How many MC would you give this corporation for it to be balanced?

[Dipoloulos]

I was imagining a possible corporation to create, and I was wondering how many MC it would need to start with to be balanced.

My proposed effect:
Each generation, if you are not the first player, you may take a turn before the first player. You may take up to three actions per turn. As long as at least one other player has not passed, you may take zero actions on your turn without passing for the generation.

Alternatively, what cost would you give to a card that has this effect (without any tag)?

[danielvictor]

If you could take zero actions without passing,there would have to be some alternate mechanism for ensuring the turn didn't go on forever !

[xspuipuke]

You need to drop the first player effect. It directly affects all the other players, giving an unfair advantage to the second player, without their corporation receiving any sort of balancing penalty.

[Dipoloulos]

Daniel Victor: Yes, indeed, that could be rephrased. The idea is that you can pass your turn as long as someone else is still playing (edited)

xspuipuke: Yes, indeed, I’m so used to playing with two players that I didn’t think about that. The idea is that you play first each generation without necessarily changing the order of the other players (edited).

[FrankJones]

Though an interesting concept, I am not a fan of this corporation idea.

[xspuipuke]

So, lets list all the effects of this corporation and try find a value for it:

1) It has an on-going Head Start effect that triggers once per generation if we are not first player. We won't be first player in about 1/N of the total number of generations played, where N is the player count.

The Head Start promo prelude comes with 2 steel and 2 MC per card in hand, including any cards that you've drawn from your first prelude so figuring out how much the 2 early actions are worth is not that easy. Plus, how often you get to use it depends heavily on the number of players. If we assume 4 players, 8 generations played, and 7 cards kept (to subtract the additional Head Start effects) plus the fact that many people claim a prelude is worth 21 MC, we arrive at 6 uses at 3 MC (21 - 7x2 - 4 for the steel) value each for a total of 18 MC.

2) It has a blue card action that you can use once per turn saying “play one additional action".

If it were a blue card action that you can use once per generation like normal blue card actions, it could be assigned a 5 MC value. But this is ongoing, so I'd simply double that for 10 MC total value.

3) It has a blue card action that you can use once per turn saying “do nothing" unless all other players have passed.

If it were just once per generation, it'd be almost like using Tardigrades minus the occasional point it generates and the microbe resource that can have other benefits. What I do not like about it, though, is that towards the end of the game in particular, you can just sit out the entire generation, wait until everyone has passed and then have free reign over what you do. In 2-player you could do major damage this way as you outstall your opponent by definition. I strongly recommend making this a once-per-generation effect at most. And then I'd value it as being 0-1 MC of value.

Assuming corporations are priced at around 65 MC of starting money (take Teractor with its Earth office effect as an example yielding a 64 MC equivalent of starting money), minus 28 for effects 1) & 2) mentioned, I'd arrive at about 37 MC of cash. Allowing 3) to be ongoing should reduce this way down but then it may become unplayable. If you agree to once per generation, I'd say 36 MC of starting money should be fine.

[FrankJones]

I think the other issue is this corporation would make the game unpleasant for the opponents.

[Dipoloulos]

Thinking about it again and after reading the comments, I can see why such a corporation could actually be unfun for opponents in practice, if you start by skipping most of your turns in most generations and then play everything at once at the end.

Regarding the cost to assign to such an effect, Xspuipuke’s reaction, who attempted an evaluation (thanks!), confirms to me how complicated it is to price, since he prefers to stick to evaluating a toned-down version.

With the effect as originally proposed—that is, in essence, “you always play first and last”, I see that Xspuipuke’s response is basically: “you’d need to give the corporation even fewer megacredits, but then it would be unplayable.” And yet, there is some amount of starting megacredits at which it would be balanced; I just understand that finding that point is far from obvious. ^^

I was curious to hear other players’ opinions on this effect, and I fully expected the range of evaluations to be quite wide.

As far as I’m concerned, I still value this effect much lower than Xspuipuke does, since you’re suggesting 28 megacredits for a toned-down version, that is, more than Earth Catapult. Personally, I would have valued the full version (playing first with three actions per turn, and being able to pass as many turns as you want) roughly at the level of Vitor’s effect, and I would have given the corporation around fifty megacredits.

[RicardoRix]

I think a lot of players have problems with unusual card effect that otherwise break the intended 'spirit of the game', which it would seem this touches on. You only have to look at the Agricola ban list discussion and find that a lot of cards find themselves on that list for 'annoyance' reasons.

I'm not an expert, but I'm not really sure, so I would like to clarify a couple of things with the card effects:

Firstly, most rounds, the card effects are not going to bring any benefit, given that players are not actually limited by the number of actions they can take in a round, and order does not matter wildly most of the time apart from things like 1st action negative plant space effects.
As far as I can tell, there are 2 main benefits:
1. would be to snag the milestones in a very opportune way, thinking mostly about Gardner and Major.
2. At the very final round, with some surprise premature end of game tactic.

Can a poor man's version of the 2nd benefit (very poor terminology) be accomplished by stockpiling money in the penultimate round?

So all-in-all, annoyance value is quite high, but is it really that powerful?

[FrankJones]

A player who knows he or she will go last and first every time has a huge advantage. The guarantee of doing numerous uninterrupted actions is tremendous. Milestone grabbing, award funding, plant protection, Map priority, TR bonuses, etc. Being able to do 3 actions per turn also helps with each of those things.