After reading this thread http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=233508 I came to the realization that maintenance is the biggest problem with early corporations, coupled with inflation for late corporations.

If you could destroy the single biggest factor of reducing maintenance (the courthouse) you would in effect increase the costs by anywhere from 1.5x or more depending on inflation rate, and current corp costs.

can you imagine using this against the AI? or vice versa? Knock out their courthouse and don't look back. in fact after knocking out a few courthouses, it snowballs because to compensate the AI will have to dedicate more to gold, or espionage to prevent others from being knocked out. but if they lose too much money per turn they can't do both, therefore they either lose units, or expose themself more.

I wonder if someone can report on how easy this is to accomplish.

it seems that this would be the easiest way for an State property player to wreck the economy of corp wielding nations while the destruction of their own courthouses would be tame in comparison. remember that state property usually wracks up costs through synergistic upkeep civics, not city maintenance.

Yes, courthouses are absolutely critical for delving into corps. Certainly, knocking out the AI's courthouses is a sure fire way to bring their late game economy to its knees. Having so much depending on one building is rather contentious.

However, even more than the exorbitant maintenance and inflation rate, the way the AI handles corps is rather questionable. They simple spam them in all their cities whether they own the HQ or not. If that's the design intention, then corps and inflation isn't quite right at the moment. Otherwise the AI's getting some fairly major bonuses to their maintenance and inflation.

On a related note, the HRE are going to suffer a significantly smaller amount of maintenece on corporations thanks to the rathaus.