Well there isn't much of a real world reduction in distance maintenance from state property either.
Maybe not. I personally always looked at that as representing the huge Sovjet Empire which was functioning under a State Property like civic. This empire was a single continent empire.
Not a strong argument, I know, but the large differences between the various civics that you can use to govern your empire are just there to make it an interesting choice. So small real life perceived differences are blown up to huge proportions and they try to do this in a way that retains game balance.
And I think they may be giving you your wish
Corporations are(should be post-patch) something you WANT in your cities, (almost all of the time if they are foreign and always if they are domestic)
That was another discussion and also an interesting one. I just argued that inflation shouldn't influence the upkeep of corporations because it would mess with the balance between the benefits of the corporation (hammers, gold, science, culture) versus the maintenance cost of the corporation. (
see this thread) It would be impossible to properly balance that when inflation would also be used to influence the balance.
Personally, I would like it if corporations are (really) good in your own cities if you found the headquarters. There is a race to found the corporations and it is expensive to get one first. You must direct your research in the right way and if you are in a competitive game it is important to have the great person available once the corporation becomes available. So some reward is reasonable. Furthermore, there is a serious cost to spreading the corporation over all of your cities. It costs 100 hammers per city and 50 gold per city, nothing to be laughed about.
Under the 3.13 rules for corporations, it is probably also mildly interesting to get a foreign corporation in a well developed city when you have enough resources to seriously benefit from the corporation. However, a foreign founded mining inc (my favourite corporation nonetheless) in a city without a courthouse and without production bonuses while you don't own many resources to boost this corporation (a corporation with very few usable resources still has a considerable cost), is probably not such a great idea. It might be a better idea to get the benefits of the state property civic than to run an inefficient corporation in your cities. The efficiency of a foreign corporation in your cities depends on the state of your empire (resources to help the corporation) and the state of the city (how developed is it to make use of the benefits of this corporation).
Also realise that the foreign civilisation which owns the headquarters is benefiting from the expansion of this corporation in your city. That could also be seen as an additional negative effect of this foreign corporation in your cities.
Free Market is best with lots of corporations, you get the gold from your domestic ones, and the benefits from foreign ones. (and your domestic ones give you gold when they are placed in your colonies)
State Property corps could get Gold from overseas Colonies, but the State Property government would be better off just keeping it under direct control. They will get no gold from corps in overseas cities, but they won't pay maintenance either.
This goes long with the idea of
SP=low cost+low income
FM=high cost+high income (income even higher now with trade route bonuses)
I think it would be balanced
In my vision, state property is the civic to use when you were too late to found a corporation. It gives some serious cost reductions in city upkeep and it gives a serious production boost because workshops and watermills are far more efficient tile improvements. And the 10% production bonus is also nice in starting cities without high production bonuses. It works like having a mining inc. without having to spread it around all of your cities and without having to direct your research and use a great person. Of course, a mining inc. of a huge empire with a huge amount of resources would do better than the state property boost. But in that case, you're talking about a game which is already won.
I don't know if the 3.13 balance (from what the changelog shows) is perfect. It's a bit too early for me to judge that. But it isn't horribly broken as far as I can tell. I would consider the situation before the changes (where inflation influenced the corporation cost) broken.
Maybe some fine tuning is needed to balance the various labor civics.
. I mean, I woulda paid Solver of course, but thats just me.
