause mergers, the cost of ports has to be high enough to provide the needed drain and yet low enough to prevent casual use. (ie more than $30 but not too much more) Meanwhile other players push for mergers as they solidify share positions and aggregate treasuries for further dividending activities.
Unfortunately the empty spaces along the edges of the new map aren’t large enough to fit the income track or the bank pool spaces. Instead I’ve made a separate tracks page that will fit comfortably on letter or A4 for those details:
And of course some rules polishing. The changelog:
- Ports and mergers cause a (forced) capitalisation
- Forced capitalisations cost 3 days! (This is big)
- Added rules section for forced capitlisation
- Sized bank described as ~$4K
- Pumped port values most of the way back up
- Removed several ports
- Clarified glossary
- Clarified double build language
- Development rule WRT London clarified to account for Liverpool and York.
- Added scoretrack page.
The forced capitalisations for ports and mergers is a huge question. There are good reasons to think it is a great idea, as a control on late game velocity, but also good reasons to fear it slows down the effective rate of capitalisations in the late game which in turn delays the rate at which secondary companies enter the game and that is a problem. I’m finding modelling this problem fiendishly difficult; it is so sensitive to exact player positions and incentives that I’m not yet able to predict broad pattern behaviours.
In partial response I’m considering changing the round-end determinant yet again. Currently it is two exhausted actions or two players at or past 6 days. While that’s a nice pattern it is also a wee bit slow. The new thought toy is to end the round on two exhausted actions or when all players have used at least 5 days. In a 6 player game that ensures that all rounds will end on two exhausted actions. With lower player counts it will often be all players at 5 days. Hmmmm.
New rules.
Comments
Surely you can get the map down to 11×17 with no borders. You’d be able to easily print your own then for less than a $1 each.
If you had to, you could probably get away with squeezing the land mass a little bit so it’s not quite exactly accurate, but no one would care — kind of like how US maps sometimes have a straight top border and sometimes have a curved top border, depending on “perspective”.
True, and I have thought about making a bit of a bloated Britain just to get things to fit a more more pleasantly, along with shifting a few cities further off their actual positions (I’ve been fairly accurate — there should be no egregious translocations). However this is a game I really don’t want to self-publish. There’s simply too much wood required in the box: 70 Settlers-of-Catan road pieces in each of 10 colours. Then there’s the 30 shares for each of those same 10 companies as well. Too much bother! If I can’t get one of the small train game publishers to pick it up then I’ll likely release it under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
If you do release it under a CC license, it would be easier for people to print (Americans at least) if it was 11×17 too, since we could just print on 2 8.5 x 11′s.
Oh, and 700 roads? How many can possibly be used at once? In one on my games, I had spaces for 200 roads and no matter what I did, I simply could not put it on a board that small.
11×17 is also a standard and readily available USA paper size (ledger). Most (all?) Kinkos have a printer setup for printing on ledger-sized paper.
The high road calculation comes from mergers. Figure it this way:
Ergo by the time the game ends there may be 5 + (3 * 7) + (4 * 7 * 1.5) + 5 == 73 route markers on the board, all of which are the same colour — and you don’t know which colour that will be as of the start of the game! Aside: This assumes a 50% double build rate, which is high, so I took 70 as a reasonable rate. In practice the total number of routes on the board will be smaller. All 5 secondary companies won’t always float, in some rounds all the Expands won’t all be used, the game will regularly end in the 5th or 6th round instead of the 7th, etc — all leading to less total routes placed during the game. But the game manifest needs to account for the pessimal case — not having enough bits in the box to play a predictable game-case is Not Good.
If I do release the game under a CC license I don’t expect people to use wooden route markers. I expect they’ll use crayons, grease pencils or wet erase pens. In that case the bit supply simply won’t matter. However I wouldn’t publish the game that way. Much as I like pen-based routes I don’t consider it a viable commercial product characteristic.
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