Stocks and Mergers

from Stardock Forums

Alrighty, so I had an idea about making stock closer to its real world counterpart. Implement something where if you own a majority of someone's stock they have to buy enough to gain the majority of their company before being able to purchase you company, as illustrated:

 

Three companies A, B, C stock as follows:

 

A) 70%A 10%B 20%C

B) 30%B 30%A 40%C

C) 70%B 10%C 20%A

In my idea, Company A can buy out anyone of the other two. Company B can not buy-out anyone at all. Company C can buy out company A but NOT company B. This would add a new layer of stock counter-play and leads to another of my ideas.

 

For example if C buys A the stock would then become:

B) 30%B 70%C

C) 70%B 30%C

 

Now using my idea you would be unable to buy anyone out until you bought you stock back. However, this is where my merger idea comes in. For those larger games (>3 players) allow the last two players to 'win' by merger if these conditions are met:

1) Equal stocks for both companies as illustrated above

2) Both companies are profiting (If one is in debt, they would be a poor merge choice IRL anyway)

3) Both level 5 colony (or whatever max level is if there is one in the future)

 

 

I think this would add an interesting strategic element to stock buying and not just being a stock grab past a certain point.

 

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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

Is it the case the companies don't have to buy their stock back in order to buy you out? That's how it seems and it drives me crazy. Buying another company's stock because you speculate that their worth will increase seems like a reasonable strategy to me. I would think that this would also get rid of the need for the arbitrary mechanic of having to pay double for stock owned by other players during a buy-out. 

 

In Jakkillr's example, I'm assuming that it occurs with those percentages if everyone's stock value is equivalent. To be honest, I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what you mean, but here is what I imagine would be the most intuitive for new players:

All the companys' stock is initially $10 lets say. I don't know how it's calculates in the game, but lets assume that their debt, cash, patents, claims, factories, and resources are all valued at $10,000,000 when put together. 

So for example, Company A owns 70% of 10,000,000, 30% of 10,000,000 and 20% of 10,000,000 totalling 10,000,000!

If they liquify their goods and materials, to get $100,000 in cash, then they still have a total net-worth of $10,000,000 because the no longer have those goods and materials. Now at this point, if some of the goods they liquified increase in value, then they will be worth less than the companies that still hold that good in their stocks.

What this means is that company A can't buy out anyone because as they gather the cash to do so, their worth isn't automatically changing. they are just exchanging stock of equal value. So for instance, they may use %10 of their worth to buy %10 more of Company B, but until Company B is worth a different net-worth from Company A, nothing has really changed. 

In such a scenario, a good defensive play would be to buy the stocks of the company of the best player. Hypothetically, you could just ride on their coattail long enough to gain a large enough advantage to buy out the player of the least value. It's brutal, but capitalism is brutal. For the players who believe in meritocracy, they can just buy their own stock and make as much profit as they can with manufacture of goods. It's possible that Mohawk tried this and found that it made for bad experiences, but I haven't read such an account.