The Big Four?

Perhaps the most significant change in the history of British railways was the grouping of 1921-3, in which the existing railways were forced to amalgamate into the Big Four (LNER, LMS, GWR and Southern Railways). I had been planning to end Britain Under Steam before this point, but now that I'm adding rules for mergers, I can revisit that choice.

I'm thinking of requiring that in the final phase of the game, each player may only own a single company. The idea is that they would merge their other companies into that company (or let them wither completely). I would add a special merger round in which every company would get the chance to merge, followed by a stock round in which each player must end with only one directorship.

To this, I could add grey tiles with only a single station circle. So if a company can promote a city to a grey tile, it would gain exclusive control of that city. I'm undecided as to whether it could forcibly remove other company's markers or whether this upgrade would only be permitted if a company has the only marker in the city. This would need playtesting, of course.

I'm also unsure whether the final mergers should be initiated by the parent company or by the merging company. In my current rules for mergers, I've required both directors to agree to the merger. (Usually the two directorships will be help by the same player). But in the final merger, you could have each company choose which other company to merge into, so that all companies are included in the merger. The main point of interest is what would happen to the share price. You could see a player deliberately running down one of their lesser companies and merging it into another player's company, to drag back their opponent's share price. It's an intriguing idea.

Historical population

Ian D. Wilson kindly pointed me at the Vision of Britain web site. Buried therein is information about the population of British cities and administrative areas from 1801 to the present day. This is very useful as an indication of the relative wealth of different cities. It's less helpful for towns, as these entries tend to include the population of the surrounding areas.

Another relevant site is the Wikipedia page on Towns and Cities in England by Historical Population.

From this data, I've produced a list of possible changes to my game map. These will have to be balanced against their effect on the game, of course.

In some cases, I'm having to choose between showing a town which has an important rail junction and a larger town that has more wealth but less direct impact on the rail network. For example, Rugby is a small town. Nearby Northampton is more economically significant, but the important junction is at the smaller of the two.

To merge, or not to merge?

I'm wondering whether to include the ability to merge companies in the later phases of the game. Historically, the major companies did not merge until they were grouped into the Big Four in 1923. But some of them did work together, for example to run trains along the length of the East Coast and West Coast Main Lines. So a game merger would not represent a literal reformation of the companies, but would reflect growing co-operation between the companies.

My reason for contemplating this change to the design is that I'm still worried about managing the number of companies. If they each have to own a permanent train, that will be a lot of time spent calculating income. It could undo the benefits that I hope to gain from a simpler income mechanism.

It might also have a desirable side-effect in reducing the number of company markers that might be in play. This in turn would let me simplify the tile upgrade paths in some cases. This is not a major consideration, just a "might be nice" outcome.

If I adopted this approach, I would allow companies to merge once the brown tiles are available. Two five-share companies would merge to form a ten-share company. A ten-share company could merge with another company by swapping shares on a two-for-one basis, as in 1841.

An alternative might be for me to combine some companies at the outset. For example, I could decree that the GNR and NER would be represented by a single company in the game. Possibly the LYR and the MSLR could be similarly combined for game purposes. Or the LYR could be combined with the Caledonian, the NER with the NBR, and the MSLR with the Midland.

These are just musings at present. More testing is needed!

Long Distance

The geography of rail routes in Britain focuses largely on the main lines that run from one end of the country to another. The basic 18xx game system does not favour long routes over more convoluted ones that connect the same number of cities in a smaller area. So I'm looking for ways of encouraging companies to build these routes.

One approach is the use of bonuses for runs that connect certain cities or off-board areas. Examples include the red-to-red runs in 18EU, the North-South routes in 1812, or the Moscow-Ekaterenin route in 1861. I intend to have some of these, including at least routes from London to Plymouth, Holyhead and Aberdeen.

Another approach is to choose the tile mix to encourage certain styles of route. For example, in 1830, the only yellow tile that can be laid on a city is a straight. My current plans are to have no tight curve yellow tiles on cities or towns, thus encouraging the development of through routes. (Interestingly, this is in contrast to 1829 and 1825). I'm also not including green tiles #28 and #29 (with tight and shallow curves), so that upgrades of plain tight curves will also favour through routes.

I did consider banning tight curves altogether, including when tracing routes through more complex tiles, but this doesn't work in practice.

As an aside, I have found that the track building works well if the only yellow tile I allow on towns is one with a shallow curve. I.e. I exclude straight tiles as well as tight curves. This allows me to use towns to block direct routes between certain cities in the early game, which is very useful for balancing the companies.

I also considered providing a bonus for running the shortest route between two locations, or banning train routes that took a longer path than the most direct one. This could get rather complicated, so I will hold it in reserve. What I might do is to give a reward at the start of each stock round to the company with the shortest route on the red-to-red equivalents. This would reward track building without complicating the calculation of income during the stock round.

England Under Steam!

I've been worrying that my game might be too big for my goals of a game that I can play with my gaming group in an evening. With 11 companies, it would be towards the larger side of 18xx games, although not one of the few monster games such as 18C2C or 1825 with all units in play. Even if I can streamline the system a bit (and it remains to be seen whether I can achieve that), the game might take rather longer than I'd like. Bear in mind that my companions and I aren't the fastest players.

So in a fit of either madness or inspiration, I tried hacking off some of the map, on the assumption that the corresponding companies will also be removed. Scotland has been replaced by off-board areas, as has more of East Anglia. These changes remove the NBR, Caledonian and GER. The LSWR territory has gone too. The result is noticeably smaller, with just 52 playable hexes and 7 companies.

I'm quite taken with it. It might make more sense to keep 8 companies instead of 7, so that in a 4-player game, everyone can have the chance to run 2, but I think it'll be worth experimenting with the smaller version.

More map analysis

In my last post, I mentioned that my draft map has a lot of "dot towns". I wondered how this, and other aspects of the map, compared with existing games. So one evening I wrote a table that compared certain values for 1825, 1830, 1856, 1861, 1812, 1889, 18EU and Steam Over Holland.

Starting with towns and cities, I found that the ratio of town hexes to total hexes varies from 10% (1861) to 23% (18EU). My draft map was on 38%; as I thought, it was clearly higher. For cities, the ratio in existing games varies from 15% (1861 again) to 33% (1825 Unit 2). Here my draft map was closer, with 33% equalling the highest existing game. Although it has more "big cities", which is a category that (depending on the game) includes "OO" cities named cities with higher values than the norm. Conversely, the ratio of plain hexes was far lower than the norm at 30%, compared with the 50%-75% found in existing games.

I also compared the number of town and city hexes per company in the game. Here my draft map is well within the norm, reflecting the fact that the game has more companies than many others.

I also looked at terrain. Britain Under Steam doesn't have the usual mountain and river hexes; it's more like Steam Over Holland in that it has mountain hexsides. So for both of these games, I counted the number of hexes adjacent to a mountain or river hexside and used that value. The result is 29% of the total hexes, which is squarely within the "expected" range.

Finally, I counted the number of "plain" hexes, by which I mean playable hexes that don't contain any terrain, towns or cities. At 16%, the score for my draft map is very low, matched only by the terrain-heavy (and smaller) maps for 1889 and 1825 Unit 2.

Based on this information, I plan to review each town on the map to see whether it would work better as a plain hex. Some of them represent genuinely important towns that it would not make sense to remove. Others may need to remain towns so that the tile upgrade path is appropriate for that location. But there should be some that I can remove.

To complicate matters, I may also be downgrading some of the cities, which will of course increase the number of towns again! I may well end up with more populated hexes than the average game. I don't see that as necessarily a problem, provided that they are all justified (and that the game plays well, of course!).

Analysing the map

To refine the map, I've analysed how many hexes it has of each type. I have drawn up a table that shows how many hexes have dot towns with 6 playable hexsides, or cities with 5 playable hexsides, and so forth. For hexes with fewer than five hexsides, I've noted the different configurations (e.g. K, X or Y shapes). This shows me that I have a few hexes that don't fit the more general pattern, which suggests that I might change those hexes. For example, one city hex has just 2 playable hexsides that are adjacent and I don't want to provide a tile with that shape, so I might make it a pre-printed hex. In other cases I can add track in otherwise unplayable hexes, in order to increase the playable hexsides of adjacent hexes. None of this is rocket science but the table is very useful in suggesting which hexes might need work.

I've also realised that I have large numbers of dot towns. In some cases, this could lead to boring track lays. For example, where a row of coastal hexes each contains a dot town, they would all upgrade to green "K" tiles with only one permitted orientation. I am considering adding some extra track to link such hexes along the coast, so that the number of playable hexsides is increased and so more options are available when laying tiles.

I'm pleased to be at this stage; I think I am close to having a playable map. I'm sure it will continue to change but it's taken a long time just to get this far.