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From: jeff@hpcnoe.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.games.board
Subject: Re: Truly fair Rail Baron rules
Message-ID: <37800020@hpcnoe.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Dec-85 18:57:00 EST
Article-I.D.: hpcnoe.37800020
Posted: Thu Dec  5 18:57:00 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Dec-85 03:46:41 EST
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>                                        I decided that the real problem
>with the game is that some railroads are wildly overpriced, while some
>are wildly underpriced.

I disagree!  Sure there are railroads (like N&W) which seems overpriced
and others which seems underpriced (like D&RGW), but overall I think the
prices are fairly consistent.  Everyone has their own ideas of the good
buy railroads and bad buy railroads.  So if you play with the same group
all the time, you'll have a set of railroads which seems to be good buys
because they go quickly.  My personal preferences are:

    good				bad

    D&RGW				N&W
    PA					T&P
    SOU					C&NW
    MP					ACL
    WP					GN

I am kind of curious if other people have the same preferences (to disprove
my theory).  Send me (or post) your five favorite railroads and five
least favorite railroads.

>                                                Here's how I did it:  I
>used the computer to compute the odds of going to each city on the board.
>Then, I assigned to each railroad points proportional to the probabilities
>of each city it reaches divided by the number of railroads that reach that
>city.  

The problem with the above technique is that it ignores the length of the
railroad.  PA covers most of the money railroads.  But it lacks in length
which can take you accross the country.  The destinations also hurt much
less than some other areas because you can get close to it.  For example,
if you don't have anything in the West, going to Los Angeles is going to
cost.  If you don't have anything in the NE, going to New York might not
be too bad if you have SOU.

-- Jeff Wu
   ..ihnp4!hpfcla!j_wu