(9-08) Corporations I: Requirements

[hokath]

Motivation:
Now VP is so stable, and AI bonuses less front-loaded, I find myself playing almost every game to the victory screen (or the defeat screen, man Immortal is hard)
It becomes apparent that Corporations as they currently stand determine, to a large part, the outcome of the game. Yet, you cannot reasonably control even which Corporation you Found.
For example, 10 Franchises of Giorgio Armeier gives you +20 Culture per Office (that is, per City) giving a double-digit percentage of your total Culture.
Meanwhile Civilized Jewelers on the same number of Franchises gives over 100% Great Person Rate AND 30% Golden Age Length.
These bonuses are unlike any other game system with the possible exception of the "quadratic scaling" buildings like Factory and Chaebol.

I've split up my proposal into 3 parts that I think can stand alone.

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Proposal:

• Monopoly HQs require one of their listed resources locally to be able to build.
• Monopolies are no longer required to found a corporation
  This allows you to, roughly, pick any Corporation. You might not be able to make it in the Capital.

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Implementation Notes:
This uses only existing database code.
Can be played here.

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Is part of a series with

Thread '(9-08b) Corporations II: Balance Changes'

Jan 1, 2026

Motivation:
Now VP is so stable, and AI bonuses less front-loaded, I find myself playing almost every game to the victory screen (or the defeat screen, man Immortal is hard)
It becomes apparent that Corporations as they currently stand determine, to a large part, the outcome of the game. Yet, you cannot reasonably control even which Corporation you Found.
For example, 10 Franchises of Giorgio Armeier gives you +20 Culture per Office (that is, per City) giving a double-digit percentage of your total Culture.
Meanwhile Civilized Jewelers on the same number of Franchises gives over 100% Great...

• hokath
• Replies: 24
• Forum: Passed Proposals

[Vote] Thread '(9-09) Corporations III: Additions'

Jan 1, 2026

Motivation:
Now VP is so stable, and AI bonuses less front-loaded, I find myself playing almost every game to the victory screen (or the defeat screen, man Immortal is hard)
It becomes apparent that Corporations as they currently stand determine, to a large part, the outcome of the game. Yet, you cannot reasonably control even which Corporation you Found.
For example, 10 Franchises of Giorgio Armeier gives you +20 Culture per Office (that is, per City) giving a double-digit percentage of your total Culture.
Meanwhile Civilized Jewelers on the same number of Franchises gives over 100% Great...

• hokath
• Replies: 11
• Forum: Passed Proposals

• 

 

[redrum68]

Seems like a good change. My only question/thought here is should we also allow multiple of the same corporation then to be built? 2 reasons for this:
1. Are you now more likely to have 2 civs both constructing the same HQ at the same time since lower resource requirements?
2. Tech leaders would now gain a bigger advantage (potentially snowball more) since they get there first and generally should have more HQ options with the lower resource requirements.

 

[hokath]

At the moment:
They function like world wonders.
You cannot own 2 corporations at the same time

Changing those things requires big DLL+UI changes

And yes, this is a (possible) buff to the tech leader in that you might have access to corporations you didn't before. That is why it is also desirable that several corporations can help with a particular victory condition (part II)
There is also the situation now where you can actually have 0 corporations to choose because you have your starting monopoly, its in the same pool as someone else and they got there first. This change should prevent that from happening in the vast majority of cases.

 

[redrum68]

Yeah I think this is mostly a good change and gives more flexibility. Just a bit hesitant as now it potentially buffs the tech leader even more than before as they can choose from a lot more options. Also there is more likely to be a headquarter build race (similar to wonders) if multiple civs are trying to build the same one which losing that race could have significant consequences and again the tech leader generally could start it first so probably has the edge.

 

[hokath]

Hopefully your spy in the tech leader's capital will inform you they have started building it.
And that's when you assassinate the city governor

 

[Alpakinator]

Why exactly is it important to be able to choose whatever corporation you want to found, without trying to settle, fight or ally(statecraft) for monopolies?

Snowball AI will always have the optimal choice available. Deepening the snowball problem is exactly what we don't want.

And that's when you assassinate the city governor

Poking the the city governor with a dagger delays it by 5 turns, right? Which is way too low to matter.

 

[notaspambot]

Because having your choices limited by your starting RNG this late into the game isn't a great feeling. Monopolies aren't like strategic resources that you can go ahead and grab by settling a couple of cities. You either basically need to conquer an entire civ if you're lucky and said monopoly is regional, or half the world if it's not. The monopoly system also makes some corporations way harder to acquire than others. Sometimes you can't form them at all- the plantation-based corporations most often falling into this category.

 

[hokath]

Yes once you realize the mechanic works this way, you might feel that for a civ with a clear victory condition, you should restart to get a good monopoly corporation for your victory type.
Seems crazy at first, but its just a T1 restart so there's basically no cost. It's like Marsh Truffles or no-mountain Inca, etc.
Or you don't and live with the FOMO (cursed with knowledge)

Turning the question around, why should the snowball civ sometimes starts with the corporation that locks in the win, and sometimes the game continues because they're diplo and can only build 2K.
It seems arbitrary. The AI ofc does not strategize on that level either.

Finally, the reward for obtaining monopolies is already large: you gain the monopoly bonus.

Some history too: the corporations system was added later in Gazebo's tenure as the final feature release of CBP. There was some rebalancing but in general I think it's been fairly neglected, mostly because a lot of games either don't go that long (or if they do, they're decided already)
This was the revival of the axed Civ IV mechanic, which there was a mirror to the early game mechanic of Religion.
In Civ IV there were several founding requirements and the resource one was
> The city must have access to at least one of the resources consumed by the corporation.
I.e. this proposal. Gazebo changed it in his remaster to use the newly introduced monopoly mechanic, to tie everything together. Monopolies are also banned by World Congress resolutions, given by some policies and traits, etc. I think it helps to understand that in the context of the development of the content offering of what is now VP. In that way, it makes a lot of sense to tie the corporations and the monopolies together. It makes total sense at first view. However it has these less obvious implications.

 

[Alpakinator]

Good points. I didnt think about the other side of the coin - weak corpo monopoly artificially preventing a victory.

I still think civs should fight to get the ability or make it easier to get the corpo they want, because it's interesting. So the combination of requiring at least 1 resource (your proposal) and some penalty for not having the needed monopoly, like azum4 counterpoposal 2x prod cost but much higher, like 5x or so.

 

[azum4roll]

At 5x you just won't bother building it. That's more expensive than the Citizen Earth Protocol, before factoring in previously-built World Wonders!

 

[hokath]

I sponsor this

 

[Recursive]

Timestamp post to arrange all the threads in a neat order.