Single-station city bias?

A couple of playtesters have commented that the fixed income for single-station city tiles puts the companies that start in such hexes at a disadvantage.  That is not my intention and I review this aspect of the design in this article and the following post.

Although the home cities of these companies yield lower income than larger cities, single-station tiles can be upgraded more easily and can have multiple connections, so it should be easier to build more varied networks and to run multiple trains without laying a second marker.  Some of these companies start near higher-scoring cities and are better placed to upgrade those cities than companies that actually start in the higher-scoring cities.

That is the choice I intended these companies to offer.  This design goal would be forfeit for some companies if it turned out that they were unable to build multiple routes while the game still allows companies to run three trains.  To check this, I have reviewed the possible early incomes of all the companies in the game and have investigated a couple of possible rule changes that might make building multiple routes easier.  Some of changes these would have been quite major ones to make at this stage in the development of the game, so it is fortunate that they turned out to be unnecessary. 

One such option was to ease the restriction on laying two tiles, replacing the current rule that only one may be a city, with a version that applies that limit only to double and triple station cities.  This variant would allow a company to upgrade its single-station home city in addition to another city build.  But an evaluation of all the companies shows that only three (the MR, GWR and SWR) would significantly gain from this rule and the primary advantage would arise from building longer routes rather than multiple routes, so this option didn’t help the stated goal.

Another possibility was to add an extra “prong” to the yellow one-city tiles.  This would allow companies to build three routes without having to upgrade their single-station home city.   But this change breaks the upgrade process.  Companies would have fewer reasons to upgrade their home cities to green, and other companies would have one fewer option for building new track in the hex to force an upgrade.  If the green tiles had two marker spaces instead of one, there would be less incentive to upgrade to brown and if the tile were tokened out it would be harder for another company to do so.

In the end, I have adopted a very limited change.  The Midland Railway now has the special ability of a free upgrade for its home city when laying a green tile there.  Other companies are not affected.  Most of them would not benefit from applying this rule and the GSWR would be too strong.  So a special ability for the Midland Railway is sufficient.