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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, ludophile, bibliophile, numismatist, speculator and theologiser

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Another congress, conquering division

I got talking with Aliza Panitz (BGG: Morganza) last night about the merger model in Muck & Brass and in the process realised that the first or second merger is liable to be too powerful. There are a few primary early merger paths:

  1. Both northerns via the loop around Sheffield
  2. One of the southern companies with the L&SR via Peterborough
  3. One of the two northern companies with the EUR via Peterborough
  4. Two of the southern companies via Peterborough or any of the other London orbits

The problem is with the mergers with the northern companies and with anything that involves the B&GR from the southerns. If anything in the north merges, and they start the NER, then it will auto-merge, thus generating a second special dividend for those players before the General Dividend. If anything involving the B&GR merges and they start the GWR (which the B&GR has also certainly built to), then the same problem repeats to the south. That’s 3 and a bit of the four early merge cases where a small subset of players get two special dividends in quick succession without any ability for the other players to do anything about it in advance.

That may not be good. Another related problem is the turn ordering which puts the cash richest players first. As soon as the mergers hit they are liable to remain the cash richest as they steamroller as above. To give a quick sense of the problem in concrete terms from this morning’s solo play:

The first expansion after the 3rd General Dividend merged the LB&SRC with the L&SR via Peterborough. The special dividend went to the LB&SRC. The NER was then started, merging the L&SR& (which now contained the LB&SCR) and the L&MR into the NER. A second special dividend was paid to the original LB&SCR share holders. The next expansion merged the B&GR into the EUR and started the GWR which insta-merged into the B&GR for another two special dividends paid to the B&GR share holders. The GWR then merged into the NER via Peterborough and paid a third special dividend to the original B&GR shareholders and a second to the EUR shareholders. They started the CR which was won by a player with so much cash they could simply throw it away on the CR and still win. The next player, who was already low on cash, had no chance at any of the merger shares, built a foreign port as did the last expansion. The game then ended on the fourth General Dividend as there were only two operating companies: GWR & CR.

An obvious partial solution is to require that a merging player pick a secondary company which:

or if that’s not possible:

Such a rule is unpleasantly clunky, if historic and reasonable from a financials market perspective. It pretty much guarantees that the SWR is going to be the first secondary company out with the GWR and LNWR in the next round. The CR is a knife aimed straight at the L&SR and has all the subtlety of the Wabash in Wabash Cannonball. Likewise the The LNWR is a somewhat similar knife aimed at the L&MR and by extension at the B&GR. The SWR conversely lurks between the B&GR and the L&MR and can’t insta-merge in one build like the CR and LNWR can, but it potentially controls many foreign ports and is thus interesting for that reason alone. The NER is just a pig — whenever it starts it will isnta-merge into whatever the current shape of the L&MR/L&SR pair is. The GWR is a similar inst-merge into whatever the B&GR is then.

At least there’s now some subtlety to the mergers with the ugly delay rule.

Sigh.

Another potential model struck this morning:

  1. Scrap all the current merger rules
  2. Starting after the third General Dividend players may start capitalising the secondary companies. As soon as a share sells (two? three?) they may start operating.
  3. Should a secondary company build into another operating companies home station (using its own track) the other company is absorbed, shares trade up etc and there’s a special dividend for the secondary company

ObNote: This model may unduely protect the LB&SCR and EUR and unduly weaken the NER. It may also require adjusting the rule-of-three track building rules.

Getting to the port

The port pricing is still a problem but the base game seems to be cleaning up well. I’ve also made the art a little more functional, noting the starting stations and the like, fixing a few small track problems (eg Blackpool) and such forth. Nothing major.

Sig Action!

Seth Jaffee commented approvingly on the BGDF chat on my making actions in Muck & Brass mandatory, unlike the optional actions in Wabash Cannonball. I replied that while I’d have a hard time phrasing a strong argument for making them mandatory, I was convinced that it was necessary.

Later in the resulting (brief) conversation it struck me: A significant portion of good play in Wabash Cannonball centres around controlling the game length in terms of General Dividends. For instance in a 3 player game selecting Capitalisation once without auctioning a share will often add an additional General Dividend to the game, doing it twice makes that near guaranteed, thrice and you’ll sometimes get a second additional General Dividend. As a result Wabash Cannonball has control of game length as a central challenge in the game. But control of game-length is not central to Muck & Brass so supporting a strong mechanism to affect game length would distract from the actual core foci of the game (network potentials, financial leverage, emergent alliances etc) and should thus be avoided.

ObAside: The sway point in Wabash Cannonball appears to be at 3 passed Capitalisations for 3 players as past that and games start ending more frequently from track cubes than they do from shares, thus requiring passing on Expand to gain further General Dividends.

Driving trains by braille

Several small changes based on simulation runs:

  1. Setup vs game start rules clarified
  2. As each initial share is auctioned that company builds a free link
  3. Initial turn order after auction is now cash-based rather than starting with the L&MR player
  4. Action rotation clarified
  5. Actions are now explicitly stated as mandatory (unlike Wabash Cannonball)
  6. Foreign Links may not be built until after the 3rd general dividend. (not sure this is needed)
  7. Expand action requalified to limit builds to not more than three connections out from any city, and not all the connections from any city with more than two connections. This allows the dead ends (like Thurso and Penzance) to be interesting as well as the many two-connection way-stops
  8. Clarified cases of merger shares auctioned without bids.

Reaching the Third Rail

A little more playable:

From Tithes to Ploughshares

Quite a few changes this week.

I spent a few hours digging through the early history of the English railways from around 1830 onward and picked a more representative set of companies for the areas I’ll be putting them in. I also ordered them by starting date so that the initial companies did in fact start earlier as railway companies and the merger companies did in fact start later and heavily focused on mergers (eg GWR, LNWR, NER etc). There are a large number of goofs in home stations, but none I hope egregiously large (eg the GWR starting in Exeter?).

The current initial companies are:

Merger companies:

I’ve also had a first pass at allocating share counts for the initial and merger companies. Total gut sense with initial companies running from 3-5 shares and merger companies running 8-10 shares. I’m clearly going to have to play with those numbers.

The rules are looking pretty clean now. Not final but at least playable without instant gamer-pattern baldness.

A remaining problem is what order to auction the initial company shares in? It is tempting to do them in historical opening order which would be: L&MR, L&SR, B&GR, EUR, and finally LB&SCR. I’m not so happy about the very ordered progression from north-to-south that sequence represents on the map — despite the fact that the industrial furnaces of the midlands did actually drive the industrial and railway revolution in England. My sense is that the auction ordering should pose immediate spending challenges with early risks made in spite of later temptations. The three companies near London are obviously attractive — London develops beautifully and there are many fine ports to the south (the white bars) which offer Special Dividends — but having them come together as a group seems…wrong/odd. Likewise for the L&MR and L&SR with the wonders of Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester right next door. Urk.

Proposal:

  1. LB&SCR
  2. L&SR
  3. EUR
  4. B&GR
  5. L&MR

Of course that’s all higgledy-piggledy for historical dates, but it may work better. I’ll have to sleep on it.

Over the last couple days I moved the map from yEd over to Inkscape and into SVG format. Unfortunately this required a nearly from-scratch redraw as I lost patience writing the script to post-process yEd’s concept of what it should produce for SVG elements versus what I thought I wanted. Fortunately for such a simple graph this did not take long. A few colours here and there, an income track, yada yada and voial!

Note to self: Must remember to put numbers on the income track.

Dodging the revolting draft

The bit about the active player choosing which side of the merger pays the Special Dividend could be a doozey. It allows minor shareholders with similar holdings to collude across turn order in order to cause mergers which mutually benefit them but not necessarily the plurality shareholder. Consider:

PlayerX owns a significant plurality of CompanyQ. PlayerY and PlayerZ both own but a single share in CompanyQ. CompanyQ is two single builds away from merging with CompanyR. Both PlayerY and PlayerZ have significant holdings in CompanyR. CompanyR is too far from CompanyQ’s home station to consider the merge that way. So, PlayerY builds one of the links toward CompanyR and PlayerZ builds the second and as predicted by PlayerY, selects CompanyR for the Special Dividend. PlayerX with no investment in CompanyR is of course overjoyed to be shut out of the Special Dividend. PlayerX would have far preferred to build the connection himself and declare CompanyQ for the special dividend but was outflanked by the emergent collusion among PlayerY and PLayerZ.

Other forms of possible insurrection and insurgency by minor share-holders abound. I’m not clear if this is delightful or merely fatal yet. In terms of layering the incentive mesh formed by share-ownership however, this is quite delightful.

Revisiting congress

The new more historically flavoured merger rules read as follows:

When a company connects to another active company’s home station the two companies merge. A merged company may have several home stations from its constituent component companies. The active player decides which of the two companies will be acquire merge into the other acquiring company.

The acquired company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)

  1. Any unbuilt track markers for the acquired company are added to the acquiring company’s supply

  2. Each player’s shares in the acquired company are replaced 1:1 with shares from the new parent company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool of the acquiring company, then shares from the merger supply for that company. The shares of the acquired company are placed face-down in the bank pool of the acquiring company so that it may be clearly seen that it is now a component-company.

  3. The income of the acquired company’s income is added to the acquiring company’s income, and the acquired company’s marker is removed from the income track

After the merger is resolved the active player selects an inactive merger company to start. If the new merger company’s home station is already connected by track, the connected companies will be acquired by the new merger company.

  1. Any unbuilt track markers for companies that have connected track of the home station of the new merger company are added to the merger company’s supply

  2. Each player’s shares in the companies that have connected track to the home station of the merger company are replaced 1:1 with shares from the new merger company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool of the merger company, then shares from the merger supply. The shares of any acquired companies are placed face-down in the bank pool of the merger company so that it may be clearly seen that they are now component-companies

  3. A share of merger company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise). The new share is taken from the merger company’s merger supply if a share is not available from the bank pool

  4. If the merger company’s home station is already connected by track, the merger company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)

  5. The winner of the newly auctioned share selects the next merger company to start, starting the merger process all over again

If no players bid on a merger auction the auctioning player discards the share into the bank pool and receives the current income of the company divided by the current number of issued shares including the just auctioned share in exchange.

If all the merger companies have been started and a merger occurs, the active player may either pass on the rest of their turn, or may auction any available share from the bank pool in the normal manner (see Capitalise).

Quite a bit cleaner. Conversations with Ben Keightley (Coca Lite) have caused me to re-examine this simplified model, though I don’t think that was his intention. In particular I’m re-considering the automatic chaining of mergers. I’m not sure it is justified. Without automatic chaining the mergers will still tend to happen in a flurry, that is where the money is, but it will not be quite as uncontrollable an orgy and allows for interesting decisions to be made between mergers (eg track blocking) which are not possible with automatic chaining. The specific relationship of turn order and share investments also becomes more interesting. In short methinks I’ll lose the automatic chaining of mergers. I see little loss and much potential game.

The other change, and this is a biggie, is allowing the active player to determine which of the sides of a merger will pay the Special Dividend. This change was done on a whim but it feels right. It allows minor share-holders to merge foreign companies into a company in which they hold more stock, thus getting the Special Dividend where they want it while also building the agglomerate.

Historical backpedal

The current merger rules for pre-connected home stations (see below) are backwards. The merger companies were the agglomerates. The GWR (for instance) was a merger of many other smaller railway companies, as was the LNWR the NER, etc. They also (obviously) started later than the companies they acquired.

Thus, I’m reversing the direction of share flow for mergers. If a merger company’s home station is connected when it starts, all the connected railways merge into the merger company (which makes a sort of historical sense), and then the merger company pays out a special dividend. Of course this makes no difference in terms of where the money goes and how much of it, but it does make better thematic and historical sense. It also makes the game slightly cheaper to produce as less merger shares will be needed for the initial companies.

Approximating Promontory

Good progress today. I’ve finally a full working draft of the rules, complete with all companies (initially) historically researched and specified, and the text for the actions even makes some sense.

Next is polishing and bringing the map up to date followed by a good bit of number crunching simulation and analysis. Ah, the joys of abstract game design. But for now it is time to go off and watch some Anime. Blue Seed, Junkers Come Here or Voices of a Distant Star?

Unholy congress resulting in a union

A working concept for mergers:

When a company connects to another active company’s home station the two companies merge. A merged company may have several home stations. The company that built the track will be acquired and will merge into the other company.

  1. The acquired company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)

  2. Each player’s shares in the acquired company are replaced 1:1 with shares from the new parent company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool of the acquiring company, then shares from the merger supply for that company

  3. The acquired company’s income is added to the acquiring company’s income, and the acquired company’s marker is removed from the income track

  4. Any unbuilt track markers for the acquired company are added to the acquiring company’s supply

After the merger is resolved the active player selects an inactive minor company to start. The new minor company’s home station will either still be unconnected or be connected by track from one or more companies.

Starting a minor company whose home station is unconnected by track:

  • the share of new minor company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise) with a minimum bid of $5. After the auction play proceeds in the usual manner.

Starting a minor company whose home station is connected by track:

  1. If only one company has built a connection to the home station of the new minor company, then the new minor company is considered to be auto-merged into the connected parent company:

    1. The unbuilt track markers for the selected new minor company are added to the acquiring company’s supply and may be built in future starting from its home station (see Expand)
    2. A share of parent company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise). The new share is taken from the company’s merger supply if a share is not available from the bank pool
    3. The parent company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)
    4. The winner of the newly auctioned share selects the next minor company to start, starting the merger process all over again

  2. More than one company has built a connection to the home station of the new minor company, then connected companies are auto-merged and the new minor company is considered to be auto-merged into that parent company:

    1. The active player selects one of the connected merging companies to be the new parent. Each player’s shares in the acquired company/companies are replaced 1:1 with shares of the new parent company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool for the acquiring company, then shares from the merger supply for that company
    2. The acquired companies’ income is added to the acquiring company’s income, and the acquired companies’ markers are removed from the income track
    3. The unbuilt track markers for the acquired companies are added to the acquiring company’s supply
    4. The unbuilt track markers for the selected new minor company are added to the acquiring company’s supply and may be built in future starting from its home station (see Expand)
    5. A share of parent company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise). The new share is taken from the company’s merger supply if a share is not available from the bank pool
    6. The parent company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)
    7. The winner of the newly auctioned share selects the next minor company to start, starting the merger process all over again

If no players bid on a merger auction the auctioning player discards the share into the bank pool and receives the current income of the company divided by the current number of issued shares including the just auctioned share in exchange.

While the wording will undoubtedly be tightened, hopefully it at least makes (non)sense. Without adding a host of special rules about building into secondary company’s home stations, which seemed needlessly complex, this was the simplest pattern which combined player-predictability, (relative) simplicity and (reasonable) transparency while also offering potentially interesting game decisions — especially once they start to chain.

Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool

The following escape hatch to the share auction is attractive:

If a player auctions one of their own shares and no players bid, the player may put the share back into the bank pool and receive the current income of the company divided by the current number of issued shares including the just auctioned share in exchange.

What a delightfully nasty and abusive money pump, especially in lower player count games! I fear my auction theory is too weak to predict out all the implications. I should probably spend some time talking it over with with the auction theory guys at Stanford before committing, but I sure like the idea so far.

Tentative zetetic

Below is a possible introduction section for the rules. Some of the stated goals, like the duration, may be ambitious, but that’s the nature of good goals:

After the birthplace of the steam engine, railway development in England was a rocky and tortuous affair. Bankruptcies were common. Struggling railway companies merged and then merged again, acquired other companies and became not-so-vast agglomerates. In Muck & Brass players will invest in railway companies and then attempt to leverage their investments for profit. Railway companies will start, grow and then merge into each other as yet more companies pop up to join the frenzy of growth and mergers.

During the course of the game players will buy and sell dividend-paying shares at auction, build track to increase the income of the companies they own shares in, and develop the industrial base of cities the companies serve to further increase their income. After a period of heady growth companies will begin to merge, creating both ever larger income vehicles and prompting new companies to join the growth and merger fray.

By carefully controlling and timing the purchase and sale of shares, the railway networks their companies build, the development of the cities they connect and the mergers of the companies, players may leverage their investments for great profit.

The game ends after one or more of:

  • the seventh (7th) general dividend

  • only two operating companies have unsold shares

  • only two operating companies have a legal track build and can afford it

The player with the highest net worth at the end of the game wins.

Muck & Brass supports 3 through 6 players, is particularly recommended for 4 or 5 players and plays in around 90 minutes.

Resolving to aggregate

I’ve spent the last three hours trying to work out a coherent and functional and (relatively) simple set of merger rules that handle all the cases. Ooof. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least it is closer.

So far I’m tending strongly to resolving the case where the new minor is already connected by track from one or more companies, by a) merging the other companies first (active player picks which is the parent), b) selling a share in that merged product, and then finally c) issuing a special dividend for the merged company before starting yet another minor. As is typical in such cases the concept is far simpler than the language.

BTW: There’s a similar mess in Stephenson’s Rocket when a train line manages to merge into multiple other lines all at the same time. There it is complicated by the share trade-up rules, but at least they don’t also have Special Dividends.

Polished knuckles

At the prompting of Benjamin Keightley (Coca Lite) a number of small clarifications to the rules:

Also added one brand new rule to partly address the minor problem of dumping kula items on a player who is far out of contention:

New Rules and Player aid posted.

Selling a shared foreigner

Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. The shareholders divide the company treasury evenly amongst themselves (another dilution factor here) with any remainders going to the Director. Basic shares then cash out for $4 each and Grouping Shares cash out for $10 each. As an aside, this treasury payout model is a very attractive method of stashing cash away so that it doesn’t affect your turn order position while also keeping it in-hand for the end-game score — as long as you don’t trade those shares up to grouping shares.

Pampas Railroads also makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. There the concept is that a company has a base value which is a function of the number of links it has built, and that value is cashed out in the end-game to the players. Additionally there are special particularly expensive off-network locations that may be build, foreign connections, which significant boost share value but also signal a company-specific dividend (ala Wabash Cannonball’s Chicago).

Wabash Cannonball’s simplicity of ignoring shares is attractively simple. Player scores are merely the cash they have on hand when the game ends. However there also seems value in shares being worth something. Pampas Railroad’s company value system is unpleasantly fiddly for the game-value it generates. WS&IM’s straight share value is at least something but is interestingly flat. I do however like the idea of the treasury paying out to the share holders in WS&IM. Perhaps a combination of the two?

Proposal: Shares are worth $1 for each city the parent company is connected to, and the company treasury pays out divided across shareholders, remainders going to the bank.

Additionally, is it worth implementing an equivalent to Pampas Railroads’ foreign links? England certainly has a plethora of ports that could be used. They could be both very expensive (and thus an attractive way of sucking capital out of a company as a minor shareholder), and an additional source of per-company special dividends. But should they still affect end-game per-share value, and if so, in the same way?

Proposal: Each foreign link adds $10 to the end-game per-share value.

Suppressing reverse mitosis

The initial map shown in the previous post was drawn with yEd, a fine and remarkably useful graph editor. I’m still fiddling with that graph but think it is time to export it to SVG and resume via Inkscape. It is time for annotations, score tracks, actoin markers, stock pools etc — all things which aren’t really part of the graph and are thus better performed by a more general purpose tool. Thankfully yEd can export to SVG, making this easy.

Merges are going to be interesting. The basic concept is that when CompanyA connects to CompanyB’s home station, the two companies will merge. Further, the active company will pay out a (Wabash Cannonball) Chicago-like dividend immediately prior to the merge. The two companies will then merge: stock in the active company will trade-up into stock of the parent company 1:1, the incomes will be summed and the track markets for the companies collected. Then the active player will select one of the four minor companies to add to the game and auction a share of that company in the standard fashion (shades of both Wabash Cannonball and Pampas Railroads).

This gets a little more interesting if the new minor’s home base is already connected by track. Obviously the new company should start and merge immediately, but there are several ambiguities and choices in exactly how to do that. For instance, should the minor share be sold, and if so, what should it pay out before it merges? Or should a parent share be sold and the parent then auto-pay? What about if the minor company is already connected by the track of several different um-merged companies? How to resolve that? Should all the connected companies merge? What if there are more than two? Three? Four? Five? Should there be an order of the merging and paying, or should it all happen at once in a grand orgy of unification?

Those are not the only problems. As the graph is roughly circular, gaps between home stations are small which makes early merges easy(er). Additionally, if I copy the double build rule from Pampas Railroads, which I’d like to do, merges could be extremely rapid with the game ending in but a few turns and the first-to-merge having a near unassailable advantage from their early merge-dividend payouts. Thus merges will need to be delayed and possibly the double-build ability constrained.

Mucking about

Not a whole lot here yet, mostly just sounding out the graph, start locations for the initial companies (pink) and subsequent second stage companies (green).

Diluting focus — watering concentration

Harry Wu’s Wabash Cannonball centres on share dilution. Each share pays an N’th fraction of the income of the parent company where N is the number of issued shares. This simple pattern, seemingly introduced in Han Heidema’s Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters, is fascinating in the implications it provides for temporary emergent self-interested player alliances. I’d like to do something further with that idea, carrying the core notions one step further out. Thus the notion of Muck & Brass.

At the simplest level Muck & Brass is still a share dilution game, except that now companies may also merge and in merging their incomes and issued shares would aggregate, potentially offering even higher rates of return for (some) shareholders. Mergers would also offer an additional game-ending clock.

The current prototype consists of a map of England, Wales and Scotland, with a Pampas Railroads-style graph super-imposed following mostly historical train line paths and about 7% of the rules written. The intended model is very reminiscent of Wabash Cannonball nee Pampas Railroads with the additional of the merger mechanism and a more Pampas-like handling of development values and track development. There’s also a hint of Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters and Stephenson’s Rocket in there too.

I’d like a 90 minute playtime, but I’ll settle for 135 minutes. I’m not sure I’m skilled enough to cram in the level of distraction I want in just 90 minutes, but I’m working on it.

Naming declavier

Seth Jaffey mentioned using tokens to track player investment in City States, each player having a limited supply and needing to allocate them judiciously. The idea has merit, but not I think where Seth was thinking.

A core problem with the current nascent design is transports in the mid and late game. There’s simply little to reason to build them as they’ll generally benefit others more than the builder. The core problem here is that by the early mid-game each player will already have established investment presence in all the City States, thus causing the end-game to devolve into a series of simple localised efficiency struggles. Having transport, aka communication, fall out so severely in the end-game is uninteresting and needs address.

Nothing determined yet, but I’m mostly musing along the following lines:

Feeping Creaturism

City centre ranges:

T4 may yet grow by one. The T6 Metropolis not only has infinite range (and is thus not shown), but also marks one of the end-game conditions. Board size across player counts will necessarily be a function of the above.

Fiduciary notes

Ooof. That wasn’t so easy. The main changes are adjustments to the action costs for the different buildings and their products. A few buildings were lost in the process and the tech tree had to be adjusted to suit. None of the changes were particularly large but they are rather sweeping. For instance, the ramp of action costs was flattened, so that late products don’t cost many more actions than early products. That has the happy effect of putting the driving focus on the tech tree and the resultant building rotting.

Fife and snares

A simple pass through the building graph annotating each node with the action costs of the products required as inputs on each building. Oh dear. Oh dear this is bad. Action ranges for drains run between 3 for a Granary and 15 for a Shipyard or even 22 for a Train Station. Not good at all. The top end should probably be no higher than 15. It wouldn’t hurt for the lowest drain to bump up a step either.

Percussive reduction

I added a secondary red graph to the technology graph which maps the inputs to the buildings within the various technologies. As the clear linear layering of the technology tiers was lost in the new display form I also coloured the nodes for each tier. The results are quite interesting and surprisingly close to what I’d expected. I’m specifically pleased that the tree orientation and node weighting has coarsely ordered the technologies and buildings into the order the players will generally want to build/research them, at the same time calling out the clearly ambiguous sections with nodes at similar heights. Nice.

Nando, I suspect unwittingly, persuaded me last night to lose the Tier 0 buildings. Losing them gives the game a faster start, possibly trimming around 30 mostly irrelevant minutes off the play time. A fair trade.

A similar colouring exercise on the building graph groups produced:

Carting the demiquaver

Quite a few changes here:

– About as close as I’m going to get to a final building set at this early date. There are 52 of them, which has a pleasing familiarity to it given the vacuity I’m building this game on.

– Added a key.

– Buildings continue to be coloured for their primary terrain constraint. Currently everything is bound to a single terrain. I’d like to make a few bivalent later, eg paddocks, but there’s no rush

– Buildings are shadow coloured per their primary resource cost for construction.

– Technologies are coloured for their primary resource cost for research.

– The above two mean that the building and tech cost graph edges have been removed. This makes the graph much cleaner and more readable.

– Dark edges mark the tech graph. Light edges mark the building input/output graph.

– I’ve not marked money inputs or how many of an input are required or output.

– Technology tiers are marked and grouped. The intention is that when a City State researches something in a new/higher technology tier, that ALL buildings in the City State at tier-2 will be instantly removed from the board, including any product markers on them. (It is possible that I’ll change this to build a building instead of research, but that’s a fairly small change). It is left as an exercise for the reader to see the rather severe problem that this tier-2 destruction poses for a budding City States as well as the matching implications for game strategy and timing for players.

 

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