Taking over the world, one franchise at a time

BtS Corporation Pros: Add an extra layer of strategy and some peaceful stuff to do in the Industrial Age. Corporations can spawn numerous strategies.

BtS Corporation Cons: Overall, favour warmongers more than builders. Make the balance of State Property questionable.

BtS Corporation Tips: Set your sights on corporations early. You should know if you want to found one well before you get the chance. You may want to save a GP from earlier to found a corporation.

Corporations are another major addition to Beyond the Sword. As it has been mentioned many times, you can think of them as late-game religions. There are seven of those, each is an investment to found and provides benefits. As you probably know, corporations provide benefits in exchange for resources. For every city in the world that has the corporation, its headquarters gains 4 gold. The other benefits depend on the corporation.

Corporations are founded with Great People. To do so, you need the Corporation technology, another technology specific to the particular corporation and a Great Person of the relevant type. For example, to found Sid’s Sushi, you’ll need Corporation, Medicine and a Great Merchant. In addition, to found a corporation, you must have at least one source of any of the resources consumed by the corporation (so for Sushi, that’d be Fish, Clams, Rice or Crabs).

The best thing about corporations is that they have an excellent tradeoff mechanism. All corporations provide good benefits that would always be nice to have. Other than the challenge of founding a corporation (and if you want to found the right corporation at the right time, it is quite a challenge indeed), there is the aspect of maintenance costs. When a corporation expands to a city, the city’s maintenance costs go up – it’s a considerable increase, too. At Headquarters, you get 4 gold when it expands to a new city, and assuming you have a Market, a Grocer, a Bank and the Wall Street in your HQ city (and you should!), that’s 16 gold. This will usually let you break even with the increased maintenance costs, but that won’t always be the case, either. At any rate, expanding a corporation (which is done via Executive units) also costs a lump sum of gold in the first place, so expanding corporations will drain your treasury – at least at first, they may start paying for themselves some time later.

The benefits of corporations are really nice, though. Extra food? Yummy! Extra hammers? Prepare the war machine! Extra science? Onwards to the final frontier! Extra gold? Buy some oil grease for our Tanks!

Really, corporation benefits are quite good. They do, of course, scale with the size of your empire – the more resources you have, the more you gain. Therefore, corporations aren’t good if you happen to have a small empire with huge cities and a specialist economy, but if you’re an extensive civilization, corporations are good. Also, note that corporation maintenance and benefits scale with map size, which is required to make them balanced across all maps.

Corporations offer many possibilities for strategic variations, and this is one area where I am really looking forward to see what the community can come up with. Personally, I love boosting a specialist economy with either food-producing corporation. If you can get the corporation to provide you +6 food, that is 3 free specialists! You can just use these corporations to boost your city growth, of course – probably the best thing you can do with those tundra cities that otherwise get stuck at size 6 for the entire game.

Further enhancing the dynamics of corporation, their maintenance scales with the amount of relevant resources you have. So if you have Mining Inc., the more metals you have, the higher your maintenance costs will be. This is done to prevent a "breaking point" where having X resources would give benefits so huge that maintenance becomes irrelevant. Also, you can now trade for resources you already have, so you can try and buy extra resources for your corporations to consume. It plays well with scaling maintenance, because such trades will increase the effectiveness of your corporations, while also upping maintenance.

If you have a lot of money, you can try to increase the maintenance of a rival. Use your Executives to spread corporations to a rival’s city - you will get increased headquarters income, whereas the other civ will not be facing increased maintenance. It’s rarely worth it, given the costs of spreading a corporation, but it can be fun sometimes. This is something I’ve actually had the AI do to me – Ramesses had spread his corporation to all cities on a small secondary continent of mine. The cities weren’t good enough to benefit much from the corporation, however, my maintenance costs did skyrocket and I was forced to adopt Mercantilism in the end.

One of the most interesting strategic questions with corporations is whether to save Great People for it. Say you get a Great Engineer in the Renaissance age – do you go ahead and use it, or do you wait until Railroad to found Mining Inc.? Of course, you don’t have to found corporations even when you have the technology. So, use an Engineer on Creative Constructions or rush the Pentagon?

Allowing you to, essentially, get some benefits in exchange for money, corporations are a very good feature in terms of adding strategic depth to the game. They allow you to further emphasize something your civ is already good at (like founding a beaker-producing corporation for a civ that leads in technology), or to, on the contrary, compensate for something you don’t have, such as using a hammer corporation to offset low-production terrain, all of this while creating more strategic dilemmas.

Economic civics have been changed to affect corporations. Free Market decreases corporation maintenance by 25%, which is usually enough of a bonus to make you break even with corporation costs. Mercantilism disables foreign corporations, while leaving yours intact. Disabled corporations have absolutely no effect – provide no bonuses and incur no maintenance costs. That is the best thing to do if a rival is spreading his corporation to you and you do not want that to be the case. Environmentalism has the opposite effect to Free Market – it increases corporation maintenance by 25%.

State Property is a whole different issue. I have reliable sources telling me that it was last seen in the vicinity of Hunt Valley, loudly screaming for help, when it was brutally tackled by BtS designers before being hit on the head with something heavy. State Property disables all corporations in your civ, whether they are yours or foreign. It is my opinion that this change makes State Property too weak and generally ruins the economy column civic. State Property remains as useful as ever if you don’t/can’t have corporations, but as soon as you found a corporation, you can no longer switch to State Property, as the results will be bad. While you will probably gain in gold overall by switching to State Property, you will lose benefits of your corporations, which is simply unacceptable in many situations.

Consider the food corporations. You’ve spread them to your cities and are enjoying the benefits. Now, you switch to State Property… what happens? Mass starvation in your cities! While accurate historically, it’s not really optimal gameplay. Flexibility is thus lost, as you’re essentially forced into Free Market if you are using corporations.

I should note that not everyone agrees with me on this issue. And, if I am proven wrong about the imbalance of State Property, I will be extremely happy.

Of course, I cannot finish commenting any feature without saying something about the AI. Corporation AI is quite solid – specifically, it is well capable of judging whether a specific corporation would benefit it or not, basing its decision on whether to found a corporation on that. What’s more, AI evaluation of which cities would benefit from a corporation is fairly solid. If it has a corporation, it will wisely choose which cities to spread it to first, making sure to first spread to cities which would benefit from it the most – and perhaps ignoring cities where the corporation would be a liability. It’s also capable of spreading the corporation to foreign cities for extra headquarters income, assuming it doesn’t mind its rivals having the corporation.

Another positive aspect of corporations is that they give you something to do in the late game. With all available land normally already taken and the space race not yet started, the Industrial Age could sometimes have the problem of not giving you enough to do, unless you were fighting a war or actively preparing for one. With corporations to aim for, you can have another set of goals as well as a means of taking your economy to another level – not necessarily getting richer or more of everything but rather re-allocating the different yields throughout your empire.

It is fitting to also end my comments about corporations with a complaint. My main complaint with the system is that corporations favour warmongers more than builders. Specifically, they tend to favour players who spent the first half of the game warmongering. How much you gain from corporations is directly related to how many resources you have – if you have a couple sources of Iron and Copper each, Mining Inc. is okay. But if you conquered a lot and now have a total of 10 sources of these metals, along with 2 Coals and 1 Silver, the corporation becomes a powerhouse. On the other hand, this is partially counterbalanced by the fact that warmongers may find it harder to pop a Great Person in time, and may thus simply lose the corporation to some smaller builder empire. That, needless to say, is a good casus belli.