The Resourceful Trader: Corporation Maximization

I spent most the day thinking about the rise in importance of resource trading. It is entirely related to the advent of corporation.

For the most part of discussion there will be a few ideas we should be clear about

1. You obviously can trade extra resources not used by corporations and retain the same level of health and/or happiness. Since those are equal and have no effect on performance or arrangement of corporations, we shouldnt pay special attention to them.

Also part of the idea is to not only help yourself but hopefully a friendly ally who has resources you need and different corporations, or competitive corporations (surprisingly there isn't that big of a competition between Standard Ethanol and Sid's Sushi. The person with Standard Ethanol is actually has an advantage by being able to hedge both happiness and health with the one company.)

I havent explored anything beyond 2 vs 3 corps yet.

2. I am by no means done with this, so updates are welcome and encourage.

As you can see on the spreadsheet attached, the goal is to utilize those resources out there and give a general idea of arrangements that will be seen in the game. Sure there might be one for one trades like wheat for sugar but that puts each one down the same resource.

The ability of Standard Ethanol in conjunction with Aluminum Co to get 7 Reasearch is cool, but the converse and competition to that is a 9 culture consortium. That is the other point; to illustrate the opportunity costs for pursuing certain corporations.

Also the fact that Mining Inc can not be combined with any of the other Happiness/Non Food Production Corporations puts it at a distinct disadvantage if a consortium of the other 3 is formed and working in unison. at least with the Health/Food Production Corps they cant be completely pushed out by resource competition.

Anyway, download the zip and take a look.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/109343/resource_trading.zip

Your spreadsheet seems well put together, good job getting that information compiled into one place.

I think what's key to this discussion is how you should align your corporation choices and strategy with your game play strategy.

For example, if you're in for the space race, then gold and research, and any hammers you can squeeze in are going to be key. If you're going for the culture win, then you want to go with the "Fantastic Four" as discussed here.

If you're gunning for all out conquest/domination, then all you care about will probably be hammers and gold. Here, you might even choose to abandon the corporation game and go with the CS/PS combo discussed here.

I am acheing to try the corporate/capitalistic imperialism approach, where I attempt to hord resources, make a bee-line for Sid's Sushi Co., Civilized Jewelers, Creative Constructions, and Aluminum Company. I would then spread each to 3 or 4 of my key cities, then switch to Mercantilism, and spread my corporations far and wide to cripple my rivals with the maintenance costs. I think this strategy only really works against the AI, but I'd love to see it in action. My strategy is for a different reason than that discussed in the "Fantastic Four" scenario, but it also garners the same benefits.

So, for me, I would make trades to maximize my total resource count, as benefits from the corporations are multiplicative and cumulative. Further, I would prioritize trades that gave me more coal, gold, silver, gems, Iron, Copper, Marble, Stone, and Aluminum, then also Crab, Clam, Fish, and Rice. Anything else would be of no use to me.

Additionally, my war plans would be centered around securing the above mentioned resources. This will net me HUGE amounts of culture along with some cash, food, research, and production. So, for a culture strategy, you can't beat the "Fantastic Four." If you are aggressive about monopolizing the resources and financially crippling your rivals (as my strategy plans to do), then you also reduce the risk of costly wars that may slow down your progress towards victory.

Very nice.

I'm not sure I completely agree with all of the -1 /, because most players will not trade their last resource away [causing the minus /].

I think the exception is if BtS allows multiple instances of the same resource to give a cumulative bonus (i.e., 2 Rice = +2 ). However, I don't think this is the case.?.

Just in case you need them, these are all the possible 3 & 4 Corporate Office combinations:


Because of the massive number of Corporate Office combinations and then resource trade combinations, it may be simpler to create a basic graph where the rows represent different resources and the columns their benefit to each corporation.

This way to determine a resource trade's net effect, you only need to find two points on the grid instead of having to search a library of possibilities.

(I was originally going to do this but found myself sidetracked developing the Fantastic Four post on my proposed Corporate Culture strategy. I'm happy to see someone else is picking this up.)

I was going to arrange the resource list alphabetically while arranging the corporations along the top in the 3-1-3 setup, which seems simplest to me when trying to determine which corporations can co-exist (one of the first 3 and either mining or all of the last 3).


-- my 2

OTAKUjbski said:

Very nice.

I'm not sure I completely agree with all of the -1 /, because most players will not trade their last resource away [causing the minus /].

I think the exception is if BtS allows multiple instances of the same resource to give a cumulative bonus (i.e., 2 Rice = +2 ). However, I don't think this is the case.?.

Just in case you need them, these are all the possible 3 & 4 Corporate Office combinations:

Spoiler :

Code:

AC - CJ - CC
AC - CJ - CM
AC - CJ - SS
AC - CJ - SE

AC - CC - CM
AC - CC - SS
AC - CC - SE

CJ - CC - CM
CJ - CC - SS
CJ - CC - SE

AC - CJ - CC - CM
AC - CJ - CC - SS
AC - CJ - CC - SE

Because of the massive number of Corporate Office combinations and then resource trade combinations, it may be simpler to create a basic graph where the rows represent different resources and the columns their benefit to each corporation.

This way to determine a resource trade's net effect, you only need to find two points on the grid instead of having to search a library of possibilities.

(I was originally going to do this but found myself sidetracked developing the Fantastic Four post on my proposed Corporate Culture strategy. I'm happy to see someone else is picking this up.)

I was going to arrange the resource list alphabetically while arranging the corporations along the top in the 3-1-3 setup, which seems simplest to me when trying to determine which corporations can co-exist (one of the first 3 and either mining or all of the last 3).


-- my 2

Click to expand...

I think you may be right in formatting. I was actually going to ask if anyone had some software skills that would create a drop down menu of corporations with their data present and prevent any conflicts of interest from arising. this way you can drop down which civ has which corps, which resources they need, and the respective benefits, etc. then a net bar would be at the bottom of the field.


The whole point of the / swaps is becuase I dont believe the AI or the player is going to trade away their last / resources, or without gaining the same resource back in another way. Essentially you are hedging part of the trade with another trade while benefitting your corps the most possible from the trade. Also I dont think the AI will trade away any of the resources you need without regard to what their corps need.

mrt144 said:

I think you may be right in formatting. I was actually going to ask if anyone had some software skills that would create a drop down menu of corporations with their data present and prevent any conflicts of interest from arising. this way you can drop down which civ has which corps, which resources they need, and the respective benefits, etc. then a net bar would be at the bottom of the field.

Click to expand...

I have the Excellent skills to make these kinds of spreadsheets, but between work (that's what I should be doing now instead of soaking up everything BtS) and playing BtS, I'm not sure I want to expend the energy to put it together any time soon.

Set up the format and ill enter the data.

I have a nice, pretty calculator, but it's 2.2 MB.

What's the best public file share these days?

The Trade Window screenshot I had applied as a background was being reformatted as an uncompressed image once saved to the Excel spreadsheet, which was why my last version was so ridiculously large.

I also changed the colors to more closely reflect the default colors of Civilization IV (I forgot I had changed everything to a Silver-Grey color).

Hopefully, you'll have as much fun using it as I did making it ...


... lemme know what you think ...

That is amazing! Thank you so much! If I ever come up with other ideas I'll let you know. This was exactly what I had in mind when I was pondering such a thing. It's like you got into my mind!

Anyway, I am very grateful for this! I think this will definitely help out many players when deciding what direction to go into if they dont found the corporation first and how to hedge themselves in terms of trading.

I suppose the only other addition is to add more than 1 AI player into the mix. Also Multiple instances of the same resource don't tanslate into health changes or happy changes, but i suppose thats fine.

You know something, I get the feeling this whole thread should have spoiler tags around it, but nice effort anyways...

Wow! That looks very nice!

There might be a few cases where it might be better from a trading perspective to not have a complete monopoly.

for instance SE/AL vs. SS/CC/CJ works out nicely on maximal trades for SS/CC/CJ. In fact it'd work out better than an SE/MI competitor.

SE/AL: 2xSeafood, Gems, Aluminum : + 9 Research
SS/CC/CJ: Sugar, Corn, Rice, Coal: +.5 Food, +.5 Hammers, + 1 Gold, +9 Culture

SE/MI: 2xSeafood, Gems: +6 Research
F4: Sugar,Rice,Corn: +.5 Food, +1 Gold, +6 Culture

this way, MI will be unique to itself and have to compete against 2 consortiums rather than 1. It would have to offer up a lot to bust that trade.

mrt144 said:

That is amazing! Thank you so much! If I ever come up with other ideas I'll let you know. This was exactly what I had in mind when I was pondering such a thing. It's like you got into my mind!

Click to expand...

Well, you did tell me what you were looking for, lol.

mrt144 said:

I suppose the only other addition is to add more than 1 AI player into the mix.

Click to expand...

Why would you want more than one trading partner up on the screen? That just seems too difficult, b/c then you'd have to have different "you offer" boxes to determine who's getting what from whom.

If you need to calculate multiple trades to see what you're getting/giving up, just ignore the "AI has" section and punch in all the resources you'll be getting/giving between all the trades.

EDIT: Then again, I can certainly see the benefit of being able to dial up two different cities, since not every city in the empire will have the same corporation(s). Maybe I'll do that next week sometime ... should be an e-z addition.

mrt144 said:

Also Multiple instances of the same resource don't tanslate into health changes or happy changes, but i suppose thats fine.

Click to expand...

Nor should it. Even if you have 20,000 Spices, it will still only equate to +1 . (Unless something changed in BtS I just haven't come across yet.)

DrewBledsoe said:

You know something, I get the feeling this whole thread should have spoiler tags around it, but nice effort anyways...

Click to expand...

huh

OTAKUjbski said:

Well, you did tell me what you were looking for, lol.



Why would you want more than one trading partner up on the screen? That just seems too difficult, b/c then you'd have to have different "you offer" boxes to determine who's getting what from whom.

If you need to calculate multiple trades to see what you're getting/giving up, just ignore the "AI has" section and punch in all the resources you'll be getting/giving between all the trades.

EDIT: Then again, I can certainly see the benefit of being able to dial up two different cities, since not every city in the empire will have the same corporation(s). Maybe I'll do that next week sometime ... should be an e-z addition.



Nor should it. Even if you have 20,000 Spices, it will still only equate to +1 . (Unless something changed in BtS I just haven't come across yet.)

Click to expand...

The additional trading partner was to see what resources you would compete for with the other consortium and the bonuses of that

I was always under the impression that additional resources contributed to happiness or health as needed by the cities... (so if you had 2 sheep that'd be +2 health in every city that needed it, or same with spices. I suppose for the purposes it doesn't matter as much because these are already bonus resources that arent being used, and might be consumed some point in the future.)