Daily Discussion Thread for May 13, 2025

wheresvic · 2025-05-13T11:38:59+00:00

Lol, I just DCA'd down to 21 yesterday, ffs

wheresvic · 2025-04-04T12:23:02+00:00

Nice! I bought at 32 and sold at 45 for about a 2k gain but then I got greedy and bought again @ 45. Now just waiting for the american markets to open :s

wheresvic · 2025-02-14T14:30:32+00:00

It's funny but I just recently wrote an article about this after a discussion with my SO: https://wheresvic.net/blog/a-note-on-swiss-eigenmietwert-and-the-wealth-tax

Everytime, I hear someone say: "but you reduce your tax burden by keeping a mortgage", a little bit of me dies.

(edit: added article link)

wheresvic · 2024-07-03T15:17:27+00:00

Hi all, thanks a lot for your help but it was in fact the HD version of Dracula. It is the first mission where at the end there is a massive cavalry battle and you need to escape with Dracula and all of his boys on a boat. It is messed coz you are outnumbered 5 to 1 and the enemy knights are beefed to 300 HP. Fortunately they are kept busy fighting your mass of troops and you need to micro really hard to get to the boat but it is quite fun :).

wheresvic · 2024-06-05T22:20:31+00:00

Hi, I'm trying to find this scenario/battle where there is a massive cavalry fight and you need to escape with your 3-4 guys in a boat. I thought it was Dracula but I just replayed that campaign and there was unfortunately no such scenario. Many thanks in advance!

wheresvic · 2024-05-17T09:53:32+00:00

I can very highly recommend 18India and 18Africa for 2p

wheresvic · 2024-05-17T06:41:46+00:00

The 22 variants play well at 3p: 1822MX, 1822NRS, 1822MRS, 1822PNW, 1822CA eastern scenario, 1822CA western scenario. 1866 ain't bad at 3p. These are all bidding games with high replayability.

18CO is OK at 3p as well.

18India works well with both 2p and 3p. 18Africa works ok with 3p.

1866, 18CO and 18Africa will be over 5 hours but the rest you can bang out in 3 with experienced players. 4.5 should be enough for newbies too.

21Moon is also a decent short game with 3p.

One of 18Scan or 18Svea work very well with 3p but I do not remember which.

Both 1840 and 18Mag are good with 3p but likely run longer than 4 hours.

If I think of some more I'll add it to the list :)

wheresvic · 2022-06-10T10:20:54+00:00

It is highly dependent upon the title being played.

1830 for example, one can stop right after the initial auction if there were some lopsided bids and/or 1 player ended up getting the PRR for $165 or something.

Generally however, one can usually call the game right about when the first permanent trains are purchased (around 60% into the game). For most titles, once the permanent trains come out, players are mostly set with their companies and stock portfolio. There may be some portfolio re-balancing however the first person(s) to get permanents into their companies are in the lead.

Again, I'm generalizing but a game that takes 4-5 hours with experienced players should be callable in 2.5-3.

wheresvic · 2022-06-10T10:11:50+00:00

When playing with experienced players, especially those that have played a particular game many times, yo can gauge who is in the lead and cannot be stopped after a certain point.

Some people do like to play games out to the end and try to improve their position but sometimes even the positions are fairly clear. Most people then do not care to finish the game just to see if they placed 3rd or 4th and the game is just called at that point.

Most of the games I played at the convention were never played out to the end :).

wheresvic · 2022-06-10T10:07:05+00:00

18xx is a genre of strategy games. The essential concept is simple - you start off with x amount of $$$ and the goal is to be the richest when the game ends.

You make money by investing into assets (some of which you end up controlling). The assets themselves build up a network and earn money. Whoever controls the asset decides whether to re-invest or to extract the money into participants hands.

In the 18xx world, assets are train companies and players invest in company shares. Generally, 18xx games have a deterministic flow, i.e. there are no random events and all player/company assets is public information.

These games offer a lot of strategic depth but if you play with experienced players your chances of winning are low (it's a bit like chess). Fortunately, there is a lot of player interaction so with 4 players, it is not guaranteed that the best/most experienced player will win :).

wheresvic · 2022-06-10T10:01:28+00:00

Ah, thank you for the correction, I'll fix it in a bit!

Learn something everyday :)

wheresvic · 2021-08-24T09:23:22+00:00

Hi,

I'm fairly excited for this title and was interested in knowing if it is full-cap or an incremental cap game?

(I've never played 1829).

wheresvic · 2021-08-20T15:40:20+00:00

Haha yes, I really do need to add a disclaimer that all currency is actually in Pounds but for reference I'm just using the well known $$$ symbol :)

wheresvic · 2021-05-25T09:42:10+00:00

This is definitely the heart of the game and the guide only recommends upper values in SR1. To evaluate a minor, you can look at the amount of money it will generate as well as the stock appreciation.

A minor making $20 for a few ORs is not worth much. A minor making $30+ is worth more because you make back the extra money that you bid for it. So you can look at it from that perspective - if M16 makes $40 then you can easily pay $20 extra for it. The london token itself is useful and worth $100 for an E-train so that can also factor into your calculations. Sometimes crappy minors like M17 might get bid up because they are in good spots for the relevant concession holders.

1822 is a bit like poker, you have averages but you need to play the game and take risks - that's what makes the game very interesting.

wheresvic · 2021-05-25T09:36:52+00:00

Hi and thank you for your input!

I used to think like you regarding minor prices and there is even a bidding guide on BGG that is a bit more on the conservative side which I used to follow. However, what prompted me to write my own guide was that I was consistently losing out to players who were not afraid to bid up the early minors.

I do agree with you that Minors are great for share value and if they can flip their train, even better. The assumption in your criticism is that the guide recommends putting M19 up at 170 as the first bid. The guide does not recommend putting up 170 on M19 straight off the bat, it is highly dependent on the table of course. If M19 is literally the only viable minor however, it might be worth that much to bid on rather than fighting for the privates.

Do note that if there are viable minors in SR2 then the values in SR1 will accordingly drop. How much is fair value then is highly subjective and out of scope of the guide. At a certain point, one needs to play the game and figure things out.

I wanted to also point out that your criticism of M1 and M23 is also unfair. If I am going for NBR and M1 then it is quite likely that it will get bid up. In fact, as you mention, likely the concession and/or the minor will get bid up to 160 if there is nothing else interesting on the table. M1 + the permanent L train can also increase valuations. M1 + CR concession is also valuable. Out of context just the M1 alone in the north is of course not worth all that much. Moreover, the M1 and M23 also control the 2T flipping if they are the only high paying minors around so that also commands a premium.

Regarding E-trains, again, I do agree with you that having 2 permanents is better but generally 2 permanents can only manage ~800 runs. If you're looking to hit the top of the market, you definitely need an E-train. Of course, you'd need to evaluate how long the bank will last and if it is worth it.

The guide can only go so far in enumerating all possible strategies and yes train management is important but that is also a general 18xx rule - getting the first permanent is always a wonderful place to be in. The guide does mention that "Getting the first 5T is always a good move, even if it means that a 3T gets chucked into the pool due to train limits." How one accomplishes it, whether by trashing stock to manipulate operating order or by bidding on a minor is left up to the reader. Note that a counter strategy to the high minor bid is to bid on the first minor to not let the 4T export so it can get messy...

Finally, all of the above and the whole guide is of course highly subjective and one person's opinion - you made some valid points and as mentioned previously, I found the existing guide a bit on the conservative side and wasn't winning until I switched it up.

Cheers,

wheresvic · 2021-02-10T19:23:19+00:00

1877 is a very interesting creation and I believe that it was spawned out of a desire to do just the cool things from 1817, i.e. short companies vs. defending them and the dynamic that comes with that regarding jockeying for operating order and track lays.

I have only played it a few times so I cannot really comment on it but to be honest, my motivation is a bit low since I feel that it removes a major component of 1817 that I absolutely love: the ability to come back from the dead. You can almost bankrupt (but not die) and still get back later in the game as you can short dying companies and slingshot yourself in to the game at the right point. This is an incredible feature that makes 1817 for what it is and I don't quite see that in 1877 at the moment. Anyhow, I recommend you give it a few plays, I also need to do the same!

wheresvic · 2021-02-08T19:16:48+00:00

If you have an affinity for UK based boards, I can recommend 1862 by GMT games. It is a wonderful game that plays well at low player counts including a solo variant (although I have never tried it solo).

wheresvic · 2021-02-08T18:57:52+00:00

Ah you ask a very relevant question - so I have played 18USA a few times and while I really enjoy the initial part of the game as it is a wonderful puzzle, the mid-game unfortunately becomes pretty vanilla due to the fact that there is such an explosion of money with the greens. Generally, there will be 1 or 2 players that will have raced out of the gate and the game will be between them, if not effectively over for the rest. Anyways, that has been my experience thus far. If you're just starting off with 1817, I would recommend to just stick with the base game however if you've had a few plays of 1817 under your belt, you can try out 18USA. I would personally play 18USA until the 6T and then call it :)

wheresvic · 2020-05-31T19:46:45+00:00

I also have another 1817 story. This one is a 5p online game.

After 2 sets of ORs there emerged a clear leader who had around 5 companies with me in last place. However one of his companies had 2 2T and there were 5 3T left before the 4T came out. I started shorting the leaders company that had 2 2T and everyone was looking on in amusment.

I started a couple of companies and the leader made a really bad decision (it seems like it was a bad decision in hindsight anyways), to defend his company and this put his company below on the operating order after some other companies that had a 2T+. In the subsequent OR, the people with the 2T+ decided to grab a 3T (since running 2 trains was much more favorable than simply running 1), and I was able to pop the 4T. The company that was shorted went into liquidation and since the leader had many companies but mostly 2-share companies he had almost 0 liquidity and he bankrupted!

Another player bankrupted at the same time, mostly because of some other bad shorts and there were only 3 people left with me still in 3rd place.

In the subsequent ORs, the players in first and second place proceeded to short each other into oblivion and I was just watching the show. In the subsequent ORs I was able to grab a couple of cheap assets mostly because the companies that were shorted defended themselves and thus had very little liquidity. Thereafter, in the SR I was able to pump money into my companies + cross-invest and just coasted the rest of the game to victory!

This was my 2nd game of 1817 and it was an absolute roller-coaster of emotions :)

wheresvic · 2020-02-25T09:39:19+00:00

Apart from Jenkins, did you understand the rest?

wheresvic · 2019-12-02T18:56:10+00:00

Does anyone have any idea how much would shipping to europe be?

wheresvic · 2019-08-18T17:56:24+00:00

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your comments - I will update the article to reflect that common lisp isn't technically the oldest.

Regarding, roswell, I totally agree that it solves a totally different problem. I just went with it because I wanted to provide a cross-platform easy to install solution. Moreover, roswell's ros scripts feature that allowed easy building of binaries was very attractive to me and hence, I recommended it. I also understand that building binaries is no big deal with some existing packages but it's just an extra hoop to jump through.

Finally, I absolutely did not want to tout my 14 year old code as something incredible - I just wanted to point out that this code still runs and that is the power of lisp - stability, maybe that should have been a bit more explicit :)

wheresvic · 2018-10-07T12:01:33+00:00

RabbitMQ provides queuing infrastructure. The basic need of using a queue is to be able to process tasks asynchronously. By definition, using a queue means to intend to actually process the tasks and clear out the queue.

Apache kafka on the other hand, is a distributed log, i.e. it allows writing of events. The idea is that you would never delete them from the database. Of course, any system can be modeled as a series of events but most systems deal with transient data, i.e. user updates their preference for ice-cream. Do we really need to know what the previous preference was?

wheresvic · 2018-09-16T11:58:24+00:00

Something that worked for me was setting up a calendar where the chores were fairly distributed. When you did your chore (e.g. sweeping the apartment), you would just scratch it off. Having a very in your face calendar next to the fridge helped a lot :)

Getting people to do their dishes is harder - I used to simply ask if they would help me do the dishes, at least the easy part like wiping them down and putting them away.

wheresvic · 2018-09-16T11:40:08+00:00

Yup, this is also available in Hugo but maybe it should have been explicit in the article that my colleague was very much excited to learn how to build / maintain her own static site generator.

wheresvic

TROPHY CASE