I played a game with the new patch and got to the point of building corporations. Before corp maintenance scale with inflation makes end game corp cost go skyrocket. But now it seems corps is too powerful. I built sid's sushi, got +6 food from it and in a size 25 city i only need to pay 21 gold to maintain and the cost will never go up. It cost even less in smaller cities, basically the maintenance cost of corp can be completely offset by 5 gold in HQ alone and if I spread the corp to my smaller cities, I will end up with a sizable profit just from the 5g from HQ alone, I'm not even counting the return on +6 food per city here. It renders corporation strategy to a no brainer thing, build as many corps as you can and spread it to all your cities. This will allow me to run 0% gold and yet still rack in thousands of gold per turn if I manage to set up 2 or 3 corps and spread it to all my cities. And I would never spread it outside of my own borders. The strategic decision side of corps is completely gone.
My impression is removing corp maintenance from inflation is a really really bad idea. It basically turns the cons of corp into pros and yet still retain the original pros. You end up with a beast that has super advantages and no downside what so ever. In vanilla BTS when corp cost scales with inflation, it really makes you think where and how many branchs to place so you are not gonna tank your research. corp costs were high, but I think thats a good thing, because that kept me in check, I had to resist the urge to spread it to all my cities and only place it in cities that really needs it. I was also forced to spread it abroad to offset the costs. Even with the high cost of corps, I still find the corp a powerful thing to have. But now, it is way way too powerful and it completely broken the intended concept of corps.
In short, my point is the old way how corps worked wasn't really broken. Alot people complains about it. but my take is those people that complains abused the use of corp and spread too many corp to too many of his own cities without strategic thinking ahead. When I played with inflation affecting corps, I also felt the pains of maintenance costs, but it did not tank my research, because I planed ahead. And even then the corp maintenance problem only showed up at very late stage, when inflation is more than 100%.
Simply by removing corp maintenance from inflation is a terrible mistake. This completely brokes the concept of corps. Corp maintenance problem only need to be addressed for later stage of the game when inflation is close to 200%. My take is scale corp maintenance to only 2/3 of inflation. That way you still need to plan about corps, yet it wouldn't be that bad at end game.
