Hey here's something odd. I had tried a "normal" robber baron start on the Latvia v18 scenario.
1/ Start company with standard $90k my cash and $900k investor cash.
2/ Buy back as much stock as possible, without taking out a bond first.
3/ This leaves me with 1,000 shares and other investors with 2,000.
4/ Resign from company, then sell my 1,000.
5/ First problem: for some unknown reason, RT3 won't let me short sell any stock. This means I make about half as much cash as usual, because short selling an extra 1,000 would basically double my profit out of the massacre.
6/ Second problem: start another company, and find out that not only it is worse off than the first company in terms of cash, with investors not offering much at all, but it also gets hit with 15% interest on the first bond.
IOW, this start is useless because the second company is more crippled than the first one.
So then I thought I'd try starting the first company with different amounts of investor cash, just because I could and something might happen. There were some interesting results here.
Just for the heck of it, I tried starting the first company with my $90k and another $720k from investors, so investor cash was 8x my cash instead of 10x my cash. Then did the same thing: bought back stock until company was almost out of cash, resigned from chair, sold my 1,000 stock. For some reason, this time
it allowed me to short sell an extra 1,000. This is great for extra personal cash.
So I put the game speed to Normal for an instant to drop the stock price, then pay off the short. I now have about $260k to my name.
![YeHaa ::!**!](./images/smilies/brain_yahoo.gif)
Buying up the remaining stock in the first company would cost me a little bit of cash (they were about $13 each IIRC). To get the best start for the next company it made sense to do that first.
So, start the second company and it offers me $780k of investor cash to go with my $260k. This means the company is about $50k ahead of the default start, and I own 25% immediately. Go with that, then go check bond offers. This time around it is offering the usual first bond at the usual 11%. Great. Company is slightly stronger, and bonds are normal.
Not only that, but I have enough purchasing power to buy another 3,000 shares with a little bit in reserve. So do that, and I'm up to 40% ownership now without being badly in debt. Buying the extra 3,000 has boosted stock price a bit, so now I do the two stock issues at game start and raise a bit more cash with them. Ownership is now 36% (ie: 8/22).
Now to clear up the dead company. I buy all the stock in that and then do a merger. Since that dead company never took out a bond and had a tiny bit of cash left, net cost of the merger to my company is roughly zero. Naturally, my personal cash goes up a bit and that gives me a bit more of a buffer to margin calls. Personal debt ends up at $180k.
This is a bit much to be totally stable with my initial wages. Jumping companies makes the board cut your wages for the first few years. You'll get the full $10k for Year 1, but it will be cut to $7k in Year 2 unless you manage to achieve truly spectacular results. So, set a dividend high enough to stabilise things. This turned out to be $1.30/share. Sounds like a lot, but in terms of cash it's only about $29k.
With the standard start you can begin with a maximum of around $1,575k: $990k initial company cash + $490k bond after fees + about $95k from two stock issues. Doing the two-company-shuffle means you start with $1,622k, or an extra $47k. The difference comes close to covering two years of dividends, and you own 36% of the company immediately instead of only owning the default 9%.
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Now this is all very groovy, but is arguably not much use in the Latvia scenario since it doesn't have a PNW goal. Where it could come in handy is in stabilising stock price. Stock issues are effectively unlimited in that scenario, and are obviously very useful for expansion, but too many of them can lead to dropping stock price. If you can start the game with a large percentage of ownership and minimal debt, that gives you some scope for using your buying power to stabilise stock price without crippling your company with high dividends.
It would also be handy if, for some reason, you wanted to have a second company running during the scenario. Starting with 36% of your main company means getting a majority should be easy, and that would be required if you wanted to be able to swap between the chairmanship of two companies during the game.
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Anyway, the real point here is the dramatic difference in results by just slightly changing the percentage of investor cash on the initial company.
With investor cash at the standard (for that scenario) 91% for the first company, the result of the two-company-shuffle is worse than just playing it straight. You'll own 25% of the second company, but the company will be useless.
With investor cash at 89% for the first company, which is the difference between you putting in 1/11 of the total and you putting in 1/9 of the total, suddenly there is a dramatic change. You get a slightly stronger second company and a large percentage of ownership.
Just to see what happened I tried a third test, where I put in 1/6 of the total for the first company. This was useless too. The second company was far too weak to make the dodge worthwhile. It looks like 1/9 is the sweet spot.
![cheers (0!!0)](./images/smilies/cheers.gif)