Trigger - Company Loan to President

[akuenzi]

Last night I was reminded once again just how 'not good' at this game I am. I was playing something everyone else here has likely passed many times over. It was campaign # 4, Silver Booms and Market Busts, and on the easiest setting. Things went great for a while, and I built up a beautiful railroad over a couple hours, so I thought. I'd even managed to buy every share of stock... though I was fairly levered to do this. After reading a couple strategy guides, it was recommended not to let purchasing power go below $300K for this scenario, which I was careful to observe. I had a fairly hefty debt load, but I was in the process of paying it down. Trying to balance this with reducing my leverage, I also bumped up the dividend. I'm sure you all know the story.

Then I got the call from my broker with that little deficit problem in my account, the very first one I'd received in the game. That $300K buffer I was maintaining just disappeared! Having focused on my own company (probably my first mistake), I didn't have any stock in other companies, so I couldn't sell off anything to close the gap. I had the dividend set at about $700K per year, so I checked the date to see when the quarterly payment would hit. No such luck, I was just past the quarter end. But still, the company had plenty of cash. I think I had over a million sitting in liquid cash, and could have borrowed more if I'd wanted it, but there was no mechanism to get it into my hands -- me, the SOLE owner of my company, and I couldn't even get the cash! I couldn't think of anything to do, so the broker took care of it for me, and you all know what is coming.

Long story short, the broker sold every one of my shares. One of my competitors, who had virtually nothing bought up almost ALL of the shares, and now he was leveraged to the hilt. Just like that. I went from an owner to a company president with no stock and deeply in personal debt, now working for a johnny-come-lately ding dong who stole my company.

This really frustrated me. Sure, my pride was hurt, such as it was over a silly game, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem to depict reality either. I'm a CPA, and in real life, I see wholly owned companies all the time that lend funds to their owners. It's rarely healthy for their business, but it's a legitimate business transaction.

So, not having anything better to do today, being home and sick, I wanted to create a new type of 'event' to help with this sort of situation.

[akuenzi]

COMPANY LOAN TO PRESIDENT

I think I managed to create some triggers and events that would allow the player to take money out of his/her company. I still wanted it somewhat based in reality, or with some justification, so I gave it some qualifiers. The trouble is, it seemed harder to test than I thought it would be. Last night I so easily tanked a company it seems, when this would have really helped, but today it seems I couldn't do anything wrong, and seemed to be holding gold bricks. Anyway, at the beginning of each month, the trigger will ask the player if he/she wants a $100K loan, if the following things are TRUE:

1. The player's purchasing power is < 0.

2. The company has at least $100K in liquid cash OR they have the ability to take out another bond (ie, a credit rating of at least BBB).

3. The player doesn't have more than $400K in loans with the company already.

4. The value of the player's stock is more than the amount of total loans with the company.

I guess this is intended to be a relief loan in emergencies (ie, when a guy gets the friendly call from the broker), but I suppose the first trigger could be dropped, which would make loans available at virtually any time. The second trigger was intended to assess the company's health, to see if it was even a valid loan. If they had no cash, and couldn't borrow anymore, than it wouldn't seem possible to loan money to the president. In order to see if they could borrow more, we'd have to know their credit rating. Unfortunately, I didn't see any trigger for this, so I forced it to calculate the debt/asset ratio. That is part of the credit rating, but I couldn't figure out how to calculate the second part of it, the debt coverage ratio, or something like that. The calculation is easy enough, but I didn't see the triggers available. I also put a limit on the total debt of $500K. That's admittedly arbitrary, but it's also in there for the sake of time -- I soon learned that the interest calculation complicated things. The amount of the loans are also contingent on the player's stock as collateral, hence the last trigger. If the stock value is only $100K, that's all the player can borrow.

This sort of event would have saved my company if it would have been available last night! It still might not save the player if the deficit is over $100K, as it wouldn't be for a month until another loan could be taken out.

And by the way, I learned something interesting about calculating a player's purchasing power. A strategy guide says it is player's cash plus 1/2 of their stock value. This is true so long as the player doesn't short any stocks. When shorting occurs, the formula appears to be the player's cash BEFORE the shorts, plus 1/2 of their stock value AFTER the shorts, plus the cash received over short value impact to the stock value. In other words, the formula only gives you credit for part of the cash you received from the shorts -- if you received $100K from shorting stocks, and the value of the stocks is a negative $95K, you get credit for $5K.

[akuenzi]

INTEREST PAYMENTS

Naturally, this isn't a free loan to the president. If there are other shareholders, they are going to want him/her to pay it back. Even if the president owns the company outright, he/she could get in trouble with the IRS over things like this, if it wasn't paid back. It might then be considered a deemed distribution, but I won't bore you with all those things. I just pretended that each month the president would make interest payments like clockwork. I ran into a complication, because I couldn't make up a 'debt variable' with the carrying amount of the debt. All I could do was use a wild card variable that gives me the number of loans taken out, at $100K apiece. For up to $500K in loans, this required me to create 5 different events to handle this.

So, at the end of each month, the program looks up how many loans are outstanding, and then removes cash from the player equal to 1% of the outstanding debt balance and places it back in the company coffers. It will continue to do this until the loan is paid off.

[akuenzi]

LOAN REPAYMENT

The last event I set up was to prompt the player to repay the loan. At the beginning of each month, the program will ask the player if he/she would like to repay the loan if the following things are TRUE:

1. The player has at least 1 outstanding loan.

2. The player's purchasing power is at least $110K.

If the above are true, it asks the player if he/she wishes to repay $100K. If 'yes' is chosen, the cash changes hands accordingly. I chose $110K for the purchasing power as I wanted to leave at least a little cushion for the payout, but maybe it should be even larger than that. The interest is already taken care of with other events/triggers, so it's not applicable during the payoff.

[akuenzi]

I'd be curious to know what anyone else reading this thinks about events such as this. Has anyone tried this? Is there an easier way to do it than what I tried? I basically had to use 7 events to do this:

1. Initiate loan.

2. Monthly Interest - $100K loan.

3. Monthly Interest - $200K loan.

4. Monthly Interest - $300K loan.

5. Monthly Interest - $400K loan.

6. Monthly Interest - $500K loan.

7. Loan repayment.

Each one of these events is looking at the player and the company once per month, but hopefully it's not enough to drag down the game play. Like I mentioned above, I had a hard time trying to test this to see if it would work. More testing will be needed, but I did get it to a point where it offered me a loan. The trouble was, my deficit was more than $200K, so it didn't help, and I lost my company anyway. Even though I could stay on as the president, I couldn't borrow any more since I had to have some stock as collateral, according to the triggers I chose.

If anyone wants to see the specific trigger code I used, just say the word.

[jeffryfisher]

Much easier: With the game paused, the player sells one batch of stock, and then the company buys it, pushing the price back up. Repeat as needed (or until the company runs out of cash and credit). "Crunch time" as I call it, is a very very fine balancing act. I highly recommend saving the game frequently under a series of different names, and make sure you keep a fail-safe until you're in the clear.

BTW, this trouble usually comes from economic downturns. When the economy goes south, so do share prices. If you're heavily leveraged, you can be wiped out by just a couple steps down. You probably should never buy stock during a boom, and you should even be leery of buying during prosperity.

On the other hand, stock prices can go into the toilet if you blow a huge wad of company cash building a giant expansion project overnight. Since this is something you can control, you might consider doing some "insider trading" before and after your next big project. Just make sure you secure control before the shareholders can fire you (and in my modded LNG file, they send death threats at the lowest level of popularity).

[jeffryfisher]

Each one of these events is looking at the player and the company once per month, but hopefully it's not enough to drag down the game play.

What drags game play is dealing with a monthly dialog that must be dismissed. Reports of slow processing of event triggers were either greatly exaggerated or else seen on very old machines a long time ago.

Now, what can suck down a few billion CPU cycles is when a computer-run company decides to build track, especially if it is somewhat hemmed in and has several million dollars to spend on a break-out build.

To deal with both player and company, I hope you remembered to include:

"(CompanyId = PlayerControledCompanyId) and " 

in front of the rest of your trigger (unless you made it single-player only and checked human player, human company up above). You don't want your company offering loans to deadbeat AI players. You'll never even see the choice dialogs; your company will simply lose cash (if the AI chooses lucky).

[akuenzi]

Much easier: With the game paused, the player sells one batch of stock, and then the company buys it, pushing the price back up. Repeat as needed (or until the company runs out of cash and credit). "Crunch time" as I call it, is a very very fine balancing act. I highly recommend saving the game frequently under a series of different names, and make sure you keep a fail-safe until you're in the clear.

Oh for... !!!! If I can borrow another visitor's name in this circumstance: G-Wizz!! I've done the very thing you suggest more times than I can count, but never in this context. That's so simple. Usually I've done that when I set up another company for some purpose, and then gracefully bow out. Well, maybe it is simpler to do what you suggest, but it was a pile of fun trying to figure out how to do a personal loan with the company, so it wasn't all bad. It might still have application.

BTW, this trouble usually comes from economic downturns. When the economy goes south, so do share prices. If you're heavily leveraged, you can be wiped out by just a couple steps down. You probably should never buy stock during a boom, and you should even be leery of buying during prosperity.

This is definitely something I'll be paying more attention to in the future. It's the bunk to carefully nurse a railroad through it's tenuous beginnings only to lose it in an economic boom!

On the other hand, stock prices can go into the toilet if you blow a huge wad of company cash building a giant expansion project overnight. Since this is something you can control, you might consider doing some "insider trading" before and after your next big project. Just make sure you secure control before the shareholders can fire you (and in my modded LNG file, they send death threats at the lowest level of popularity).

To make sure I'm clear on this -- would you 'sell' shares of your company and buy them back BEFORE you do the big expansion, in anticipation of having later margin trouble? And in terms of the 'death threats,' which is a funny twist to build in, if you'll pardon my ignorance, what is the LNG file?

What drags game play is dealing with a monthly dialog that must be dismissed. Reports of slow processing of event triggers were either greatly exaggerated or else seen on very old machines a long time ago.

Good point. I did have a bunch of dialogue boxes in there to pop up, where the company thanks the president for the payment of interest. It was mainly as a reminder that there was a loan outstanding, but it will probably work much more smoothly if I just get rid of those.

To deal with both player and company, I hope you remembered to include:

"(CompanyId = PlayerControledCompanyId) and " 

in front of the rest of your trigger (unless you made it single-player only and checked human player, human company up above). You don't want your company offering loans to deadbeat AI players. You'll never even see the choice dialogs; your company will simply lose cash (if the AI chooses lucky).

Another good point. I'll make sure that is in there.

Here's another question. With any events that we set up in these games, is there a way to build a library of them so that they can be called up at will? In other words, I made seven events to handle this little personal loan business. In order to put this in a new map, it seems I need to enter these in all over again. If there is a new version of the game that ever gets made, it would be a nifty feature to be able to save events to a place where they can be called back again.

[Gwizz]

I haven't done this for awhile. Could be it was in RRT3 where I did some cut and paste of at least the descriptive words in the events.

I make sure I name the descriptive dialogs in a way that tells me what the event does. Sometimes I number them.

When I get a margin call the first thing I do is to see if I can send some trains to a closer station for a quicker paycheck to starve off the margin call. This can raise the stock value. Some times doing this only delays the dreaded event for one more month.

[jeffryfisher]

what is the LNG file?

default2.lng, located in the same folder as RT2_PLAT.EXE

With any events that we set up in these games, is there a way to build a library of them so that they can be called up at will?

The closest you can come is to open up a map and then select-copy the whole set of events. There are binary values mixed in with the text, but you can select around those later.

In order to put this in a new map, it seems I need to enter these in all over again.

Yup. A work-around that I've never used (yet) is to create a blank event and then give it loads of spaces (or some other placeholder character) in each text field. I could then close the game, open the map in a hex editor, and paste texts from my "library" over placeholder texts.

However, this wouldn't give me my binary values. Field lengths and placement are critical, so I don't think I'll ever paste more than text-on-text. Other values would still need to be hand-entered, checked etc. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet of selections/values for the events you create in any map.

Add a page in the spreadsheet to describe the use of game, company, player and territory variables, especially if you use codes to trigger other events. My US History is especially complex because it appropriates T4 in each of about a dozen territories and uses them like game vars. It also has 16 codes for G1 to trigger other events.

If there is a new version of the game that ever gets made, it would be a nifty feature to be able to save events to a place where they can be called back again.

That's a function called "export". It would also be nice to have windows-standard copy-paste and cut-paste in all text fields.