This game rocks!
It is a computer version of the boardgame 1830, which has several sequels. The whole series is referred as the 18XX games. I posess three of the games (but not 1830), but have no-one to play them with (as they typically take six to ten hours to finish). The 1830 computer game lets me enjoy the game, and it plays much faster. The AI is respectable and strategies that win the boardgame work in the pc game, and vice versa.
The only real bug is that an AI that ends up with two railroad companies and no trains will buy one D-train and pass it from company to company. As trains are bought after income is earned, the two companies never earn another dime. The best feature of the game is the info table, because it tells you how much money is left in the game.
The review is slightly incorrect. You do not have to buy six shares in a company to start it. It is enough that, between all of the players, six shares have been sold. As two of the private companies come with shares to public companies, the B&O and PRR can both be started with less than six shares. It was fun to steal the B&O away from the AI that bought the B&O private. In six player games, nobody starts with enough money to float a company, so multiple investors in a company is the only way to get the game rolling.
There are only eight companies in the game, and the winner is the player that manages to be president of three of them.
The only good reason to dump a company on another player is to get money out of a company's treasury, or to get money to start a new company. If you have priority, and an AI has enough stock in the company to have more shares than you after you sell, the company witholds dividends. On the last operationg round before the next stock round, it spends all of its money to buy the oldest train of your other company. Ideally, the other company operates after the to-be-dumped company, so it can buy a new train that scraps the oldest trains and buy any other train that the to-be-dumped company still posesses.
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