Corporations

[gdijedi7]

Greetings!

I have finally played a normal game of Beyond the Sword (the new content rocks, especially the space mod! ), and I have founded most corporations. The thing I noticed about them is that they are a real drain on your economy.

What Corporations do you use, and what is your strategy for using them?

[Kuciwalker]

Only use corporations that you need, and try to use the most efficient ones for your purposes.

(e.g. if you only need food and can get Cereal Mills, skip Sid's Suchi Co.)

[Blake]

Broadly speaking, there are two strategies for using corporations:

1) An efficient corporate economy.
The idea is you run Free Market (essential), you found the Shrine in the Wall Street city. You spread it everywhere it'll turn a profit. This is easiest with corporations which bring in gold or hammers directly, because with food/culture ones you may end up being wasteful... (for example food going to unhealthiness means you essentially waste every 3rd food... food going to unhappiness is even more useless)

2) Highly selectively.
Here the idea is you only spread the corporations to where they do the most good.
Here's an example. Say you found Aluminum Co. Instead of spreading it everywhere, you ONLY spread it to your Ironworks city, Heroic Epic city and a couple of other production/military-focused cities. This way you can cheaply buy more coal from other civs and you get the benefit of the free Aluminum in the cities where it does the most good - the high hammer cities which will be training the bulk of your modern army and later building SS parts.
Another example of selective spreading is founding the culture corporations for a cultural victory and ONLY spreading it to your 3 big culture cities, since in other cities the culture wont help. Again this keeps costs down (more gold to go to the culture slider!) and also keeps resource prices low.
A big advantage of selective spreading is you can run Environmentalism if you so choose and you don't need a Wallstreet city (of course it doesn't hurt to have the HQ with the wallstreet).

3) Honorable Mention
Run State Property and forget about corporations. Always worth considering, especially if you have the type of land which benefits from SP - meaning lots of rivers.
Ignoring corporations is not necessarily bad strategy.

[Kataphraktoi]

Corporations are only good for getting a bonus of in cities not for making money. I had a wall street+3 corporation city making 1200GPT(huge map) but the time and effort to get that was very much wasted. I had the option of spreading corps or just conquering the AI....corporations just come too late.

The best one might be mining corps, imo. Spread it in your production cities to help make troops faster. Cereal Mills is cool too for a boost.

[Common Sensei]

Now that corporation costs are divorced from inflation, with enough access to gold, silver and gems, Civilized Jewelers becomes an excellent asset for the Corporate Economy that Blake mentioned.

[jbp26]

LIke the previous poster said, Civilized Jewelers can turn a modest profit with a few resources and enough multipliers, not to mention the boost in money that the corporation home gets. You can also bombard the AI with corporate branches (especially in their useless cities), saddling them with the upkeep while your hq gets the benefit. They'll even do the work of spreading it for you.

[gdijedi7]

You can spread Corporations into other civs?

I tried to spread Aluminum Corp to Celtia (they were my friends), but I couldn't.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by gdijedi7
I tried to spread Aluminum Corp to Celtia (they were my friends), but I couldn't.

WELL!!
It helps alot if the civ isn't running Mercantalism or State Property civic. It's explained quite clearly in the civic descriptions in the F3. It has also been mentioned in many threads, especially those discussing corporations.

[Kuciwalker]

^ Solver he was mean!

[nbarclay]

Here's my preliminary analysis based on a combination of abstract theory and my experience thus far.

Sid's Sushi and Cereal Mills are most useful in cities that have a food shortage, and in recently founded or captured cities that have a lot of catching up to do on growth. Which of the two corporations is better can depend a lot on the map type: on maps with lots of water, there can be enough seafood resources to make Sid's Sushi a better food source than Cereal Mills even though Cereal Mills gets more food per resource. Another place where the food corporations are almost always useful (except perhaps for the Dutch) is coastal cities where the extra food can let more citizens become specialists instead of working coastal tiles. (Since dikes let the Dutch get more benefit from water tiles than other civs can, they don't benefit as much from having extra specialists instead of working water tiles.) For inland cities, it is useful to consider whether or not the cities can make good use of extra food before spreading one of the food corporations to them.

Sid's Sushi, Creative Constructions, and Civilized Jewelers can be real powerhouses when trying to pursue a cultural victory, or when engaging in a cultural power struggle with a neighbor. Thus, even if Cereal Mills generates more food and Mining Inc generates more hammers, there may be some cities where the culture-oriented corporations are attractive. Edit: I just noticed that Aluminum Co. turns each source of coal into a source of aluminum that Creative Constructions can use. So in a city with Creative Constructions, Aluminum Co. can be more useful than it appears at first glance.

Mining Inc can be a great way to trade income for extra production. If I can found it in the city with Wall Street to help defray my expenses, I generally want it in all my cities except the ones where I want Creative Constructions instead for cultural purposes. (More generally, the corporations that will be spread most need to be founded in the city with Wall Street if possible.)

Note that courthouses are an absolute necessity when making extensive use of corporations. Capturing cities without courthouses, spreading multiple corporations to them, and not building courthouses in a timely manner is a fairly effective way to wreck an economy.

[jkp1187]

In follow-up to nbarclay's thoughts, in general, I would say that the corporation should almost always be founded in your Wall Street city to defray costs -- which also should also be a city that has one or more religious shrines if you can swing it. There may be certain unique situations where this isn't the case, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. (If someone has an example, I'd be interested to hear it....)

Because of their UBs that further reduce maintenance costs above and beyond the usual 50% from a courthouse, Zululand and the Holy Roman Empire will be able to run corporations more profitably than other civs.

In a choice between Sid's Sushi and Cereal Mills, I would choose Sushi every time. Most maps tend to have more "sushi" resources than "cereal" ones, and while there are only three "cereal" resources (corn, rice, wheat), there are four "sushi" resources (clams, crabs, fish, rice). Sushi also has the benefit of providing both food AND culture, and can really be a tremendous bonus in newly founded (or captured) cities, or in frontier cities battling it out against a rival civ's culture.

This is another person's take on Sid's Sushi: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237717

[ben04]

If you have enough resources then going with option 1 is a no brainer. It easily largely outperforms both 2 and 3.

You get +5 base gold from each city. Adding in all gold modifiers you get a +15 gold (or 15.75 if English or 15.50 if Musa Mansa). The city corporation maintenance costs can first be cut down by 25% percent through Free trade. So you have 75% left. Now you can still reduce those by 50% through a courthouse (or 70% if you are Zulu or 75% if HRE) so you are left with 38% of the costs (or 23% or 19%). For simplicities sake let's say you have to pay 0.33%.

So all in all you can cover 45 gold corporation costs per city (if no modifiers were applied). To get that high costs you will need tons of resources. So most of time you will be making profit and get the bonuses.

If you manage to crack that 45 gold border (which I have only yet managed using the world builder and an unholy number of iron resources and Mining Inc.) you will be cranking out modern tanks at a rate of 1 per 2 turns in tundra cities on Epic speed. As war unhappiness and global warming don't affect corporations there's basically nothing that can stop you from that point on.

EDIT: Remember that 45 gold border is a per corporation border, not a total border.

[jkp1187]

Originally posted by ben04
If you have enough resources then going with option 1 is a no brainer. It easily largely outperforms both 2 and 3.

You get +5 base gold from each city. Adding in all gold modifiers you get a +15 gold (or 15.75 if English or 15.50 if Musa Mansa). The city corporation maintenance costs can first be cut down by 25% percent through Free trade. So you have 75% left. Now you can still reduce those by 50% through a courthouse (or 70% if you are Zulu or 75% if HRE) so you are left with 38% of the costs (or 23% or 19%). For simplicities sake let's say you have to pay 0.33%.

So all in all you can cover 45 gold corporation costs per city (if no modifiers were applied). To get that high costs you will need tons of resources. So most of time you will be making profit and get the bonuses.

If you manage to crack that 45 gold border (which I have only yet managed using the world builder and an unholy number of iron resources and Mining Inc.) you will be cranking out modern tanks at a rate of 1 per 2 turns in tundra cities on Epic speed. As war unhappiness and global warming don't affect corporations there's basically nothing that can stop you from that point on.

EDIT: Remember that 45 gold border is a per corporation border, not a total border.

Interesting -- I didn't know that the math worked out that way. Note that whenever patch 3.13 comes out, the owner of the corporate HQ will only be receiving FOUR (4) GPT from every city in the world that has a branch of that corporation.

[ben04]

Even with "only" 4 GPT you can still finance costs of up to 32 GPT (exact value for normal civs). That's a bit more than 16 iron resources and gives a 16 base hammers. It's a limit that now realistically may be reached but still itoo high IMHO.

Now if you play as HRE I come to a border of 64 GTP.

Here the more detailed math (because at first I didn't even believe that HRE value myself):

Let i be the total income after modifiers, ir the raw income, c the costs after modifiers and cr the raw costs.

We have:
i = ir * 300% = ir*3
So before the patch i = 15 and after i = 12.

c = cr * (100% - 25%) * (100% - 50%) = cr * 3/4 * 1/2
That 100% - 25% are the costs remaining after Free Trade is applied and that 100% - 50% are the costs after the courthouse. (For the HRE that factor is 100% - 75% = 25% = 1/4.) They aren't added but multiplied because Free Trade applies to the corp costs and the courthouse to the maintenance costs. (If they were added the HRE would end up with no costs at all.)

So now we want to calculate the upper border for cr, meaning the value of cr for which the income and the costs are equal:
i = c
ir*3 = cr * 3/4 * 1/2
cr = 8*ir

For the HRE you have
i = c
ir*3 = cr * 3/4 * 1/4
cr = 16*ir

Which is indeed the double of the costs of normal civs.



Corporations are just broken as they are now. The Zulu and HRE UU should only modify maintenance costs caused by the city number. Meaning for the Rathause:
-50% maintenance & -25% city count maintenance
This would nerft them a bit because in the moment if they can play out their advantage (which doesn't happen too often because most games end before corporations or there aren't enough resources) they basically decide the game. +22 base hammers in each city (which is what the Rathause can give in the optimal case compared to a courthouse) is just crazy. (I know that in this case -50% - 25% != -75% so one might consider -50% maintenance & -50% city count maintenance)

Also IMHO corporations should pay 1 GPT to the headquarters and 3 GPT taxes to the capital. This way you can still compete if you don't control the headquarters. Civs without a headquater would get an upper limit of 24 GPT which allows 11 iron resources and a +11 HPT


PS: Does anybody know how raw corp costs are calculated? Meaning if you have n resources what are the costs? All the values I provide above come from experimenting with WB.

[wodan11]

Another note of importance that hasn't been mentioned yet...

Corps are a late game mechanic. One of my favorite is Sushi, but it has been rightfully pointed out it is very much limited by health and happiness.

However, we should recognize that what else is available late game? Hollywood, Broadway, and Rock 'n Roll. These wonders give multiples of additional happiness resources.

Usually these multiples have limited utility. When combined with Sushi, however, they have amazing synchronizity. The obvious first step is to use them to trade for massive amounts of seafood and rice. In addition, you can trade for all the health and happiness resources you can get your hands on.

There's another mechanic that has good synchronicity with overcoming Sushi's limitations... and that's colonies. It is trivial to establish a colony and then to obtain any resources that colony has available, even the sole instance of a resource. Furthermore, the dip modifier you have makes them willing to give you this resource for little or nothing the whole game.

Also look for other late-game mechanics, such as the American Shopping Mall, that help.

Wodan