Re: [Rails-devel] Further 1835 testing

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 4:50 AM, Stefan Frey <ste...@we...> wrote:
> On Friday, November 18, 2011 10:39:01 am Erik Vos wrote:
>> > 3) Most people's definition of a "share" is such that the stock price
>>
>> chart gives
>>
>> > the price of one share.  Therefore, a "share" is 10%.
>>
>
> That is definitely the best argument. for PR's share unit being 10%.
> Could someone remind me (as a newbie to 1856) how does it work
> for the Candian government railway if it issues 20 shares? Does the share
> price reflects still 10% or does it refer to 5%?
>

There are two basic concepts that my gaming circle uses for 18xx games
that I think are well-suited for clarifying this issue.

There's the "pieces of cardboard" or "certificates", which is used for
things like maximum certificate limits.
Then there's "shares" which are the divisible denominations of the
company ownership.

Each "share" is divided up into face-value percentages, the most
common being 10%. However, a single "piece of cardboard" may have
multiple "shares" represented (e.g. the president's "certificate" is
really 2 "shares")

So, in terms of internal code representation, we (should) have two
classes and a few properties.

Class 1: Certificate.
- property: share_array

Class 2: Share.
- property: base_percentage


So, for situations like 1856's formation of the CNR, it's actually a
decision of whether we're creating 10 10% shares (using 9
certificates) or 20 5% shares (using 19 certificates). This is part of
the process of the CNR formation, because it requires calculating how
many companies are being folded in.


>> Yes, that is a sensible point of view.  One problem is, though, that we
>> must rethink how to report selling multiple shares.
>
> Erik I even wondered how you got everything consistent with his definition
> PR's share unit being 5%?
> I suspect you created a variable that defines something like "stock is quoted
> in multiples of 2".
>


But you never sell "shares", you always sell "certificates" (i.e. the
piece of cardboard).  So, your transaction is always with the
"container" for the shares.


>> If a player sells two 5% certificates, what did he sell in terms of shares?
>> One share?  Two 5% shares? Two half-shares?
>>
>
> I prefer two "5% certificates". All other definitions end up being ambiguous
> in some constellation. I would even use an ID for the certificate types
> instead of the 5% attribute, as there might come up a game with various
> certificates that have the same nominal but differ in some other properties.

I'm a little unclear on the 1835 situation. My thought would be that
the base "share" value should be whatever the smallest denomination
being used is.

So, if there's 2x 5% shares floating around and everything else is
10%, we should use 5% as the base value, and the whole company's set
of (cardboard) certificates should contain a number of share objects
that adequately represents their total value. This means that the
whole company has 20 "shares" of stock, divided into 10 (cardboard)
certificates. (e.g. 2x certificates at 5%, 7x certificates at 10% each
containing 2 shares, and 1x certificate at 20% which contains 4
shares.)

Having two separate objects makes all of the math and logic *so* much simpler.

>
> Stefan
>

---Brett.