The patch is controlled by three difficulty settings:
- The initial interest setting is changed to a minimum interest setting. This interest is applied if your loan is low compared to your maximum loan. The default is the same as before. The maximum was raised to 5%.
- The maximum interest setting controls how much interest you pay if you have your maximum loan taken. For loans between 0 and max. loan the interest rate is calculated linearly between minimum and maximum. The default value is the same as the minimum value. The maximum value is 15%.
- The maximum loan in percentage of company value allows you to take a higher loan if your company value is high. However, if your company value is low you can always at least take the loan based on the traditional initial loan setting plus inflation (i.e. your maximum loan is at least as much as it was without the patch). The default value is 0%. The maximum value is 90%.
- The default values are selected so, that the patch does not have any effect unless you change them.
- Minimum and maximum interest rate settings are coupled in a way to enforce that the maximum is never lower than the minimum. Thus, setting one of the two settings may change the other one (this is visible in the GUI).
- The maximum loan is updated quarterly.
- The settings are locked during game play and can only be selected in the difficulty settings before starting a game.
Example:
Relevant difficulty settings:
Initial loan: €400,000
Minimum interest: 5%
Maximum interest: 15%
Maximum loan: 50% of company value
Your current state:
Company value: €2 (you just started).
Current loan: €200,000
Maximum loan; €400,000 (patch does not take effect as your company value is low)
Current rate: 10% (as you have 50% of your credit line exhausted)
Later state:
Company value: €19,999,200
Current loan: €200,000
Maximum loan; €9,900,000 (i.e. 50% of company value rounded down)
Current rate: 5% (you have only used 2% of your credit line, so you pay the minimum interest)
Updates:
- r12098: Now includes Gonozal_VIII's resizing of the difficulty settings dialog.
- r12104: <SHIFT>-click on increase or decrease loan button now changes amount (*10)
- r12149: Now borrow/pay-back maximum amount possible if selected value is too high and savegame bump in trunk
- r12164: Another savegame bump in trunk
- r12187:
- The changing of loan amount is now done by buttons (<SHIFT>-click no longer works)
- The amounts for borrow and repay can now changed separately.
- The amounts can be changed to max. which has the same effect as <CTRL>-click
- r12364: Some savegame bumps have gone by
- r12795: Update to current trunk
- r12841:
- Changed language files to match english.txt
- Insert some casts which hopefully avoids a bug in VC++ Express 2005
- And a savegame bump again
- r14536: Update to current trunk