Tuning the new playtest release

I released a playtest version of 18GB with revised finances at the beginning of the year.

So far, the tests imply to me that the share prices of companies are too low, both when they start and when they convert, especially in games with four players.  This means that between them they have slightly less cash to buy trains.  The combination of the two (lower price, fewer trains) will mean they progress slightly slower up the stock market and thus the game will be a little too slow and too long.  Fortunately, it's not too hard to tune the factors that give rise to the underlying causes.

One such factor is that I set the highest opening share price at £100, where previously it had been set to (the equivalent of) £120, one space higher.  I did have a reason for this, to do with the possibility of a new company in the brown phase immediately buying two permanent trains, but I can address that problem in a different way.  So I will undo this change to the range of opening values.

At the lower end of the opening prices, I will return to requiring a choice between £70 and £80. Allowing the intermediate value of £75 seemed like a good idea but it gives players a false impression.  The extra £25 starting cash in the company is not enough to buy a better train or place a station marker and so is pretty pointless. 

The most important fix for the four-player game will be to push the players's starting capital back up a bit.  The new version required a complicated re-vamp of the private railways in order to mesh with the new finance system and starting capital was one factor in this mix.  The total cost of the private railways is slightly lower in the new version but I overcompensated by cutting the starting capital too much.

Once again, I did have another reason for reducing the starting cash.  In 18GB, it is sometimes possible for a player to start two companies in the first stock round.  I wanted to limit the chance of two players choosing this strategy, in case it accelerated the train progression too much.  But it is questionable whether it would be a sensible strategy for players to adopt, so by cutting too much I was addressing a edge case at the expense of the normal cases.  If the edge case does prove to be problematic, I can probably address it in other ways instead.

I may also need to make some additional tweaks to offer more chances for companies to double-jump on the stock market in the early game, but any changes in this regard would likely be isolated and subtle and are just part of normal tuning.

Testing also revealed that the certificate limits may be too low, so I will tweak them slightly.  I haven't revisited these in a long while.