Inductive price control

The next problem is that the incentive for cube trashing is too high in the early game (possibly in the whole game). There’s too little cost or risk to the trasher, especially in a sell-buy-sell game. I could drop to a sell-buy/buy-sell but that merely puts the phasing off by one without removing the problem. Ditto for sell-or-buy. The optimal path remains to simply buy in one’s own goods, sell them, and then rotate through the goods in the bank pool trashing them until you can’t any more. While there are risks to doing this if other players are still active in the Stock Round, it is easy enough to wait until only one player is still in and then go on a rampage. The last two held goods will still provide between $10 and $5 in bonus income, same as before. What’s lost is the appreciation and investment value. The resulting end-pattern of goods values is a direct implication of initial configuration of goods on ships versus turn order, and it isn’t even hard to calculate what the end-state will be at the start of the first stock round.

Possible address: Make purchases cost $market+1. This slows open market purchases.

Hurm. The game is losing coherency. Time to clean up and simplify. Bring out the Holy Reducing Crucible!