With the release of version 28 to playtesters, 18GB is basically ready for the wider world. But if I were to revise it further, I'd be tempted to think again about the capitalisation rules. Specifically, I might introduce par prices.
To recap the current situation: companies start with five shares and five times their initial price as capital. Each share pays 20% of the company's income. In a subsequent stock round, the director may convert a company to have ten shares. This drops the share price by two spaces and gives the company five times the new share price as extra capital.
What concerns me is that linking the extra capital to the current price reinforces the benefit of an early lead. If a player owns a company that is paying well, they obviously get the benefit of the early income; they also benefit from owning good shares that climb the stock market (possibly including double jumps) and enable them to convert at a comparatively high price. Lesser stocks will definitely not double jump and may well have their price hit by players selling shares in those companies.
As an alternative fix, I did consider removing the double-jump advantage. I could do this either by ruling that five-share companies don't double jump, or by saying the game starts with a basic stock market in which companies only move one space and only introduce multi-jumps from a certain phase change. Either approach would limit the most egregious cases of early stock appreciation.
On reflection, it seems easier to record par prices and give converting companies five times their par price, rather than the current share price. This is a familiar mechanism from other games (and would work the same way regarding the costs of buying from the IPO vs the open market). It would remove the capitalisation advantage of well-paying early companies.
My intention is that someone who does well early on will still gain the benefit of the income (and the share price if they choose to sell shares), but the company itself gains no advantage and so the player has to look for other options to maintain their early lead.
Looking at other 18xx games, the "convert at current price" mechanism usually seems to be found in games with incremental capitalisation, where the cost of shares increases with the price anyway. I haven't seen it in a game with partial/full capitalisation and multi-jumps. It may be a combination of mechanisms that introduces an unwanted positive feedback loop. So, if I were to tweak 18GB further, I'd experiment with dropping this mechanism.
An even more radical approach to reduce early advantage would be to drop the notion of 20% shares entirely. Instead, I could adopt the rules from 1880 China: companies would start with five shares worth of capital but shares would only pay 10%; "conversion" would just give a company its final tranche of capital. The impact of this mechanism is that when someone gets enough money for another share, the extra income is only 10% instead of 20%, so the additional advantage of buying the share is lessened. But this change would remove a choice point from the game as to whether and when to convert, and I'd rather not make that change.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thanks David for your thoughts.
ReplyDelete18GB has some defences against the profit-taking tactic. One is the possibility of jumping multiple spaces on the stock market based on the company's income. If the share price may be hurt by profit-taking, it can quickly be regained by multi-jumps. You can see this working in 1860, for example. Another is that directors may buy over the 60% limit if they are buying from the open market. So if someone buys at par and sells at CMV, that becomes an opportunity for the director to gain more shares in the company. This avoids the need for price protection or ledges.
The question of undercapitalisation is one that will need playtesting. Companies can get capital by withholding or via insolvency. Players can also dump companies completely, selling the director's certificate to the open market. It is common for each player to start a second company; the challenge is how best to use that capital across the two companies, and whether to ditch the weaker company or hold onto it for the long term.
I note what you say about 10% shares as well. The disadvantage of making this change in 18GB would be that players would no longer have the decision of whether to convert or to remain as a 5-share company, so an element of strategy (and variety) would be lost. To be fair, when I originally designed the game, I expected every company to grow up eventually, so in one sense I would be returning to the original vision, but in practice this decision has proven to be add an interesting choice for players, which would be a shame to lose.
This weekend, we tried using the par price approach in 18GB. It didn't really work. Although the game was perfectly playable, the change didn't particularly affect the early leader more than anybody else. It just encouraged a change of tactics, putting more emphasis on keeping the early companies a five-share companies (because converting them would have generated less capital and so was less worthwhile). It also removed the tension between converting early to get shares and tokens, and converting later to get more capital.
ReplyDeleteIt did have one good effect in that selling shares in weaker companies did not affect the capital they got from converting. But it also introduced new oddities. At one point, I owned just the director's certificate of a ten-share company that I had run to a very low share price. This should be been a prime target for takeover, but people were dissuaded by the immediate loss they would make on each share bought at par.
The conclusion is that I won't be pursuing this option further.