King Younk
Warlord
I don’t use them. Don’t they cost maintenance? How do I use them effectively?
Corporations
- Thread starter King Younk
- Start date
SittinDown
King
Yes, the cost maintenance, and they're expensive. You'll need courthouses, unless you're going totally advanced and trying a STRIKE economy, but that's not really worth getting into right now.
The two best ones are usually:
On a standard map, you can easily get +12 / +14 food per city, which is like having two free irrigated corn in every city.
You have to spread the corporations with executives, which is kind of a pain.
The two best ones are usually:
- Sushi - You can get crazy big cities, and if using caste-system, you can do really crazy stuff. You can found a city, and have it be size 8 in like 10 turns. Especially good on archipelago maps where there's lots of seafood.
- Mining - With lots of metals / precious metals, you get huge production bonuses. Fun for lots of reasons. Stacks really well with forges and factories. Especially fun for industrial / organized leaders.
On a standard map, you can easily get +12 / +14 food per city, which is like having two free irrigated corn in every city.
You have to spread the corporations with executives, which is kind of a pain.
FlyinJohnnyL
You need more workers....
You like huge, marathon games. That's one area where you may find some use out of corps. In a standard game you're usually better off without them.
DigitalBoy
Emperor
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Corporations cost a lot in maintenance, and it increases with each resource you have that works with it. The upkeep is halved by courthouses, so you'll want to build them everywhere you spread the corporation to. The gold from the corporate headquarters goes a long way toward mitigating the cost (especially with Wall Street), but you'll usually be losing gold to it anyway, especially since spreading it costs a great deal of gold as well. Free Market also helps a lot to offsetting the cost. I remember a game I played years ago where I was hemorrhaging gold because I was trying to run Environmentalism with two corporations spread to all my cities.
The yields you get from corporations can be really ludicrous though. Mining, Inc. usually generates something like 10 hammers each turn in my games, and that's pretty stupid when you consider how many cities produce almost no hammers naturally.
The yields you get from corporations can be really ludicrous though. Mining, Inc. usually generates something like 10 hammers each turn in my games, and that's pretty stupid when you consider how many cities produce almost no hammers naturally.
On a large map that has numerous coastal city sites available. The yields from Sushi/Mining can easily give you in excess of +10 food and +20 hammers per city. That is just bonkers and your empire power & growth just explodes in a stunning way. Wall Street in your HQ and courthouses everywhere + Free Market are musts however. Your growth will be so enormous that you will need to build Markets and Grocers everywhere most likely but you will have plenty of ability to build them.
They do make the games more tedious with the corporation executive spread plus it takes game-long planning sometimes to ensure that you secure the Great Engineer for Mining. But for maximizing your victory score, there is no beating the power of the corporations so long as you have enough seafood and mining resources on your map to get the bonuses.
They do make the games more tedious with the corporation executive spread plus it takes game-long planning sometimes to ensure that you secure the Great Engineer for Mining. But for maximizing your victory score, there is no beating the power of the corporations so long as you have enough seafood and mining resources on your map to get the bonuses.
No different than spreading religion. I don't really see a pain point, TBH.
6K Man
Bureaucrat
Aside from the annoyance of having to requeue executives (can only build 5 at once, IIRC) and move them around, there's the cost of spreading a branch office (~80-120g, I think), the need for Courthouses, the loss of revenue when the AIs go into State Property...
Fish Man
Emperor
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In addition to what @6K Man said, corps are also very late game, which means that you only have very little time for them to pay returns on investment, specifically the hammers required to build execs and the gold to spread. And until you have around 15-20 copies of corp resources, they end up costing more than they give for the most part.
I dunno. I generally build courthouses in my cities anyway to reduce maintenance, so that really is not a thing for me. I will agree that the cost of spreading is a little high. As far as State Property goes though, you can't do much to keep the AI out of it. Sometimes you just lose income. Personally I would rather have the food boost from Sushi, or the hammer boost from Mining.
Usually by the time I reach corps, I have hammers and money to burn, as well as a large army. If I found a corporation, I spam executives to cities that need them and leave the rest alone. I couldn't care less about the money corps generate. I'm in it for the side effects. Mining Inc. can make a moderately good production city into a powerhouse. Since I already have a courthouse and possibly the Forbidden Palace nearby, I'm usually in pretty good shape.
Fish Man
Emperor
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It's not about the corps generating money or not, but rather that their incredible costs REALLY drain your economy. It doesn't matter if you have extra food or hammers, if you have to turn down your slider 40% just to fund those positive benefits. And SP can also make a production powerhouse out of every city...from letting you spam workshops on every tile and work them as food-neutral.
In terms of win speed as well as win rate, any victory condition or difficulty, SP is far better 95% of the time.
6K Man
Bureaucrat
I wouldn't worry about the slider - it's about how much commerce and hammers you put out, not where the slider is. I've never had a corporation lose money, unless I somehow ended up with an AI Corp that wasn't founded in a Wall St city. You can always build Wealth with Mining Inc branch cities.
I'm like rah, I'm lazy and stay in SP. Even if Corps might be better, they're too much work.
Fish Man
Emperor
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I know. But in the lategame, whatever benefit you get from corps is not worth the raw beakers from commerce you lose from having to turn back the slider. What I mean is that for corps, the net GNP in hammers/commerce is less than the net GNP in state property, output of cities - total costs. I've tested this across hundreds of games to arrive at this conclusion.
FlyinJohnnyL
You need more workers....
I'm fairly certain that things like corps were added to the game for non-competitive players. In that, people who don't try to win as quickly as possible. The entire modern era is basically intended for players that really like to get immersed more so than winning or losing. Modern wars are an absolute nightmare to most of us, but I have friends that just want to play one game as long as possible, seeing all branches of the tech tree and utilizing as many units as possible.
s.bernbaum
Mostly lurking
I resemble this! It is very rare that I don't play through the entire tech tree. Normally, I play marathon and huge. I enjoy the immersion. My games last weeks and sometimes months in real time. Depending on the map, I may use either Corps or SP, mostly SP. However, if I am going for either Space or late Culture victory, if the map is right for it, I will use Corps. Mining works well for a Space victory and Sid's Sushi is super for a late culture victory. When I have kept my bordering neighbors as best buddies, Sushi lets me take over their border cities by cultural conquest, while keeping them as friendly, and getting my three top cities to Legendary status at the same time. In recent games, I played Corps and, just for the heck of it, watched what happened to my income whenever I spread a Corp. It mostly went up per turn, enough to compensate for the initial cost of the new Corps branch in only a few turns. This is with Wall Street in the capital and banks in every city with a branch.
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I think Corps are more powerful on larger maps and slower game speeds because you can get a ton of surplus resources and have time for them to pay back. 95% of the time, I find myself using SP though. It's much easier to and I think on typical maps like standard Pangaea it's superior. However, the fastest Space wins (including WT BC Space Win) all involved abusing Sushi so corps do have their place in the highest levels of the game IMO. The amount of effort needed to optimize corps is very high though and maintenance can be killer.
Orion Pax
Warlord
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- Mar 19, 2019
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Yeah I like Corporations as a good attempt to have something interesting and new towards the latter part of the game. A new use of great people, new meaning for having lots of certain resources (whereas most of the game you ideally want one of each). But yeah, to max them out it requires loads of tedium and time when your empire is most sprawling. Once I started using State Property I was hooked. It does so many things so well, much that replicate Corps' benefits while streamlining costs. And you can get it earlier, arguably, since you really have to work your Great Person production to get a Great Engineer for Mining Inc., for example. Missing it can delay founding that for a while, when you could have been benefiting from buffed watermills, workshops, and the +10% production boost. AND boldly expanding your empire further without heed for distance costs. Not sure on all the math, but saves a ton on the anxiety.
What do folks think of Corporations in K-Mod? Some of the founding techs were altered to give more balance. Sids is Refrigeration, which kinda makes sense (does anyone want sushi that hasn't been refrigerated...?
). For Mining Inc., the luxury metals (gold & silver) were swapped out for uranium & aluminum. I kinda like that as it adds more weight to those late-discovered metals. Gold & silver are highly valuable from turn 0, so rewarding them even further seems redundant, versus rewarding expansion and exploration, discovering value in mediocre land, etc.
What do folks think of Corporations in K-Mod? Some of the founding techs were altered to give more balance. Sids is Refrigeration, which kinda makes sense (does anyone want sushi that hasn't been refrigerated...?
). For Mining Inc., the luxury metals (gold & silver) were swapped out for uranium & aluminum. I kinda like that as it adds more weight to those late-discovered metals. Gold & silver are highly valuable from turn 0, so rewarding them even further seems redundant, versus rewarding expansion and exploration, discovering value in mediocre land, etc.
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6K Man
Bureaucrat
Yes. If you refrigerate prepared sushi for any length of time beyond an hour or two, it gets rubbery and unpalatable. Maki is even worse; the rice becomes a brick.
Sid and Jerry's Ice Cream would be a better name.
drewisfat
King
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- Feb 8, 2011
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- 997
In BTS the main corp play for me is Sushi if going for Diplo. Any diplo guide you read on here will talk about rushing for mass media to finish the UN. I say that's hogwash outside of HoF. I generally want to rush Sushi. Medicine also comes with Environmentalism, which is a great civic to swap into for Sushi/Diplo victory.
Kmod nerfs Sushi hard by moving it to refrigeration, and moving gold/silver out of Mining is a slight nerf. There's greater internal balance between all the corps in KMOD, but unfortunately that leads me to draw the conclusion that generally /none/ are worth it. Maybe some slight use from exporting CJ.
One thing that should be mentioned about corps, and a big reason Sushi is so dominant, is that resource clumping is advantageous. If you have a lot of the resources required yourself it obviously makes you more inclined to go that corp. Less obviously but more importantly, the AI can only trade excess corp resources. The three seafood resources tend to clump together. If there were say 10 clams on the map split between 2 AIs, that means you could get up to 8 clams - while if those 10 clams were split between 5 AIs evenly, you could get at most 5 clams. Strategic resources are evenly spread out through the map. Gold/silver are kinda rare, but they do clump up - so replacing those with aluminum and uranium makes mining a little weaker.
For a counter point though, corps can be kind of worth it if going space and SP isn't necessary. That's a more plausible endgame on KMOD than BTS, because the AI is harder to conquer but techs a little bit slower.
Kmod nerfs Sushi hard by moving it to refrigeration, and moving gold/silver out of Mining is a slight nerf. There's greater internal balance between all the corps in KMOD, but unfortunately that leads me to draw the conclusion that generally /none/ are worth it. Maybe some slight use from exporting CJ.
One thing that should be mentioned about corps, and a big reason Sushi is so dominant, is that resource clumping is advantageous. If you have a lot of the resources required yourself it obviously makes you more inclined to go that corp. Less obviously but more importantly, the AI can only trade excess corp resources. The three seafood resources tend to clump together. If there were say 10 clams on the map split between 2 AIs, that means you could get up to 8 clams - while if those 10 clams were split between 5 AIs evenly, you could get at most 5 clams. Strategic resources are evenly spread out through the map. Gold/silver are kinda rare, but they do clump up - so replacing those with aluminum and uranium makes mining a little weaker.
For a counter point though, corps can be kind of worth it if going space and SP isn't necessary. That's a more plausible endgame on KMOD than BTS, because the AI is harder to conquer but techs a little bit slower.
Nogbadthebad
Chieftain
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- Jun 23, 2020
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- 36
I'm not all that convinced by the thought of fish flavoured ice cream. The cat seems to like the idea tho
