Demand Cards - [EBPEdit Help Contents]

Demand Cards, also called contracts, list the payments various cities will make upon delivery of an indicated type of load. During play, each player receives a set of demand cards upon which he bases his decisions about what loads to carry and trips to make.

EBPEdit offers several methods for creating contracts, two manual and one automatic. All are accessed via the Cards pull down menu. The board games typically have between 100 and 150 contracts; EBP allows a maximum of 1000. Though the editor permits fewer, your map should have at minimum 50 contracts.

EDIT DEMAND CARDS INDIVIDUALLY

To create or edit demand cards one by one, choose the Cards, Demands pull down menu. If you are creating a new map, click the Set # of Contracts button to tell the program how many contracts you want. You can later increase or decrease that number, if desired.

For each demand of each contract, select a city and its demanded load. You can enter a load delivery payoff or click the Sugg button to have EBPEdit suggest one. Alternatively, you can leave the Pays field empty, and later employ the Set All Payoffs feature (described further below) to have EBPEdit automatically assign a proper payoff.

If you want some of your contracts to have a different number of demands, click the desired value from 1 to 6 at left. Maps with differing number of demands per contract are supported beginning with EBP version 2.0.18.

EDIT ALL DEMAND CARDS

To edit all the contracts at once, choose the Cards, Edit All Demands pull down menu. You can then type the cards within the box below the map, one card per line, using the following format:

card#;city1;demand1;pay1;city2;demand2;pay2;city3;demand3;pay3

So, for example, the first 3 cards might resemble:

1;Atlanta;Oats;14;Monterrey;Tobacco;24;Oklahoma City;Corn;9

2;Chicago;Fish;14;Montreal;Textiles;39;Omaha;Silver;24

3;Kansas City;Nickel;19;New Orleans;Cotton;9;Phoenix;Imports;15

Use care when typing these as proper spelling is critical. You need not enter the cards in card number order. Each card number must be unique, and you must enter all cards numbered 1 through whatever maximum you set. If you enter a load type that does not exist, when EBPEdit processes your list, it will ask if you want to create the load. Processing occurs when you click outside the Contract Editor Box (such as on the map).

Each card must include from 1 to 6 city;demand;pay triplets.

If you have contracts already prepared (such as in a word processor), you can copy and paste them into the Contract Editor Box. Click on the box, and press Ctrl+V to paste.

RANDOM DEMANDS

Rather than create all the contracts manually, EBPEdit can do the job for you after you have finished creating all your cities and loads. Choose the Cards, Random Demands pull down menu. You specify the number of contracts, and EBPEdit does the rest. Larger cities are assigned more demands, proper payoffs are calculated, and the demands are arranged on the cards to minimize duplication. Subsequently, if you wish, you can use the manual features above to edit and tweak the contracts.

SET ALL PAYOFFS

If you've created contracts but didn't want to specify each delivery payoff, or if you want to change all the payoffs, use the Cards, Set All Payoffs pull down menu. You can specify two payoff multipliers and two random factors.

For each demand, EBPEdit checks each supply city, then sets the payoff to the minimum result of the formula (milepost distance * distance multiplier) + (build cost * build cost multiplier). Most of the board games use values between 0.4 and 0.5.

To create some randomness in the payoffs, specify a non-zero absolute and/or a percentage random variance. These variances are applied to the value computed as described above, and are best described via example. For absolute variance, if you enter 4, to each payoff EBPEdit will randomly add or subtract a value from 0 to 4. For percentage variance, if you enter 20, to each payoff EBPEdit will randomly add or subtract 0% to 20%. In all cases, the minimum payoff EBPEdit will assign is 1.