Sullla Wrote:On corporations: yeah, this is something we haven't discussed much. Whether to use corporations or go with State Property is another major issue to consider. If we stay at our current size, I think corporations are a no-brainer and much superior to State Property. However, I was basing my previous long post on this subject on the assumption that we would attack and conquer Kathlete, in which case we would have something like 30+ cities and absolutely crippling distance maintenance costs even before factoring in corporations. With us not being Organized in this game, I personally think we do better with State Property eliminating most of the costs of a bloated empire. Yes, we lose out on the very important bonus food and production and culture - but we also don't have to fool with spreading the corporation around either, and paying the gold to set up branches everywhere. That's a nice help there. And this being MP, no one can just trade for a gazillion fish from the AIs to power their Sushi corporation either.
It's a questing of which victory condition you choose to pursue. Corporations are generally better for Culture and Space, State Property is better for Domination. I think that if all things are equal, Speaker and I would rather go for Domination than one of the more peaceful conditions, knowing full well how tough that could be. There's also a minor bit of personal preference too - Speaker and I both think corporations are broken and poorly implemented; given a choice, we would probably rather crush our enemies with the awesome production of State Property than trade for extra gold resources to increase cultural output of our Creative Culture branch. One is a lot more rewarding and fun than the other.
Not to mention, very few people seem to realize just how much production you can get in the lategame using State Property with proper tile management. On this grassland-heavy map, we could easily get 100 shields/turn out of just about every city with a couple of Biology farms and a crapload of State Property workshops and watermills. Or Universal Suffrage + levees would turn all those riverside grassland cottages into massive shield producers. There's plenty of fun ways to take this into the later game still.
Anyone else find this odd? I always thought corporations got better as the empire gets bigger, your costs go up linearly (and they are significant) but your benefits go up quadratically (more cities with the corp, plus controlling more resources so more benefit per city). Also, imagining that humans will trade them extra corp resources sounds rather fanciful.
I'm also a little surprised by their GP plans. Always thought the GP bulbing was way more powerful when you could also trade those techs for 3x their listed value; in this no trading game I find it hard to value bulbs over golden ages.