Seems like reducing the franchises per office to 1 solves most of the problems? You can get your franchises up faster, since you are just building offices instead of waiting for TRs to finish, and you lock out other civs' franchises, and it guarantees immunity to sanctions. Keeping it less powerful than the others seems reasonable, since corporations aren't exactly communism's strong suit, but gives them lots of utility to compensate.
I do agree with Bite, however, that there are still some clear winners and losers W.R.T. the corporations. It doesn't matter if you have Syndicalism, Transnationlism or if you have to make do with Nationalization if you're stuck with 2Kay Foods as a corporation.
I fear, only 1 franchise per office would make Order even less attractive for smaller empires. Would you pick nationalization, if you have 6 cities and get only 12
or
, while you could have 30-40 with freedom?
The whole discussion about this tenet brings me personally to this conclusions:
1. Corporations are imbalanced, if your empire is very wide, offices rising franchises is the major culprit, but also the nationalization tenet, which bypass the normal franchise limit
2. The way you create or atleast the time you need to create a franchise is unsatisfying. Nationalization wouldn't be that strong, if you were able to create franchises much faster on other ways
3. Sanctions are too strong. It's a too easy way to hurt someone very hard. You not only hurt his economy, but also his happiness, tourism, access to strategic resources
Possible solutions:
1. 3 offices rises the franchise cap by 1, up to a limit of 20. The cap for Venice is higher.
2. Finishing trade routes can create a franchise. Every 5 turns, a franchise appear in a foreign city, cities you are targeting with a trade route are chosen first, cities which send a trade route to you are chosen second, after that, the current random mechanic works.
Freedom increase the maximum franchise cap by 30% and reduce the Spawn time to 4 turns. +1 trade unit and trade units getting faster.
Order immidiatly creates 2 franchises per Office in own cities, up to the normal cap. Trade route bonus to cities with a franchise is doubled. Others can't create franchises in your cities.
Autocracy doubles the trade route bonus to cities with a franchise. +100% modifier for trade routes to cities from vasalls. Gain 1 of each strategic ressource for every 5 established franchise.
3. Sanctions half the yields you get from trade routes and from foreign franchises. Ideological pressure to you is increased by 50%. Raise maintenance cost for buildings and units by 10%.
This hurts, but it doesn't take you out of the game like the current version.