session report

[sharunasbresson]

dear Toby, i write you about my first long game session with your app.
First of all, thanks fro your great work! I've tried before playing online 18xx but it's the first time I'm looking forward doing it again and again after one session!

Here my feedback for the current state of the art (apologies for my poor english, I'm an italian after all :-) ) :
The game I'm writing about is the id74
There are minor presentation issues and I know you're dealing quickly with them (yesterday when i opened the game the new corporation look was a very pleasant surprise).
I would like to get some more information on the game maps (train phases, train limits).
Especially as soon as more 18xx game will be implemented with your system the need of this kind of minutiae will get more important.
The bank pool with the already sold stock would be also useful.
Maybe different color for the different player name (but I'm nitpicking now).

The bug or major issues I found are the following:
when a corporation bought the sumitomo company and tried to lay a mountain track without river
the power to ignore the building cost was not active, meaning the 80 $ was regularly charged on the company treasure (maybe we didn't find a way to make this work, in this better scenario my “complaint” would regard the usability, but I suspect the this rules was just not working).

Same thing with the train limit. The agenda showed us that as expected we were entering the phase 5 and the train limits of 2 but it was only when we entered phase six that we were forced to have just two trains in the corporation. In phase 5 a corporation was also able to buy a third train.
But even if we were careful to fair play, not being able to discard the trains in excess was a gamebreaker.

The other and possibly bigger issue we had was the ability to buy trains form other corporations at a proce different from 1$. We used the price tab and tried by clicking but also by writing the amountof money we wished to pay and it always decided we were going to pay 1$.
Obviously after that we just continued the game for test, not for “enjoying the game” (wich really was until then really enjoyabe, and we are very very grateful).

Probably a minor bug (but I think I wouldn't be an accurate tester if I wouldn't mention it) occured just once, when the Iyo railway was able to run the same route twice. The director of the company saw what was happening and used the undo button to avoid the mistake, but the app was allowing him to do it, while in an other occurrenc eof the same mistake from another corporation the app showed us the mistake.

Finally, I saw on the forum that someone perceived as useful the possibility to control form one computer the other online player's moves.
We thought the opposite, because sometimes inadvertently someone thinking to act for himself made adecision for another player (we manage to undo, but we were uncomfortable about it).

I hope that with this letter I'm “making my job” by offering you something in exchange of the wonderful gift you are providing us all.

Maybe one day would be nice to play with you (I'm sure you could teach me many things as you did when I watch you running a game of rolling stock)

thanks again and keep up the great work!

eugenio aka sharunasbresson

[tobymao]

i've fixed most of these issues

thanks for the report, it is invaluable, i really appreciate you taking the time to play and comment.