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Will Companies be able to acquire foreign buildings? United Fruit Company ringing a bell ;D
Generally hugely excited about the direction companies are going right now. Having them be relevant players economically and politically would be hugely exciting.
They follow basically the same rules as Financial Districts and Manor Houses. So if a building level is up for sale and your country has the required foreign investment rights, then yes.
It would be great if we could get exactly the same flow and UI for bulk privatization, that would be nice and consistent too.
Yeah, we've discussed it internally.
It felt vastly more important to get the Bulk Nationalization out, because it's use case is more urgent, but also more complicated to implement.
We do have a rough idea of how we'd do it for Privatization too, but have no concrete plans at this point. We'll keep an eye on feedback of course and if it becomes more pressing, we'll likely react to that.
Nice, so companies will allow you to focus investment on certain buildings.
What happens if company can't invest in relevant buildings anymore? For example all worlds iron and coal mines, or opium plantations are maxed out?
Send me a save file when you get there, then I'll start worrying about it
But more seriously, I'm not sure that'd be an issue? They'd be megarich and continue to be so most likely. Not sure they need to be able to get even richer? ^^
When privatizing a state-constructed building that could be owned by a company, will it be possible to ensure that the building gets bought by the company rather than a Financial District?
Guaranteeing: Not at the moment. Investments go by the currently existing logic, so anybody fulfilling the conditions could buy it. Companies will be more likely to invest in fitting buildings though since their options overall are more limited.
What will happen to the canal companies ?
No big changes planned for now.
They still have the shipyard building groups they can invest in etc.
Will companies get CEOs that have ideologies?
As mentioned at the end of the Dev Diary, CEO characters would certainly be on our list of potential future expansions to Companies. They could have ideologies, yeah.
But I want to stress none of this is purely thoughts, there's no concrete plans, and certainly nothing in this regard is coming with 1.8 update. The current changes are already quite big.
Very excited for this update, especially changes to companies!
How moddable are the they? Can they be spawned by script, to simulate the establishment of private companies for example?
There's an effect to spawn a company HQ, where you can also define which state to spawn it in, but this will still affect all the logic that is currently present around companies. For example it will take a company slot once that happens, you'll see the company as established in the company interface panel etc.
What happens if I lose a comapny slot/replace one? Do i get back all that they own / they become a normal financial district/manor house?
When a company is disbanded, the ownership of all levels they owned will be changed depending on which economic law is active in your country. So they might become part of Financial Districts, turn worker-owned or country-owned.
And will there be any dynamic for when 2 companies target the same type of buildings? Like trying to buy the others lvls? What about buying public/normal lvls? Will that be unlocked by stock exchange and/or mutual funds?
They behave like other ownership buildings. So any of the two could buy a level, that's up for sale, but not each others.
I hope company "slot"s will be removed in favor of some other mechanic so less but monopolistic companies tend to be better[or worse depending on economic or political impact] like say 1 company owns 214/300 lvls of X building type will be better economically than 3 small ones(or reverse) but will weild so much political weight it might become your political nemesis!
Slots will continue being a thing for the foreseeable future at least.
Will economic laws affect company ownership? Like Public companies for commies , private for LF, mixed for others and also publicly owned after discovering mutual funds[so that my SoL can rise faster] ?
Somewhat.
Due to the architecture of ownership buildings, companies will always have to be private owners, even under Cooperative Ownership and so on (for which they'll get an exception). So there's that.
But what changes is the establishing conditions. E.g. you'll usually need to provide 5 levels to establish a company, but under LF you can't nationalize, so instead you'll be required to have enough money to buy 5 levels, which will then get transferred to the Company as it's being established.
We will do things like who benefits the most based on economic laws though, so for example under Command Economy most of the profits will go to the state coffers instead of the Capitalists working in the buildings (under LF for example).
I sincerely hope that nationalization of foreign owned levels changes away from a play as it is now.
It would make way more sense that it gives infamy and an event for the effected country(s) that allows them to start play against you (ideally all of them joining in the same play).
This would make way more sense from a realism perspective.
No changes planned as of right now that I'm aware of. I think we would generally tend to agree that it would be nicer to flip the role compared to what it is right now though. So maybe in the future when we find the time.
So for the companies for them to actually have a hq, do you need to have them selected in the company tab or do they just pop up
Can companies be created without player intervention? I want to see companies establish themselves naturally without players clicking "establish" company button depending on the economic policy for immersion sake
.
As mentioned in the DD, you still need to press the button to establish them in the currently planned version for 1.8 release.
We have thought about making adjustments with regards to LF in particular so that they'd be able to establish themselves, but that's more complicated than it sounds. Maybe something we can do in the future.
Will there be any new ways to visualize foreign ownership? I think the current mapmode to be fine but I'd like more info on how much of my GDP is foreign owned, and how much is related to industries my pops own abroad.
We have a task to get some new visualization charts in, but it's unsure at this point if we'll be able to make it in time.
How would a command economy use companies if there's no investment pool? Surely there should be a rule allowing them to get some bonuses on all industries specified by a company, to give command economy a "niche" of top-down specialization.
They will have to be exempt from the rule pretty much, so that they can invest even under Command Economy.
Will Companies be able to affect prices and have an influence in politics?
They will affect prices indirectly of course through increased throughput etc., but I assume what you mean is monopoly style price manipulation, which is not a thing for 1.8. Just like political influence (as mentioned in the DD) this would be a future ideas list which we might get back to in the future when time allows.
Nice addition, the companies owning the actual businesses is a good step-up in immersion for a player, at least for me.
Just to ask, will be the state able to own quotes in a company if the national laws allows for interventionist polices?
No, due to the architecture of ownership buildings, they'll have to be fully private. But the state can still profit from them under certain laws.
Is there a plan to modify the state traits? The geographical environment profoundly influences the fate of various countries, and state traits should have a greater impact. I don't think there is a natural efficiency gap of only 10% in grain production between the Western European plain in France and the Eastern Siberian region in Russia, nor do I think Australia's iron ore production efficiency is only 10% higher than that of the United States. Overall, I think the effect of state traits is too conservative.
Feel free to set up a post in the suggestions section with concrete things you'd like to see changed and tag me in it and I promise I'll take a look at the list at least.
Super hard to make a general statement about it. Some should probably be stronger, others are fine.
This looks great.
Would it be possible for the companies to use their cash reserve as an investment pool instead of the main investment pool. Perhaps with a much larger cash reserve limit. It would be nice to see the growth of a company be slightly separate from the wider economy, and for more profitable companies to expand much faster than companies not making much money.
That was my initial proposal to the programmers in fact.
In the end, this was deemed not feasible (or at least a lot more complicated). Having it work through the existing investment pool logic makes it much easier because a lot of the necessary things are already set up in place and only need to be adjusted for our new purposes.
You will still see
some of the effect that you describe: The more companies contribute to the investment pool, the more likely it is for them to expand. So well-running companies will in fact expand faster than if you had poorly performing companies in your country.
Would it be possible to add one line, wich Shows us how many radicals it would be in total? So all the ones shown there combined.
I'll poke somebody about it
More control over nationalization looks amazing.
Companies owning buildings in this next update also looks really nice. If I understand correctly, they will only be able to own the buildings that they specialize in?
Also, since companies highly depend on profitability of buildings, are there any plans to introduce stockpiling mechanics in this update (or in the near future)? Weapon buildings for example are usually only profitable during war. Which is kind of understandable, making a bigger internal drive for war and war profiteering in the game, but disregards the in-between period, where countries need to arm themselves in advance. Also, running out of supplies as the war drags on should be a major factor in ending of the wars.
But in the context of companies, weapon manufacturing companies often highly fluctuate in the game. I'm worried that they will simply start downsizing during peace time, which then produces shortages when you need them.
And in the wider context, where in the last update you also mentioned the famines, food stockpiles could also play a role in mitigating some of the damages.
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No stockpiles with the 1.8 update. That would be a huge change which we'd have mentioned in what we've planned for 1.8.
The big changes that are coming are all listed there.
Next: micro level nationalisation for individual buildings. What if I want to nationalise all foreign ones, or from just one country? What if I only want to nationalise a part of foreign owned levels from certain nations or nation? Please!
As I mentioned, you can nationalize all buildings based on the filters you're able to set up in the Registry + the sliders in the window itself. So you should get most if not all of what you want?
The building just being the company logo kind of irks me. It sticks out too much. If resources allow I think it would look better if there was artwork representing a headquarters and the company logo occupied the same space that the goods icons do on their buildings.
That's the plan at least. Everything shown is WIP as mentioned.
Love the companies update! couple questions:
Will the HQ employ capitalists at the same rate as financial districts do? Being singular, monopolistic entities it make sense that they would create less capitalists as they level up but make them filthier rich than regular districts, and it also makes sense that public companies like national railways would create more bureaucrats per level instead. This would make them more distinct.
How the production methods of employment are set up depends on the economic law your country is under.
In general, there should be fewer capitalists compared to financial districts, yes.
When it comes to the rest, we're thinking of adding a bunch of bureaucrats for command economy for example or clerks for worker-owned to reflect their owner nature.
Also, im not sure if i understand; will they be able to buyout buildings from regular districts? Or will they only be able to buy yours and build new ones?
They follow the same rules as the other buildings. So no buying from other private owners, but they can buy the ones you put up for sale (or another country to which they have access) and they can build new ones, yeah.
Id also love to see them getting their own investment pool, but i get it would take a lot of effort to jumpstart them.
That was an idea I threw into the ring too, but was discarded due to it requiring significantly more effort than sharing the pool.
Sounds awesome! Has there been any thought to increasing the amount of companies one can establish at any time, since their bonus will be more focused?
Not really, since we'll tweak the bonus they receive to compensate already.
Let's see how that plays out
How will prosperity bonuses for companies work now? Will they only check the productivity of the levels owned by the company, or still the entirety of the relevant sectors? (I'd assume the former, but it wasn't specified)
Correct, for that they'll check only the buildings in their portfolio.
Ah so they just will stay at some size.
No, there's no defined max size. But I'm not sure what problem you're seeing with them reaching a theoretical max?
Wait a second, does that mean that companies and private entities can now build, use and maintain their own construction sector? If yes, this is big news and a welcoming change !
No that's not what that means
It only means that construction bonuses are not applied to every building of the type, but only company (private) built ones.
With the company throughput change it would seem like state-building those buildings is not as good anymore. E.g. when having Krupp it isn't as efficient anymore to build steelworks yourself since you dont get the company throughput bonus anymore. So my question is when having laissez-faire active such that every state-built building gets privatized (or when selling state buildings to pops in general), will there be a mechanic (not with 1.8 immediately but maybe the following patches) where companies can buy building levels via that way as well?
Also since you mentioned that companies will still be established by the player, will there at some point maybe be laws introduced that allow for pops to establish companies themselves or is that something you guys don't want?
In any way this all sounds really promising and I love it!
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I've mentioned both things in other replies, so not full details here.
They can buy levels just like financial districts or manor houses. If you put them up for sale, they can buy them.
Maybe under LF we can get it at some point that they establish themselves. Maybe.
These company changes feels like a downgrade. Looks fun on paper but less interactable then the system now. I like to plan ahead and use different companies in different stages of the campaign adapting to the situation at hand and make use of their bonuses. These changes feels like make it much more rigid with little to no player agency.
Companies were never intended to be changeable as much as they are right now.
Having said that, if you want to continue changing companies, you can still do that. Disbanding a company is still an option for you and the building levels aren't lost.
Very happy to see all "organic growth" Urban buildings grouped together in their own slot, but what about Trade Centers?
Is there something in the works, or is it that there's no Trade Centers in Westphalia?
If the latter, will Trade Centers be moved alongside Financial Districts and the like?
Also and assuming that there were no Trade Centers, would it be possible to have them (and others) be fixed in place even if the're no building levels? For example, we could use this to quickly hover over Urban Centers and see how much urbanization we need for the next level.
It's indeed because Westphalia doesn't have any Trade Centers
We'll consider adding Company HQs to this grouping too.
