Corporations - how and why?

[Ita Bear]

Hello folks,

I'm playing a game currently and just researched corporations. I'm vying with another AI for dominance, so I would like to use corporations to perhaps give me the edge. The problem is, I've never really used them much before! I'm playing at Monarch level where I think it is becoming important to use any advantage given.

Could someone give me a brief overview of how corporations work, exactly? My understanding is they consume excess resources; whose do they consume when spreading to foreign cities? I think I'll try for a science victory, so which corporations are best suited for me?

Kind regards,
Ita Bear

 

[Qactus]

Here's an old but still relevant summary on how corporations work:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/corporation-the-power-of-sushi.237717/

You should definitely give it a try.
Some important points to consider:

- State Property is a good alternative to corporations that is much easier to use
- Mining Inc is very powerful, adding valuable base hammers to cities at a time where hammer multipliers from factories and power are available.
- Sid's Sushi (or depending on the map/resources Cereal Mills) lets your cities grow really big
- I would suggest you try Mining plus one of the food corps and ignore the rest for the time being.
- You need to plan for the correct great person to be ready when you reach the prerequisite tech. Especially the Engineer for Mining can be tricky.
- Corporations won't earn you money, they generally cost you. You can mitigate that by building courthouses and by having gold multipliers in your HQ city, but the real benefit is the output in hammers/food and you usually pay for that with a high gold upkeep.
- Regarding the resources: Those are not consumed but rather increase both the outpout as well as the cost of the corporations. You can use and trade for multiple identical surplus resources as soon as you have the corp, i.e. 3 clams will have the same effect as 1 fish, clam and crab each.

 

[Nick723]

I think the other corp which is worth being aware for space victories is Aluminium Co - Aluminium doubles the speed of a lot of space parts and you don’t always have it.

Edit: although be aware that you can’t have both Mining Inc and Aluminium Co in the same city

 

[coanda]

Why? Because you're going for a high score run and need Sid's Sushi for the added population. Or because you got tired of using State Property every game and wanted a challenge.

Corporations aren't bad, but if you're still learning the game I'd recommend ignoring them for a while until you're comfortable leveraging workshop-spam instead.

 

[codehappy]

Corporations are a "win harder" feature. They are a way to turn a winning position into an absolutely dominant, crushing position. It's expensive, and you only really reap the benefits if you're early and can found the corps you want (usually, one of the hammer corps and one of the food corps, maybe also Aluminum Co. if you need that resource.) It can be fun if you like "winning harder", having the biggest, tallest empire and the strongest economy. They aren't really something you profit from when the outcome of the game is in doubt, though.

The main problem with corps, of course, is that the cost is crazy: the hammer+food corp setup requires both a Great Engineer and a Great Merchant, a ton of hammers spent on executives, gold to spread the corp around, and there's the opportunity cost that you can't run State Property. Wall Street and courthouses make them even more profitable, but that's still more hammers. Endless hammers. Compared to the cost of State Property (some worker turns for building workshops) it's clear you can only make corps really pay off if you're winning the game already.

But it's certainly possible to get them set up sufficiently early to be good right up to Immortal difficulty, at least, and if you are able to get the corps spread and matured, you can outproduce, out-tech, and even out-culture everybody on the map. You can found cities in the tundra and ice and make them instantly more productive than most of your opponent's cities. You can slap a Sid's Sushi fishing village down next to an enemy city and flip it. You can grow all your core cities to size 30+. It's fun, no doubt, which is a perfectly good reason to do it! It's also true that you could have built a spaceship or a couple stacks of doom with the resources you have to spend; in practically any game you have the resources to make corps good, you could have won sooner with SP.

 

[gavenkoa]

Does that mean corporations are for fun and not for Deity?

 

[AcaMetis]

They're situational. The not-impossible Charly map, for instance, was won using Sid's Sushi.