Certificate limits

I did a quick bit of analysis yesterday and found that most 18xx games set the per-player certificate limit so that approximately 85% of all shares in the game could be held by players, if each player was at their maximum. The percentage is usually a bit lower than this for 2-player games and a bit higher for 5 or 6 player games. This seems a reasonable rule of thumb.

However, it is based on the assumption that all companies have ten shares. In games where companies start with five shares and only some might convert to ten shares, its not immediately clear how to set the certificate limit. 18Ardennes addresses this by increasing the limit as more companies convert to 10 shares. This works, but adds one more number to keep track of during play.

I'm wondering whether it would be simpler just to treat each ten-share certificate as half the "weight" of a five-share certificate. It might be simpler still to change the limit to the number of shares, rather than the number of certificates, with 10% shares counting as 1 and 20% shares as 2.

In my game, I want to always have shares available for purchase, either from new companies on from the open market. So I don't want to set the limit so high that all or most shares can be bought. This means that even in 6-player games I'll keep the limit to around 85% rather than letting it rise over 90%.

This is enough analysis to be going on with. We can always tweak the limits during playtesting if need be.