Increasing liability

With a number of playtest games on record, I am able to analyze them for common patterns. One such pattern I found was that the player who managed to start a third company went on to win the game around 90% of the time. While this could theoretically be correlation rather than causation, e.g. that the players were already winning when they started the third company, it seems likely that the extra company cash that comes with the additional company is sufficient to swing the game markedly towards that player.

I had hoped that other aspects of the game design would balance this tactic; for example, it is harder to transfer trains between companies than in most 18xx games.  The rules for determining player order do give players the opportunity to put themselves in a position to buy the extra company, at the cost of buying fewer shares, but I don’t want this to be the dominant factor in the game.

Having observed the problem, there are several possible changes that may reduce its impact:

1. Increase the cost of starting the extra company
2. Make transferring trains even harder
3. Make the new company more of a liability

In two recent games, I addressed point 1 by requiring 60% of shares to be sold before a company starts, in later phases of the game.  This worked well in the brown phase but had an unfortunate side-effect in the blue phase.  To raise cash for a second company (let alone a third), players had to sell shares in other companies, which reduced the share price of those other companies.  As people had tended to buy the cheaper shares, either as value for money or because that was all they could afford, these sales tended to affect the weaker companies. In one game at least, the player with the strongest company rose above this pack and went on to win.  So the rule change solved one problem but has potentially created another.  I’ll need to keep an eye on this.

For point 2, one tester suggested that the minimum cost for trains could be half their face value.  If the third company bought a new train, this change would mean that an existing company would have to raise at least some cash in order to buy the train across, which seems like a fair deal.  However, it doesn’t affect the opposite tactic, in which the new company buys an old train from an existing company, putting more cash into the existing company.  The existing rule that restricts the maximum cost to twice face value is effective for yellow trains, less so for later trains.  (I could of course change the maximum cost).  The risk to the design of restricting these costs is that transferring trains between companies may become completely unviable, which would remove an element of strategy altogether.

Point 3 is the approach taken by most 18xx games.  Typically, you cannot sell the directorship of a company at all, so buying a company automatically brings an element of risk with it.  The side-effect is that players become reluctant to cross-invest, to avoid the threat of having a broken company dumped on them.  Mike Hutton uses an alternative approach in both 1860 and 1862, which is to make sales of shares in a trainless company yield only half the share value.  I have now tried this in 18GB and It seems to work. 

A consequence of adopting this last change is it becomes more advantageous for players to keep companies and let them become insolvent, rather than to sell them.  This is a shame, as one of the goals of 18GB is to have a fluid market with shares being bought and sold frequently.  Indeed, early on I did have the “new” rule and I removed it specifically to encourage players to dump their companies completely.  Sadly this turned out to unbalance the game as noted above.

I might consider also increasing the liability for insolvency, by reducing the income from insolvent companies (again, as Mike Hutton did in 1860).  This might keep the balance of choice between dumping a company or running it as insolvent.  But it would affect other aspects of the game in turn, as insolvent companies would take longer to become viable; indeed, later in the game they might become useless.  So I will probably leave the Insolvency rules as they currently stand.  18GB has a different overall flow from 1860 and I don’t want to change it in a way that makes the game longer.

In summary, I have made trainless companies worth less, which adds more liability when asset-stripping a company.  I also require more shares in order to start companies in later phases, which requires players to commit more resources when starting a new company.  (This may cause other side-effects that I will have to address).  I have also considered reducing the income for insolvent companies as well but am not adopting that change yet.

Streamlining

Someone commented that I haven't given an update here for six months, which is a fair point.  We have been testing during that time and I have continued to tweak the design in response to feedback, so it’s reasonable to give an update now.  Some games have been proceeding online and they have been quite slow, which accounts for some of the delay, although the online experience has been useful in testing the clarity of the rules as well as the game itself so it has its advantages.  It is definitely time for an update or two.

Apart from one significant exception, I'd describe most of the changes as tweaks.  There have been a lot of them; almost every aspect of the game has been tweaked in some way, including the map and tiles, the train mix, the private railways, and advanced features like the characters.  This is “game development” rather than “game design” and as a newcomer to the design & development process I’m finding that development takes more time than the original design.

I addressed some of the concerns about players gaining too great an advantage too early by changing the value of green tiles. To counter the impact this had on company income in the mid-game, the 4+1 trains have become 4+2 trains instead; the increased income come less from the extra +1 per se and more from the fact that this allows trains to run longer routes.  The impact of stock sales on share prices has been simplified further, which again helps to pull back a leader.

The extra cost for the LNWR directorship has been replaced with a new Private Railway that requires the owner to start the LNWR and reserves that right to that player.  This fits more in the spirit of 18xx than the extra cost for a particular company.  The other private railways have been adjusted a bit to compensate. The special ability of the Midland Railway company has also been replaced by a more general change to the tile mix.

The rules for building track across hills have been simplified.  The cost of building across estuaries has been halved.  Various minor map changes have improved the game.

A recent change has been to remove the yellow 3-trains. This simplifies the train mix and speeds up the start of the game.  I am also changing the cost of yellow and green trains in order to balance the game start.

I removed the WW1 rules completely.  Although they worked, they added fiddlier route calculations to the end game, when I just want the game to be resolved quickly.  The only remaining reference to WW1 is the ability of one of the characters, who gets to run an extra train starting in Inverness with the ability to run through blocked-out stations, once per game, as an homage to the endeavours to ship arms and supplies to Scapa Flow in the north of Scotland.

I have also moved the characters back to being an optional extension, rather than the “advanced game”.  If you use this variant, there is now a random selection of characters to include in each game, adding to the variety, while the process for players to choose characters is simpler than before.  Some characters are more valuable than others and have a small upfront cost.  Most have been tweaked for balance and playability purposes.

Overall, these changes have made the game smoother and more balanced.  Game development is a slow process but the game is better as a result.