Ascendent action

I’ve a wee wish to have goods which are entirely stored in warehouses (none in supply or on ships) have their price move up on the market, but also to have an additional one or two goods of that type added to the supply, thus diluting the monopoly. There are obvious problems with this, primary is perhaps that it limits vertical growth to a maximum of five steps per game in a 4 player game. 4 player games would have 16 turns with one step up on turns 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 in the optimal case. Of course the odds against hitting that pessimal case are large. One to two steps per game would be more typical.

Hurm. Maybe that’s enough if I also have vertical rises on no goods of a given type being transacted on the turn. Yeesh. If I do that that’s going to make the probability math for the goods type distribution rather interesting if the trading game isn’t to be degenerate.

Gahh. I would like to reward monopolies. They should be difficult anyway.

Other problems:

–The race condition between warehouses and wharves. Warehouses offer same measure of market control by putting latency into transactions but also disproportionately rewards those early in the turn order after the next auction (they’ll get the modulo ships). Wharves offer supply chain control through volum. plus the income from cross player purchases.. I like that it isn’t quite clear without defining the current stock price context and holdings which should be bought first. Nice screwage opportunities around the turn order too.

– I’m a little worried that the screwage opportunities may be too large, making investing more than trivially in a colour another player holds too risky. The only address I see for that is to make the gains from continued holding via increasingly large steps in market value large enough to offset the slam opportunity. Touchy that. Too large and the game is a fast rich-get-richer. To low and each player will self-selct themselves into a primary colour and thus isolate.

– I suspect that I’ll have to grow the size of the supply with each wharf bought. Otherwise the early turn probabilities will be too low in setting up the 4th row of ships to be interesting. Players should be making decisions as to what goods to dump early in order to affect the goods distribution likely for turn 4 after the bank cubes are moved into the supply and the turn 4 ships put out and stocked. The growth can’t be linear or the nice asymmetric distribution will tend to skew badly (the numbers should be small). Gahh!

– I wonder if I can just increase the number of colours as wharves are bought, thus helping to preserve the initial asymmetry and offering a tempting monopoly target.