Starting bank balance.

[AP]

Just pondering our server game. Starting in 1750, 4 players now above £10,000,000 in the bank by 1760. By 1835 and the advent of rail, would expect that to be up to £75M+ (and maybe well into the hundreds of milions for the leading companies).

Naturally some companies prosper and others fail over a 100 year period, and inevitably those that survive are the ones in decent financial shape.

However, it would seem that "late joiners" are going to be very much penalised, if they start at 1835 with £250k.

There needs to be an element of rewarding enterprise and effort, but equally, it needs to be viable for players to join later, and not be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude apart from their competitors. I suggest the starting balance needs to scale with time somehow.

Also, what is the interest rate for bank balances in credit?

[jamespetts]

The rate for accounts in credit is currently 2.5%, but I am considering abolishing this entirely.

As to starting amounts, the long term plan is for players to start with no free money at all, and have to build up a network by borrowing: the more that players borrow, the more that they can build, but the more profit that they have to be able to make quickly in order to repay the interest.

[AP]

The rate for accounts in credit is currently 2.5%, but I am considering abolishing this entirely.

Sensible. Otherwise it doubly rewards those who accumulate.

I suppose if you wanted to emulate a market somewhat, you could have interest rates set based on demand for borrowing vs demand for saving. I.e. if everyone is saving, borrowing is cheap, and vice versa. 

[jamespetts]

Sensible. Otherwise it doubly rewards those who accumulate.

I suppose if you wanted to emulate a market somewhat, you could have interest rates set based on demand for borrowing vs demand for saving. I.e. if everyone is saving, borrowing is cheap, and vice versa. 

That is an interesting idea, although a difficulty is that all transport companies is a small subset of "everyone".

[ӔO]

I wonder if there are any stock market experts on the boards?

My assumption is that one would normally want to invest in companies with promising growth and solid profits, instead of only having solid profits and no growth.

[Jando]

I wonder if there are any stock market experts on the boards?

My assumption is that one would normally want to invest in companies with promising growth and solid profits, instead of only having solid profits and no growth.

That's very old school thinking, these days you invest into companies before other investors do. In that case profit of the company doesn't matter anyway cause you sell your shares after the other investors have bought theirs and driven the stock up.

[jamespetts]

That's very old school thinking, these days you invest into companies before other investors do. In that case profit of the company doesn't matter anyway cause you sell your shares after the other investors have bought theirs and driven the stock up.

Ahh, but in a game starting in 1750, old school thinking makes sense. However, this is probably getting into complexity well beyond our ability to simulate.

[Sarlock]

Removing the interest rate on positive cash balance makes sense.  The current model already does reward borrowing: I borrowed almost $2 million from my line of credit in the early years of this game and it paid off hugely as I was able to fuel very expansive growth with borrowed funds.  Next game I am going to be even more aggressive with debt expansion.  (I'm a business guy, very familiar with debt financing growth strategies)

What you can do is apply the 2.5% interest rate to the starting cash balance amount.  New players that start in later years will be able to start with the incremented cash balance and be able to set up with the more expensive infrastructure and vehicles.  At 2.5% you will double funds roughly every 28 years (call it 30 for rounding purposes).  This means that in 1750 it's 250,000 but by 1840 you can start with 2,000,000 in funds (2^3 expansion of money, or 8 times) which is sufficient to get things rolling in that time period.  Move to 1930 and you double another 8 times to 16,000,000 which again might be about right.  You can always tweak this down to 1.5%-2.0% if it's a bit too aggressive... but 16 million in 1930 doesn't go nearly as far as 250,000 in 1750.  This is super easy to do... just once a year apply the incremental percentage starting cash amount to that variable.