So, I posted on here a few days ago looking for advice on the early part of the game, and it was very, very helpful. I'll grant that I'll have a lot of fine tuning to do, but there's time enough for that later. Right now, I just finished researching Liberalism in my most successful game to date, and I am beginning to ponder if I should look to incorporating something. Of course, then I wondered on the mechanics...

So, I fired up a test map and worldbuilder, and did some experimenting with Sid Cereal and Sid Sushi. The first thing I noticed with Sid cereal is that, if you have a lot of resource but not a lot of cities, corporate taxes get really freaking big. Second is that the 'consumable resources' are based on what trade network you're on. Third is that, with enough food, it almost seems like you can sustain your city on either cereal or sushi. Still, that leaves a few questions:

1) How are corporate taxes calculated? There is a direct correlation between how much of the corporate resource you have and how much you spend, but the exact formula is eluding me.

2) How far flung should your corporation be? Is it generally worth it to have 20 cities incorporated if you only have 2 of the needed resource?

3) Does Ethanol offer oil on the whole trade network, or just the one city?

4) Can you trade resources into your network? Say the Dutch have 3 wheat handy and you're Sid Cereal's HQ. If you buy/trade the wheat off 'em, does that get added to the 'consumed' resource in your network?

5) What general tricks differentiate a corporation from the religions?

Help, as always, is greatly appreciated

Look up the article on sushi.

2: No.

3: just the city that has ethanol

4: yes

5: They are tenfold more powerful

A pimped out sid's suhi can give 11 food, and 44 culture per city, in my last game, I could destroy an island by just having 1 city and culture flipping. Also, your enemies can have sushi, so be careful when you spread them.


As a general rule of thumb, since each city that has a corp gives 4 wealth to the corp hq, you want the city with the corp hq to have wall street, to double your income

1) No idea :) I do know that the more resources you have the more expensive it is for sure though.
2) Depends. Things like Sids/ Cereal Mills can go anywhere as well as Mining inc. With that combination, even a tundra city can turn out decent.
3) Only in the city it's in. It'd be a little unbalanced if everywhere got it.
4) Yes you can trade for resources.
5) What do you mean? If you mean what I think you mean then the only major thing that isn't completely obvious(but is still obvious) is that corps don't give diplo points.

1)Corporation maintenance depends on the number of resources you have, the city size, your civics, and the presence of courthouses (and a couple of UBs). The exact maths behind it can be found in this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=249397) article.

2)Depends on the corporation, but its usually best to get every resource you can for a corporation. Civ Jewellers might not be too bad with only a couple of resources - you still get the 4gpt at the HQ, but you wouldn't have to pay much in maintenance. Generally I want to be well into double figures on resources excpet on the smallest map sizes.

3)Only the city its in. I don't find this corp that useful, but if you really can't get oil any other way you could put it in your production cities.

4)Yes. Comes with the added bonus that the AI charges very little for duplicate resources.

5)The main difference is that religious shrines basically just give gold. Corporations do that, but also can convert gold into more useful things (like food, production etc.) I've written a guide to basic corporation strategies that you might find interesting. Just check the link in my sig.