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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,
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theologiser
License
Selling souls on the bayou
Capitalisation may be too expensive. Too often the only correct bid is however much or one more than the player with the second most cash has. Sometimes the correct bid is to even bid more in order to fund the company or to hide cash for turn order advantage. Surprisingly rarely is it to bid less than the second richest player. The result is that the only player who has an incentive to choose Capitalise is the player with the most cash. This is a problem of the first water, exacerbated by the ability to hide capital in company treasuries for recovery in end-game payouts (admittedly a loss) in order to gain preferential turn order.
In noodling the area last night I came up with a curious idea:
What if the player that wins a Capitalised share has to pay the 3 months, not necessarily the player that selected the Capitalisation action?
Among other things this would give the ability to fork the other players. They either allow the Capitaliser to get a share (cheaply) or they sacrifice positional advantage. That can be a hard position, especially in the setup for mergers and ports. The buyer-pays-the-time pattern would apply to both the directly selected Capitalise choice and those forced by ports and mergers. A player already past the round-cut-off would not be excluded from bidding — thus weakening or at least bounding the fork-ability.
Comments
In my own attempts to implement a Neuland/Thebes style track in one of my trains games, I use a mix of the two. The player that capitalizes pays half of the AP cost and the player who purchases the share pays the rest.
It works pretty well.
I’m mostly convinced by the buyer-pays rule change. The set pieces and simulations I’ve run through so far are intriguing. My only real questions with it regard the increased opacity of the bidding process (which is already pretty opaque), the effective time-injection into a round if players already past the time-threshold win shares (their extra three months do nothing to accelerate the end of the round) and a general unease that the entire choice among all three actions may be so ambiguous as to make the choice either unimportant (it doesn’t make a significant difference which is chosen) or unnecessary due to being obvious (once the opacity blows away) and thus a non-decision.
I also thought about a mixed duration rule, though more along the line of mixing cash and duration rather than splitting just duration. It had attractive factors but I was unable to justify the complexity and fiddle-factor of such a detailed rule. It was just too fine-grained for my sensibility.
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