Would it be possible to found and spread a corporation while you temporarily had access to a resource? Via either selling off the resources after the spread was done or by buying a resource just during the spread. That way you could theoretically gain 4 coins/turn for each spread without incurring maintenance costs...This seems exploitative, and I would not do it regularly, it would just satisfy my desire for corporations to work more similarly to religions as a universally good boost in income.

I am almost certain that you still have to pay maintenance for a corp even when your resource is cut off. Sorry, but this will not work.

Side note, it would also mean denying yourself a resource entirely along with the health/happy/options that come with it. On a small scale, it could work but then THAT would entail cutting off cities from trade. I doubt you want that.

AFAIK you need ot have access to resources to found a corporation, you will just need the tech and GP. After that spreading the corp does not require resources to be available.

Whatever may be of that, you will always pay maintenance. Corps can already make you a lot of money even though maintenance gets steep. You can build a HQ in your wall street city and build all gold multipliers and see how it suddenly becomes very attractive to make that corporation a global one!

AFAIK you need ot have access to resources to found a corporation, you will just need the tech and GP. After that spreading the corp does not require resources to be available.

Whatever may be of that, you will always pay maintenance. Corps can already make you a lot of money even though maintenance gets steep. You can build a HQ in your wall street city and build all gold multipliers and see how it suddenly becomes very attractive to make that corporation a global one!

Correction: a Corporation cannot be founded in or spread to a city without access to any of its consumed resources and can never be founded in a city where a competitor's Corporate Headquarters is already present.

In addition to the specific tech (and GP), you need to have the technology "Corporation". Maybe that's obvious, but thought it should be mentioned anyhow.

I thought you were surely wrong about the corporate fees, but according to this article (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/corporations.php), you are not alone in this view, "a Corporate Office denied access to the appropriate resources generates no fees but still provides +4 gold to its Corporate Headquarters."

However, if you look farther down into the very same article, that statement is shown false by the calculation given for corp fees paid by each city:

-1 * ( BaseHeadquarterCommerce + Resources * mapSize ) * PopulationModifier * Difficulty * CivicsModifier / InflationModifier

Thus, the resources might be zero, but you have to add 4 for BaseHQCommerce, yielding a non-zero corp maintenence for the city even when it has no resources. Only way the corp fee goes to zero is if you use State Property (CivicsModifier=0), but then the HQ commerce is also zero.

So in short, I still think this won't work as advertised. There will always be a non-zero cost associated with city corp fees. However, I grant that you sometimes might be able to profit by reducing the number of resources and thereby minimizing fees while keeping the +4 gold in the HQ.
In some situations that might be an interesting use of a corp. I would not say it is exploitive since you are denying that city the benefits (increased science, increased production, increased food, increased culture, access to Alum or oil etc) to do so.

If you do not heve enough resources to justify using a corp, it's usually a losing proposition and you shouldn't found it or spread it, in my experience.

...and most importantly....

If it is maximizing CorpHQ commerce that is your aim, you can do that very easily and avoid all corporate fees in your other cities. How? Spread it to a foreign Civ, let THEM pay the city maintenence, and gain the fees in your HQ!!!
(At least until they adopt StatePr and Merc to save their economies).

Correction: a Corporation cannot be founded in or spread to a city without access to any of its consumed resources...

i thought that you could spread corps to cities without the resources. need to check that.

as for the maintenance fees: you get +4 :gold: from the HQ for every city that the corp has spread to, foreign and domestic. however, you pay increased city maintenance that scales upward as you gain access to more of that corp's resources. spreading your corps to foreign cities equals big profits.

so aluminum, inc. is likely to draw a net profit, especially if the HQ is founded in your wall street city. but something like sid's sushi, where you have access to many resources, is likely to end up costing you initially but paying dividends in the form of higher populations.

Thank you guys for the answers. I've usually been aiming at Sid's Sushi for the food...and providing the foreigners with extra food just seems...wrong. What would be the least beneficial corporation in your opinion?

And when you say that you can't found in the same city as a "competitor" does that mean ANY corporation or just ones in the same industry?

What you want to do is spread the corp to an AI who has only 1 of the resources. You get $4, they pay $4+, and they get barely anything for it.

Better yet, sometimes what I do is target an AI with NONE of the resources, trade them the resource, spam the corp, then after the minimum time, cancel the trade deal. Then they're stuck with nothing, each exec pays for himself in 20 turns, and sometimes they even help you with the spamming.