Trigger - Commodity Simulator

[akuenzi]

I probably shot a day messing with this, but it was a fun challenge. I read somebody's post recently (tried to find it, but couldn't locate it), who said they would like it if the game would allow the purchasing of the underlying commodities transported to or from industries. Today I tried to create something that would do this. Not sure if it's of any use.

I called the commodity 'gold,' though I suppose that technically isn't one of the game's commodities. The challenge was to create something that would fluctuate in value and be tradeable through the same stock market screen we use in buying/selling the railroads.

First, within a map scenario, I set up a company (calling it 'GOLD') with the maximum amount of cash ($100M from player + $4M from public) possible, so as to maximize the number of shares available for trading. Next, in order to give it some assets (but not cash, which the 'company' could use to do rail activity), I created a tiny region on the map, set a huge price to buy it, and gave it atrocious goodwill, which would push up its price even more. Almost all of the new company's cash was used to buy the rights to this tiny region, which put it on the balance sheet. Then I forced the company's cash to be zero, set the dividend rate to zero, and had the player resign as chairman. Then I had the chairman sell off the $100M ownership until all stock was held in the hands of other investors. Thus, the company was basically gutted, had no cash, and ownership rights only to a tiny square of property for a very large price.

Next I set up several events that would hopefully keep this 'company' from performing as a 'company.' I forced it to have the manager Thomas Swann. The only benefit he comes with is slightly increased goodwill, so I thought it would be okay to take him out of the game and leave him in this 'dummy' company functioning as a commodity. I forced its credit rating into the toilet so no borrowing could take place and set overhead and manager salaries to be 99% less than normal to keep it from attracting cost. I also restricted the Company's access to every territory, and made it so they couldn't buy or do anything with them. Since it would attract a little cost over time (tiny amounts of overhead and the manager salary), I set up an event to bring in cash $1,000 at a time whenever the cash balance hit zero or below, just enough to keep them there, and never enough to do anything uncommodity-like, such as build a railroad or pay a dividend.

With this dummy company (now a 'commodity') unable to do anything but barely subsist, I made up a couple new events to help it fluctuate in value. I learned that the noncash asset of territory rights wasn't enough to keep the share value from slowly going down to zero, so these new events helped its valuation to move either up or down each month. Right now it's 'random,' but it wouldn't be hard to have other events that could force a specific move in the share price in either direction.

After a lot of testing, it kind of works... but sometimes it goes down the toilet to a $1 share value, too, and struggles to ever rise again. It also sometimes goes over $100, and has the typical stock split at year end. It seems like the program gives it an inherent bias to the downside, but that's probably just a reflection of the game engine trying to calculate a decreased stock value for this dummy company that has nothing and can do nothing, as modified by events that try to keep the price buoyed upward. Right now there's a 50% chance of either an increase or decrease in the stock value each month. I set the downside only at 20% and the upside at 34%. It seems to hang fairly stable, but like I said, it sometimes goes down to the bottom.

All things considered, it's likely not worth a thing... but it does add one more thing to trade and would be a way for someone to generate some cash, and it appears the computer companies figured that out as well.

[jeffryfisher]

I am wondering what a "hard" commodity would be good for in a game where cash is perfect (and earns interest). Maybe if someone designs a scenario in which cash can be inflated (devalued), taxed, threatened by war/conquest, then players could be forced to consider hedges like commodities and foreign investments.

One thing that can hurt cash in the game is when the prime rate is lowered a step or two. I think it takes only one step before boom times pay 0% interest on player and company cash hoards. At two steps, interest in prosperity is zero and in a boom it's negative. Negative interest is like losing value to inflation, and that could push players to park savings in commodities

[akuenzi]

I think you're probably right -- it doesn't have much place in the game when cash works fine. I did it mainly for the challenge. If I could figure out how to get the price to 'bend' according to the events more, it could be quite useful as a hedging instrument depending on the game's economy at certain times.