Cooperation addiction

Anyone else guilty of this ?

I pretty much never choose state property because of it, and spend a lot of my resources, even during wartime, to spread a cooperation. Even trying to spread civ's jewelers for the economy boost ( I always run free market,& keep coop in a city with wall street and have courthouses all over ).
However this usually ends up having an economy almost only dependent on one city, eg a single city making 1400+ gold ( being a holy city quite often, and having 3 cooperations sometimes), which is quite dangerous.

Are there any better ways of having a major GNP without having to create moo many ''gold'' cities ? I found I often failed the game because I was making too little production cities, but now I really need holy's and cooperation to keep a healthy economy with enough production...

State Property is a must if you're going for a Domination or to a lesser extent Conquest victory. If you're on that path, forget about incorporating a company, do something else better with the Great People.

Bast said:

State Property is a must if you're going for a Domination or to a lesser extent Conquest victory. If you're on that path, forget about incorporating a company, do something else better with the Great People.

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I respect SP, but never underestimate the power of corporations + vassals. I recently had a game on a standard map where Mining Inc was netting well over 30 hammers, and sushi +18 food. Most of this was extorted from capitulated rivals. Corps may be expensive, but it's easy to recoup the losses through leveraging the gains to your advantage.

Snovvdog said:

Anyone else guilty of this ?

I pretty much never choose state property because of it, and spend a lot of my resources, even during wartime, to spread a cooperation. Even trying to spread civ's jewelers for the economy boost ( I always run free market,& keep coop in a city with wall street and have courthouses all over ).
However this usually ends up having an economy almost only dependent on one city, eg a single city making 1400+ gold ( being a holy city quite often, and having 3 cooperations sometimes), which is quite dangerous.

Are there any better ways of having a major GNP without having to create moo many ''gold'' cities ? I found I often failed the game because I was making too little production cities, but now I really need holy's and cooperation to keep a healthy economy with enough production...

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If you want to go space, use corps the way you described. (corps/shrine/merchants in WS city).

If you are waring or are planning domination, SP is probably your best bet. Gold can come from conquered cities.

State Property is a must if you're going for a Domination or to a lesser extent Conquest victory. If you're on that path, forget about incorporating a company, do something else better with the Great People.

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Hardly. SP is an economic drain which makes your conquests more expensive and slower to return a profit. Sid's Sushi is the BEST late investment to quickly regrow your enemy's caps after they've been starved by having city radius 0. Forgoing the larger numbers of trade routes or the higher health of the alternatives is a major drag on how fast I tech, let alone the need to divert into researching communism itself sometimes.

Sometimes I need hammers more than beakers and cash, other times I don't. Many late game wars are won for me by getting tanks before the AI gets anti-tanks, SAM infantry, or gunships online. Other times I'm beelining laser. Even if I can get zero corps, free market or environmentalism are better for me.

If you can get your hands on massive amounts of metal and coal, Mining Inc. can handily beat the production edge of SP while Sid's Sushi or even Cereal mills normally is better for food.

Well I've just won another game with 3 cooperations, sid sushi for food, crea constructions for prod and civ jewelers for gold... Haven't come to specialize my main commercial city yet fully ( as in spread coorp nation wide...) as I only just captured it but it's still my best commercial city...


I was planning a domination victory and I had no economic problems at all ( see save) cities were captured as size 17 and the like...
I had ran SP before I founded Sid sushi, but after that I immediately wanted the food bonus...

I won it by voting myself victorious...

the best way to cure an addiction to cooperation: get married.

SP isn't an economic drain when you take territory on other landmasses - in fact it becomes very necessary if you can't get FP over there and is still better if you can. Corps can be powerful too, but then you want a fairly large empire on a contiguous landmass and then just vassal everyone. State property has the instant hammers and food bonus on workshops etc also though - it's a really strong civic.

Even though in real life I think it sucks, honestly.

I must admit that I have never founded a corporation.

They are hands down better than State Property, if you have enough banks for wall street and you have the right resources from them.

In one of my current games I get -6 gold per city(-3 with courthouse) from the corporations but get +12 gold in the headquarters, for 9 net profit about. I find it is quite hard for distance maintenance to get higher than 18 base (which would make it -9 with courthouse, and even cost with the corporation)

An exception may be if you have cities on a separate continent, although good placement of the forbidden palace can help with that, or if you have to rely on workshops heavily for your production. A cottage economy gets limited benefit from state property.


The obvious limitation for corporations is you need to make sure you get the right great people, and research the needed techs. If you don't think you will get the correct great people for awhile it may be better to just go with the state property strategy, and start building those workshops and watermills.

I must admit I don't use State Property much these days. While it may save a lot of gold if you have a considerable number of cities on another continent, its very inflexible compared to corporations. Also if I have so many cities that the saving is anywhere near the profit of a corporation, I'm probably just about won anyway. Even on a game with domination switched off, a huge map and cities spread across three continents I found junking Sushi/Mining for SP to be at best an even trade when you allow for cities starving down. Add to that hammers are probably worth more than gold or science in that situation anyway, and Mining/Sushi is the best way to get a captured city up and running fast.

I'm probably not the best person to teach you how to break corporation addiction...

TheMeInTeam said:

SP isn't an economic drain when you take territory on other landmasses - in fact it becomes very necessary if you can't get FP over there and is still better if you can. Corps can be powerful too, but then you want a fairly large empire on a contiguous landmass and then just vassal everyone. State property has the instant hammers and food bonus on workshops etc also though - it's a really strong civic.

Even though in real life I think it sucks, honestly.

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By the time I can build the FP, I almost always have a good idea if I'm going to need it overseas. The problem with SP is that it depends on you running lots of workshops and waterwheels. If you have few rivers, the second is not a huge impact. SP workshops are in direct competition with US/FS cottages; if I'm warring on another landmass I want most of my territory to be running cottages for the massive advantages granted by monopolies on industrialism, flight, advanced flight, laser, computers/composites, robotics, and stealth. In late era warfare if I can get a tech advantage from bonus trade/corps running FM and my main military cities can churn out 3 promo units every turn I just don't need the hammers from SP.

In real life everywhere that state property has been implemented has seen an immediate drop in industrial output (and this tends to only be reversed by implementing some form of police state to compel to work through threat of violence) and has generally lagged behind everyone else in life expectancy gains, consumer goods production, etc.

The main drawback of corporations is that they cost a lot to set up. You need the right techs, a great person, hammers to build the executives, and gold to spread to a new city. Plus, it takes time to spread the corp around because you can only build execs from one city at the beginning, and the number of execs you can have at one time is limited.

Corps are a long-term advantage, but in the short-term they're a drain. State property only costs one optional tech and a civic switch, and you get the full effect across your empire immediately. The short-term advantage is worth it if it helps you win a war earlier or beat your opponents to a wonder, for example. So for me, whether or not to found corps depends on my victory goal, and how my opponents are doing, as well as the availability of the right great people.

nullspace said:

The main drawback of corporations is that they cost a lot to set up. You need the right techs, a great person, hammers to build the executives, and gold to spread to a new city. Plus, it takes time to spread the corp around because you can only build execs from one city at the beginning, and the number of execs you can have at one time is limited.

Corps are a long-term advantage, but in the short-term they're a drain. State property only costs one optional tech and a civic switch, and you get the full effect across your empire immediately. The short-term advantage is worth it if it helps you win a war earlier or beat your opponents to a wonder, for example. So for me, whether or not to found corps depends on my victory goal, and how my opponents are doing, as well as the availability of the right great people.

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Agreed, and I would add that you need to build an expensive national wonder to reap their full benefit, not to mention courthouses and any relevant multipliers. Also, Broadway and RocknRoll can sometimes be very useful to obtain free resources from non-hostile rivals. For this reason, I don't always consider SP to be competing with corporations. If you can obtain communism early, sometimes it makes sense to run SP until you have the necessary techs and GPs, and your cities have all the important infrastructure to milk the power of corporations properly.

Let's be honest here. You are going to be building courthouses anyways by the time you get to corps. The question is how much cost of the corp while you are building the courthouse is compared to the benefit. I handily submit that +6 food (not hard for sushi) handily outweighs the added costs until a courthouse gets up in a new conquest or newly founded city.

WS is expensive, but it pays for itself. It is very rare not to have a heavily cottaged city that you can build it in with US, shrine city or similar that you can't make it so very worth the hammers to build.

SP is nice, but using it on an iterim basis competes with the need for 2 turns of anarchy and running merc or FM. Do not underestimate the value of the trade benefits to FM. If you have cottage cheese you get very little from SP and the faster teching from better trade from FM will get you to Railroad, Medicine, etc. sooner.

Enviromentalism and US with the kremlin and cottage spam. No need to muck about with corps with this setup.

Any remaining cap on growth is removed in most cases, windmills become worth building instead of hilled towns and you get to switch between unrivaled teching and extremely powerful and efficient production as you see fit.

The problem with sushi is that most of the time you dont need more food to reach 20+ pop. With the grassland settings most people use and the tendency to make sure some sort of food resource is in every city, sids ends up growing cities into unhealthiness most of the time.

Mining inc conflicts with civ jewelers. Monies > hammers, especially when the jewelers work just as well with a single resource as they do with ten, and especially especially when the money can be converted into hammers anyway.

mirthadir said:

Let's be honest here. You are going to be building courthouses anyways by the time you get to corps. The question is how much cost of the corp while you are building the courthouse is compared to the benefit. I handily submit that +6 food (not hard for sushi) handily outweighs the added costs until a courthouse gets up in a new conquest or newly founded city.

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But would +6 food beat the benefit of workshops/watermills in SP? I recently played a map that gave me many, many plains, and I can safely say that +6 Sushi would not only fall well short of what SP yielded, but would cost more too. It wasn't until I obtained a GM+(lucky)GE that the balance shifted to the corporation's advantage, and by then I'd enjoyed a good 50 turns of SP. Obviously, whether it is worth running a spell of SP before obtaining corps is map dependent. In this case SP was a no brainer for resolving my food deficit, and making the bulk of my land useful. I needed a solution urgently, and adopted a "wait and see" attitude towards founding corps.

mirthadir said:

WS is expensive, but it pays for itself. It is very rare not to have a heavily cottaged city that you can build it in with US, shrine city or similar that you can't make it so very worth the hammers to build.

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That depends on whether you cottage everything, if you do then forget SP, if not then forget US . Normally I run the science slider very high in the late game (often 100%), so for me, building WS in a cottaged city (not that I normally have many) would be wasteful. Better to spam workshops everywhere, build it quickly, then substitute workshops with farms and run merchants IMO. Anyway, I never for one moment suggested that WS isn't worth the hammers, I said it is an ESSENTIAL build if you are planning on spamming execs. Obviously WS isn't a prerequisite for running SP though.

mirthadir said:

SP is nice, but using it on an iterim basis competes with the need for 2 turns of anarchy and running merc or FM. Do not underestimate the value of the trade benefits to FM. If you have cottage cheese you get very little from SP and the faster teching from better trade from FM will get you to Railroad, Medicine, etc. sooner.

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2 turns of revolution? That would be 1 for normal speed (single civic swap) I believe, but you can time important civics switches with a Golden Age. At this stage it's quite normal to have GP(s) on standby. Obviously, if you have spammed towns on every workshopable/wartermillable tile then it goes without saying that SP would be a very weak civic for the circumstance. I gather the impression from your talk of "cottage cheese" and "US" that SP might not fit in with your playing style.

Ibian said:

The problem with sushi is that most of the time you dont need more food to reach 20+ pop. With the grassland settings most people use and the tendency to make sure some sort of food resource is in every city, sids ends up growing cities into unhealthiness most of the time.

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The good thing with food though is that it can be converted to anything. Why grow your cities to their maximum potential size? You could have a modestly sized production city that focuses the food surplus on workshops thanks to Sushi, the smaller size would mean that you could relentlessly spam unhealthy improvements without fear of breaking the health cap too. Or you could make an ocean city work lots of rep specialists, rather than weak water squares. Just because you have lots of food, doesn't mean you need to grow. Food is flexible.

How can you not like SP? Come on! Police state/Representation, Vassalage/Nationhood/Free Speech, Caste System/Emancipation (damned anger penalty), State Property, and Free Religion are powerful civics for getting production/science out of ALL your cities while still maintaining tech progress. Farms and Workshops, YUM!

But still, it's hard to argue with massive boosts from corporations. I find it to be a logistical issue usually. Putting corporations in every city is expensive and time consuming, whereas SP is quick and easy. Go ahead and spend your turns on peaceful business ventures, don't mind the stack knocking on your door.