P3-02 - Hostile Takeover Inc.

PaulusIII

Unholy Warlord
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P3-02: Hostile Takeover Inc.

When it comes to late-game warmongering, we tend to go for the warmonger's economic civic; State Property. After all, it keeps the costs down, increases production, is cheap and doesn't need much hassle to make it work. And hey, who uses corporations anyway when it comes to warmongering? If anything, corporations only seem to see much action in a peaceful environment, keeping small empires in competition with the bigger ones.

We as CEO's of Hostile Takeover Inc. have enough money to control the government. We're gonna make the free market work and have the corporations run our war efforts. We'll show them commies who is boss when it comes to warmongering! But since corporations can be an expensive effort to run we have chosen our proper leader who'll make the maintenance costs bearable while still endorsing our aggressive policies; Shaka Zulu!

Settings:

Map: Fractal
Size: Standard
Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Emperor
Leader: Shaka of Zululand

But even for such a large corporation with nearly unlimited power over the nation, we CEO's still have rules to abide by. As Hostile Takeover Inc. we will advance the free market's interests all over the world!

1. The free market is superior in every way to alternatives. We will not allow socialism or environmentalist voices in the government. (State Property and Environmentalism are off-limits. Environmentalism votes will be defied)

2. The free market dislikes big government. (Bureaucracy is off-limits as well.)

3. The free market will be supported by its corporations. (Found at least 3 corporations, and spread them throughout the empire.)

4. The free market will not bet on a war without proper funding of the economy. (We are not allowed to run aggressive wars before we found our first corporation. This to prevent us from overrunning the world before we start our pro-corporate policies - hey, we're playing Shaka, so steamrolling opponents might not be out of the question.)

5. The free market will reign supreme over the world. While total victory is preferrable, growing too big to fail is also an option. (Only Conquest and Domination will be accepted)

SG rules: Have fun, destroy our enemies, 24/48 rule. Not much else to say really.

Roster is closed!

PaulusIII
Meiz
nocho
Pindrus
Loki Strikes
Ralph Jackson

Alternate: Dave Hartwick

Discuss the rules etc. Will roll up a save later today.
 
I rarely bother to play with corporations, so this would be a great variety for me. Sign me in! :)
 
I very rarely bother with corps myself, just because I'm a State Property addict. Thought this would be a nice variant to use corporations to great effect for once :)
 
Sign me up, please! :)

I hardly know how to run corporations properly, not even in real life! :rolleyes::lol: Most interesting game, therefore!

On a side note, I will be away on a trip from Thursday to Monday (both included), so put me at the end of the roster, supposing this will be kicked off soon.
 
Oh, this sounds like much fun. But I'm already in three games so it would probably be unwise to join. Sadness. If, for some reason, you have trouble recruiting players I might hop on, otherwise, I'll happily lurk.

The only recommendation I have is to found all your corporations (make sure that they are non-competing) in the same city in which you have Wall Street. Corporation profits aren't added into the city's normal income, so they are separately totaled and modified as pure gold.

Shame about Bureaucracy being off-limits, though. Moving the capital to your Corp. town would really crank out the money, I think, but the flavor of the rules makes sense.
 
I will sign-in if you will be so kind to allow this lurker an opportunity to earn custom-avatar privileges. In single-player I usually play in the monarch-to-immortal range depending on other settings and this variant isn't some sort of OCC-AW or no-worker craziness, so I think I should be able to not quite drive the game into the ditch during my sets.

Paulus, are you dead set on Shaka for the challenge? I would put him as a close #2 choice for these rules behind...

Charlemagne of Holy Rome! The 5% difference in city maintenance (Rathaus vs. Courthouse + Ihkanda) can actually mean a lot of gold, depending on the number of resources that the corp's are eating. But more important, without early wars to grab territory we will be relying on the acres we can secure in a turbo-charged early expansion to propel us to a decent tech position in order to found our corp's and secure enough resources to make them useful. Thus, contrary to many games, the 2x speed settlers will make a big difference. Plus the ubiquitous defender UU would allow us to skimp on units in the mid-game, though the Impi is certainly nothing to shake a (pointy) stick at either.

As for which corps to choose, I think that will depend heavily on the resources available. With Fractal we could end up in the middle of a huge continent with every type of grain or isolated on a string of islands with only ocean-based food resources.

Looking forward to 5000 years of barbarism!
 
I'm in Paulus, looking forward to another war based game... Hopefully a bit more of a challenge than the Izzy game :lol:

I am thinking corporation wise that Sid/Cereal mills(depending on resources), Mining inc and civilized jewelers seems the way to go...
 
Sign me up Paulus

Cheers

Ralph
 
3. The free market will be supported by its corporations. (Found at least 3 corporations, and spread them throughout the empire.)

If all your cities have to have all three corporations, it limits your choices. You can have one of the food ones or Standard Ethanol, as they all take rice. You can't have Mining, Inc., as it competes with Creative Constructions, Civilized Jewellers, and Aluminum Co. I could be misreading the intention of that rule. If not, I expect I'd go with Cereal or Sid's plus Creative Constructions + Civilized Jewellers, unless by some freak of the RNG there was a ton of aluminum on the map.

Which takes you to required techs

Cereal Mills - Refrigeration + merchant
Sid's Sushi - Medicine + merchant
Creative Construction - Combustion + engineer
Civilized Jewellers - Mass Media + artist

And they're all pretty late. It's going to be a long peace, depending on how "aggressive wars" gets interpreted. That rule's a bummer as you can't fully exploit the spreading your corporations to your vassals ploy. Also, you could get beat to one you need and lose the variant, although I haven't seen all that many AI founded corporations. I'm not very experienced with the late game, though.

Looks like you have a full roster, Paulus, but you can put me down as an alternate if you like.
 
Perhaps we should clarify the 3+ corporation founding requirement. A :food:-producing corp. is a no-brainer and which one will likely depend on our land--or, more appropriately, our seas--and available resources (though we will likely be able to acquire more through trade, as we won't be spreading such a powerful corp to AI's).

Mining Inc. is generally regarded as more powerful, and certainly available earlier (Railroad), than the other conflicting corps (Creative Constr, Civ Jewelers, Aluminum Co). Would it fulfill the variant rules to spread mining in core cities and one/two/all it's competitors in the boonies of the empire? It would mean you couldn't have all the HQ's in the :gold:wallstreet:gold: city, but, with Civ Jewelers making money everywhere it goes and only putting the secondary corps in smaller cities, that is less of a concern.

I've pretty much exclusively used Sids + Mining Inc. in my own single-player games, so this variant will be a nice way to break out of that.

I'd guess everyone has probably read or already knows this info, but the guide on corporations is a good reference: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237717
 
Nice to have you all back on board guys, and welcome to Pindrus :)

I've been thinking about making rule 4 slightly more lenient, allowing us perhaps one offensive war before corps kick in. I've mainly put that rule in to prevent something what happened in another SG I played in; the first Immortal Slavers game. We set out to showcase the power of Kremlin-powered whipping, but we claimed a domination-nearly-conquest victory before we even got to the Industrial Age :lol:

Since we don't have corps before at least Railroad or Medicine, I think that rule is perhaps too strict. We should still restrict war but perhaps not entirely forbid it.

Will roll up some starts later this evening.
 
Well, I've rolled up three starts with Shaka. ;)

(start pics spoilered to improve load times)

Start A:
Spoiler :

Start B:
Spoiler :

Start C:
Spoiler :


Neither three are outstanding at first glance. I'm not sure yet.
 
Yeah Paulus I read that game, really interesting, and good job on the domination

I think we should be allow to war, but not to the degree where we actively pursue a win until corps...

I would say a food corp and mining inc in one city, and stick civilized jewelers in another city and use it in our crap cities to get some money/offset maintenance

Wall street would go in food/mining inc city probably.

On GP's
Music for free artist for jewelers?
Economics for merchant?

For an engineer should we go pyramids - HG to ensure an unpolluted pool or just run an engineer spec and pray?


EDIT:
on starts not much preference so I will just express some thoughts

A: land seems not that good, lots of plains and desert around us, may be very hard to expand

B: Meh, mediocre, would probably explore with the intent of settling 1E for plains hill bonus

C: Riverside plains hill start *drool*, then I notice the dye and groan... meh, C is probably my favorite if just for plains hill + river... also looks like no danger of not having enough land and plenty of forests to chop into finding better spots.
 
Lots of plains you roll! :)

A: seems to have most food with fish and rice, phants good to have. Hopefully not too much desert to the NW and hopefully the river NE leads somewhere.

B: to many plains for my liking

C: never fond of calendar resources in the BFC. Looks like coast NW, At least plains hill settlement.

ACB if you ask for my preferences...
 
Thanks for the slot in the roster, just set up a photo bucket account so looking forward to the SG experience.

These starts all seem a somewhat inauspicious beginning for the massive corporate empire that Zululand will someday become! This truly will be a capitalist-inspired rags-to-riches story.

A - Land resources at least match starting stats. Though the plains hill is just 1W it looks like we'd just pick up some more ocean and possibly some desert and may settle on a resource, so probably settling in place in this scenario (1E ends up 1 off the coast). This is the only start with visible, decent food (fish + rice) and could have decent production to kick out settlers/workers. A worker first while researching fishing then build a WB with hunted elephants?

B - A sheep as the only visible food resource and a huge swath of food-sucking plains... could be more munchies in the fog, but I've seen the map scripts kick out poorer capital sites than this too. Moving 1E onto the plains hill to pick up the ivory and hammer bonus is a possibility, though there are 3 mystery tiles to the west that would be lost and the bare hill may have a resource. I'd want to move the scout onto the bare grassland hill to see if he can see any more food south. And is that silk on the forest NNW of settler?

C - Also fairly food-poor, though with a bit more green grass in the visible BFC. What else does the fog hold?? Scout can move SW but that still leaves 5 question marks. Farming the riverside grasslands dye would be a nice early commerce boost and lots of forests for chopping are a plus though. Head straight to BW and have the first worker chop out a 2nd after farming the dyes & cows? Normally not a huge fan of calendar goodies in the BFC though, mostly a waste of resource slots.

In the end I will vote A > C > B with hopes that A's desert is just a little blip (maybe with some FP if the river curves back) and not the Sahara. Plus A already has 2 sushi resources!:D C would be great too though--even without much food we should be able to chop out a decent number of cities.:)



-*-*-*-*-*

I can't think of some creative way to only semi-limit our warring. Even if we just have one pre-corp war it would be possible to grab enough land to make the rest fairly trivial, depending on how our opponents fare.

Perhaps if others DoW on us we are allowed to take as many cities as required for them to come to peace on our terms?

Even if we miss the free GM & GA from techs it would be easy enough to run caste for a while to pick them up if we can find a decent GP city. The GE is tougher, so we should probably shoot for at least one of the early engineer-point wonders. Hesitant about the 'mids though. Depending on the strictness of rule #4 we may not be able to spare all those hammers, especially with no stone visible in any of the starts.

The good news is that with a focus on early expansion we probably won't be putting out many GPP, so snagging the even a slow-cooking GE with a Hanging Gardens + Forge should come around eventually.

A final word on whether "spreading" corps means we have to have all 3 in every city or can differentiate?
 
lurker's comment:
sooo . . . even though it's super-lame, i'm going to plug an older game of mine which has a lot to do w/corps ~

PH11: Hypermegaglobalnet we had to found all 7 corps. it might be a good reference game as some of the mechanics/logistics are probably similar for your game.

and good luck with the game ~ looks interesting! :goodjob:

 
When I focus on early expansion I usually pop MORE early GPs, as most of my cities will be running scientists so I have at least some research.

HG + an engineer seems like a plan though, however I am not going to be for it or against it vs. mids until I see some more land.


I will settle a plains hill even knowing there is probably a strategic resource there, the hammer bonus is just so huge in terms of raw hammers gained over a game as well as the value of early hammers.

The strategic resource, in best case scenario will probably take 30-40 turns to reveal (if it is copper) and in those 30-40 turns I would have gained 1H a turn, I probably won't be working this resource for another 10 turns as I will be improving my food firsts


After all this advocating of plain hills, I probably would not move 1W on start A for the reasons Pindrus made. The start is just so weak that moving 1W would probably hurt more than help, it would pick up 1 ocean + 1 desert tile and give up a grassland and a plains hill
 
I'll give my vote for A also. The other two starts... meh...

I can't think of some creative way to only semi-limit our warring. Even if we just have one pre-corp war it would be possible to grab enough land to make the rest fairly trivial, depending on how our opponents fare.

Perhaps if others DoW on us we are allowed to take as many cities as required for them to come to peace on our terms?

I like this idea, it should work as long as we don't start to invent some loopholes to abuse it.
 
I've mainly put that rule in to prevent something what happened in another SG I played in...

Then I advice start C, because I know you guys will have troubles to resist another round of elepults (trademark registered by Soirana) fun with ivory so close ;)

Good luck guys :)
Raskolnikov
 
Are these starts really that uninspiring? :rolleyes:

Did Hyperglobalmegalonet inc.llc.com.mba steal Shaka's thunder? :eek:

Any other comments or opinions on the starts? :bump:
 
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