To be more precise: while in general it is to your advantage to be behind in cash, and thus early in the turn order, most notably for the production phase, occasionally you can get a huge benefit by being later in the turn order and taking advantage of a bigger factory type that another player has oh-so-conveniently made available for you.

Thus, the lower-count factories are more powerful, even if they have other flaws.

On the other hand, as JC said, even decent planning can get wrecked if you depend heavily on a type that just doesn't roll high numbers.

The dice can and will throw the game. It won't happen often, there is room for considerable skill, but it will happen. The dice also seem to make the game more tactical then I'd prefer, but I suspect that with more long term information early advantages may be be impossible to overcome. The current random factors force a level of defensive play which acts as its own leveling stick.

While not really a calculator game as the sums are not that hard, I could easily see paper and pencil being popular.

I'm tempted to roll capacity purchases and Locomotive Production together into a single seamless round: Player-1 buys capacity and does his first pass Production, Player-2 likewise etc, then iterate on Production until done. This would not change the actual game but would make the painful counting process just before Locomotive Production simpler and hopefully faster.

I've played 2.5 times now (one was a solo-play). I could see Lokomotive Werks getting down under an hour with frequent play but I'm not sure if any group near me has the tolerance to play it that frequently. I'd like to try. While not a brain burner, it is an intensely focussed exercise that would be hard to play casually. On a similar note: There is a lot of money shuffling, so use poker chips.

And this is one of the things that I love about the game... Without the randomness of the dice, a small advantage found early in the game would continue to multiply to create an unstoppable juggernaut by endgame.

I have 4 packs of post-it note paper in my LW box and 4 pens.

We only keep track of money on these paper pads now. Everyone is entrusted with keeping their own bank, and we simply announce totals each round when we determine play order.

We tried this once and, for whatever reason, it did not make the game move any faster, and in fact confused one of the players.

And really, try the pen-and-paper method. It's so much faster - even poker chips will waste needless time passing them back and forth from the bank.

JC, we definitely try to modify the turn order... As you've noted, sometimes it's good to go first and sometimes it's better to go last.

The biggest time saver is keeping track of the money independently on paper. Each player can use their pad to calculate all their financial stuff.

Though my group doesn't play at Huber-speed (TM), we are a fairly fast group of players though so 45 mins for us may mean 60mins for mere mortals.

Also, do you normally blow through the green 5s before ending the game, or end before?

I'd say that we usually get into the Green 5's... but not necessarily "through" them before someone hits the target score.

After the first couple turns, we do the first player completing his turn through his first pass. I am convinced that it speeds things up, but with a few players it did lead to some confusion.

I greatly prefer this one with four or three to five.

Have any of you used a simple generic score track for the money? It seems as if that would be the easiest way to deal with money in a way that everyone can still see each other's totals.