Why am I too stupid to understand corporations?

[wayne07]

Out to prove myself wrong.... emperor level. Corporation is really doable but require extreme care.

1. You have to get to the corporations first.
2. You must be advance in tech (At least the corp tech).
3. You must have a lot of GP.

Pretty amazing income i think... corporation spamming + spy civic change when they switch to SP...

Notes:
I built 8 cities. 6 initially with 2 later on useless stops to get resources. Later game, forced to conquer 2 city of shaka around rifles and subsequently 2 more cities around mech infan because he declared twice. The original plan was actually just to stick with 6 without any substantial warring but ended up with whole round of defensive war and getting 6-7 GGs.

Conclusion:
Corporations is usable if certain conditions are met. You must actively spam them. The AI research really took a bad hit with them + wars between them also.

Get Cristo ASAP .. its an amazing wonder. Saved my butt in this game.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

1967 is a lot more persuasive than 1934. (personally I haven't been able to get to modern age for a few games, due to aggressive AI. Never said I was great in practice)

Did you need to spread to AI civs to keep your income reasonable? And if so, do you think that it harmed them more than was 'fair'?

 

[wayne07]

But SP is stronger... lol

but i need to be in FM to use spy to make the AI go FM.

 

[AuTEC]

Hi Guys,

I've done quite alot of playtesting with my buddy in networked games. We've tried to set up situations using corporations and our conclusion is that they likely are broken. Our conclusions are based on the following two arguments.

1) Corporations that provide resources such as hammers or food aren't good to compare to the drawbacks corporations create. The one corporation that serves as a good testing ground is civilized jewelers.

Civilized jewelers provides 5 to 10 gp usually in our games to the cities they are built in, and take away more than the 10gp initially. When the jewelers are initially built, they seem balanced, providing your own economy an additional 5-10 gp/city on average to the civ that built them. This quickly goes away due to inflation however, and winds up costing 40gp per city without providing any benefits (benefit is ONLY gold). It is unlikely in our opinion that game developers intended to have corporations be such a permanent negative drain on your economy fifty years after they are built. This is completely contradictory to how they work in the real world.

2) A game strategy that has worked out extremely well vs all computer and human opponents is to rush to railroad, and build the mining corporation. Spread the corporation to all of the opponents cities (don't spread in your own at all) and then force environmentalism using the united nations. Its rare for your computerized opponents to defy the resolution. Also, if you rush railroad and then rush mass media, the negative impact of corporations has not yet built up so if there is a calculation the computer does he likely causes his own defeat by voting yes. Research spending crawls to a halt, and his army deserts him, making it easy pickings. Have had a couple of 1850ish domination victories on emperor using this strategy.

Corporations in this context are similar to a virus. Again, I don't believe this was the intended implementation of corporations in Civ IV.

Regards

 

[jkp1187]

Hi Guys,

I've done quite alot of playtesting with my buddy in networked games. We've tried to set up situations using corporations and our conclusion is that they likely are broken. Our conclusions are based on the following two arguments.

1) Corporations that provide resources such as hammers or food aren't good to compare to the drawbacks corporations create. The one corporation that serves as a good testing ground is civilized jewelers.

Honestly, I don't understand why you are saying this. Can you explain your reasoning behind this statement?


For what it's worth, I just finished a game (standard map/normal speed/starting in 4000BC), and found the corporation Sid's Sushi to be rather helpful. I am not going to bring numbers into play here, but it seemed to be helpful that I was on something of a conquering spree, and started selling sushi to all of my new "markets". At the same time, the food bonus was good for three of my own cities, and the culture bonus helped out a fourth one (taken from Russia -- needed to force back Celtic culture.) I did find it helpful to spread the company to some non-vassal civs as well. As far as I could tell, the trade-off was worth it for me. Your mileage may vary.

Frederick founded two companies -- Mining, INc. and the Jewelry company (I forget its name). I believe he leveraged Mining, Inc. into constructing the Internet, then turned off science and went full on Culture. Joao founded Creative Constructions. He wasn't doing too badly, either. I don't think Freddie spread his company too much. Freddie also started running Environmentalism at some point, too.

Brennus was doing badly, and he went for State Property. I managed to influence him into Free Market for a few turns, enough for me to found a branch, but as soon as he could, Brennus went back to SP.

In the end, Frederick got his cultural victory about 10-15 turns before I was ready to launch my spaceship. I was far and away the points leader prior to his victory. I enjoyed the game.

I'm not ready to proclaim corporations perfect by any means....and I definitely not sure how well they would play out in a cutthroat multiplayer game. But I think I'm going to take a step back, maybe play the game for a week or two, and then think about how corporations seems to impact things. The totality of decisions and events that impact a Civ game can be pretty broad. So I want to see how Corporations affect my games the way I play them before making any more definitive statements on them.

 

[AuTEC]

My point is that to analyze the corporations system it makes more sense to test it with civilized jewlers rather than the other corporations. The reason is that its difficult to say whether or not 5 food is worth the -40 gp? Wheras its easy to say that the 20 gp is NOT worth the 40gp cost (as with the jewlers).

There is really no situation where the jewlers make much sense, unless of course you want to destory enemy civs.

I'm not trying to say that its not fun to play with the corporations the way that they are. Just saying its my opinion that the cost of corporations were not supposed to be modified by inflation, and that we'll likely see a fix for this in the future.

Regards

 

[mrt144]

itd be interesting to see the empire produciton numbers between corp running ones and SP ones...

donde el demographics?

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Don't forget Jewlers gives culture. It will only rarely be something you need more than a higher research rate, b ut you should mention it to be fair.

 

[homan1983]

wayne I looked at those screenshots and was impressed. I also looked at your corporation screen and the city maintenance shown was very little - thats very nice.
I do say however that the corporations don't give much benefit under you. It seems that instead of trying to get all the resources you could, you've gone and used corporations as a way of making a hellalotta gold!
Thats a pretty useful way of doing things.
It does mean however that you can't conquer much (hence good for a culture/space/diplo vicory) since the extra cities that need maintenance, and the extra resources would definitely change things.
It seems that you have 12 cities and according to your HQ your corporation has spread to 47 cities (just mining, not even the others) and looking at the small map you're playing it feels as though 47 cities would be pretty much every city on the map so congratulations.

 

[mrt144]

seriously, why is it we're only seeing success on small maps? isnt that a problem?