Week 4 – The End Of Phase 1

Alas, the end of phase 1 is upon us! This week I made several updates to the base game, and I am excited to announce I’m officially ready to start the real fun (double for real this time!)

First, the average game lengths are now recorded. This is entirely useless for now, but will probably be used when analyzing results (once I, you know, actually have those…)

I also changed the rules for passing Go. Now, players receive 10% of the government’s reserves, which are currently fixed at $2000 (so they still effectively get $200, for now), but will eventually be responsive to taxes. Obviously, it’s pretty important we give the government some ability to enact redistribution policies–otherwise this is just going to turn into an analysis of “what tax rate produces the highest tax rate.”

(Though in real life, government social welfare spending is more targetted, I figure there’s no loss of generality if I just make it 10% for everyone, and this limits the number of variables being tested at once. This is because I couldn’t find any averages for welfare spending as a function of wealth or income, so any decision I made other than this would basically be guesswork and arbitrary, even if maybe slightly more accurate.)

Also, players can now only build houses and hotels within their respective color-sets. I forgot to do this last week, but it’s fixed now.

Lastly, the simulations now run until either turn 1000 or bankruptcy. This is because I was having some infinite loop stalemate problems, and by 1000 the game is probably in one of those.

Overall, these small things have made my simulation really robust, and I’m excited for what’s to come.