Buying Shares in Competitors Problem

[petrov]

Hey Guys,

Pretty new here and need ya help! I am looking to buy shares in the other companies but it says i cant buy 25% of the company in question as the company isnt old enough to trade shares yet.....Is there anyway around this (e.g. settings) or does any1 have an idea of how long a company has to be before trades can be bought?

Thanks in advance

[FooBar]

You have enabled the purchase of shares in the patch/advanced settings? If so, shares can be bought if a company is six years or older.

[Conditional Zenith]

It's 'anyone', not 'any1'

[thegreatpl]

i always thought that the six years was a bit odd. i know for a fact that in the original TTD you could buy shares immediately. so why not in openttd?

i know it adds to fairness, and in multiplayer games this could be good. but there ought to be some sort of option to allow people to change the time until you can buy shares.

[Swansea Stu]

Surely a company needs to be of a certain size in order to be floated. Maybe 6 years is too long for some of the new noAI (as they are so good). But then buying 75% of a company when it first starts and then waiting to see if it does well is more like dragons den than a tycoon game.

[thegreatpl]

*hit himself over the head for not seeing that strategy before when he was playing TTd*

open ttd is a business simulation game as well, and there is the fact that in real life shares can be bought from the outset, i think.

i think that there ought to be some choice about the time. just to give the user more of a varied gameplay.

[Conditional Zenith]

IIRC (and I may well not be) the company value in TTD didn't take loans into account, so buying shares straight away actually cost decent money. Here, you could buy 75% of the company for $2 as they start out, which a human would be stupid not to do at the start of the game. Just cause TTD was broken doesn't mean OTTD should be.

And seriously, the business simulation side of TTD has always been a joke. The vanilla game is way too easy.

And while I'm not positive, I'm fairly sure that a company must be floated before you can buy shares in it. And a company is definitely not floated from the outset. In OTTD every company just happens to be floated at 6 years old.

[Hyronymus]

It's 'anyone', not 'any1'

It's being a PITA and not allowed. Send the guy a PM if you are really annoyed by it or (very bad idea!) report his post. Now your post gets reported.

*snap* Continue as if nothing happened.

[Swansea Stu]

And while I'm not positive, I'm fairly sure that a company must be floated before you can buy shares in it. And a company is definitely not floated from the outset. In OTTD every company just happens to be floated at 6 years old.

Well I could buy shares in your privately owned company at any point, but you would first have to be willing to sell me a percentage. They just wouldn't be shares in the stockmarket sense it'd be a share of the business. Once a company is floated the need for that decision vanishes. As far as OTTD is concerned one transport company is unlikely to be willing to sell any of their business from the outset, especially to a competitor.

One thing that I find strange is that a companies bank balance is incorporated into it's worth. Maybe the bank balance could be taken off the worth and if you bought the company you don't get the money, which would be more realistic too.

[Conditional Zenith]

So what would happen to a company's liquid assets during a merger? Surely they don't disappear, to me it only makes sense that the acquiring company gets them.

[kdalts]

Personnaly, I like the idea that shares cannot be bought too early in the game - it was far to simple to buy 75% the moment a company starts up just so you can buy them out later when they get in your space or for the profit.

I would liketo see this element expanded - make it even tougher. Some ideas -

• Shares sold in 5% clumps but buyer (you) can only by 5% from each competitor each year
  Share prices should reflect the value of the ones you already own - ie: if you bought 5% off a company valued at 1million and your company was worth 100million - then the value of the company you are buying shares in should reflect it's new backers capital? - not sure that made sense
  Competitors can buy off each other
  Competitors can bid for your shares
  Competitiors can buy back their own shares
  Competitors can refuse to sell to you or enter an auction with the other competitior
  You can float a percentage of your own shares to raise capital

Maybe a bit over the top but the game theme is about being a tycoon - competition for business would figure high in that (I'me guessing because I'm not actually a tycoon )

Anyway - just a few thoughts - keep up the great work

[Swansea Stu]

So what would happen to a company's liquid assets during a merger? Surely they don't disappear, to me it only makes sense that the acquiring company gets them.

If you owned a company with assets of £1m and you had £9m in the bank, would you really expect me to pay you £10m for your company only to have £9m put back into my account? Or let me pay you the £1m your assets are worth and let you keep your own money.

[Hyronymus]

So what would happen to a company's liquid assets during a merger? Surely they don't disappear, to me it only makes sense that the acquiring company gets them.

If you owned a company with assets of £1m and you had £9m in the bank, would you really expect me to pay you £10m for your company only to have £9m put back into my account? Or let me pay you the £1m your assets are worth and let you keep your own money.

Yes, because that is the way it goes in real life too. You may not like it but it's sheer logic: when you buy a competitor you buy all assets and the current bank deposit is part of the assets.

Equally, if you buy a company with a negative bank depsosit (read: a loan) you take over that loan too.

[Conditional Zenith]

Except that last I checked, if their loan + your loan went over the max loan, then your loan got capped at the maximum, ie. some of the debt disappeared. Maybe this only happened for AIs, I'm not sure.

[555gln22]

I was buying AIs a plenty last night and got my loan more than a million above the maximum I was allowed to take out.

[ostlandr]

That's one thing in TTD/OTTD that bugs me. A competitor can buy shares in my company- but I never issued any stinkin' shares!!

When I'm playing with ridiculous building costs on, I have to be very careful not to overextend on loans, or I can go bankrupt from the interest payments. I would love to be able to issue stock instead. Once your company gets rich enough, you can buy back enough shares that you eventually own more than 50% of your own company. Hey, buying back stock and paying dividends- something else to do with all that "excess" money. Share prices should be based on the value of your company divided by the total number of shares outstanding (of course).

On the other hand, Railroad Tycoon 3 gets way involved in that to the point where I am spending more time trying to beat Morgan, Gould and Vanderbilt in the stock market than running trains. Doggone it, I want to be head of Operations, not CEO or CFO. I've got enough to worry about with whether to add another train to a busy route, or build a new branch line, or scrap all those SD9s. I gotta worry about the doggone stock price, too?!?

[Torrasque]

I've played Sid Meier's Railroads! in multiplayer. It's a remake of railroads tycoon but simplified.

The way the shares a being handled is very simple and way more more fun than in ttd :

Each compagny has 10 shares. At the begining each compagny own 5, and 5 is open to competitor.
Then you can buy/sell your share or competitor's one.

If you sell all your share, then a competitor can buy all your share and own you.

[kamad]

I used to have TTD on XP and once you owned 75% of a computers company
you could manage the company, is it possible to do that on OpenTTD??

[SmatZ]

Is there anyway around this (e.g. settings) or does any1 have an idea of how long a company has to be before trades can be bought?

Ctrl+Alt+C, cheat year six years forward, buy shares, cheat the year back...

manage the company, is it possible to do that on OpenTTD??

Not in clean OpenTTD (neither in clean TTD)

[kamad]

ok so there is no way to do it?