Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #92 - Companies

[PDX_H4n1baL]

While I love this feature Im not sure about companies (or rather conglomerates since it seems those are no simple companies) being a state based activity. It would be far more interesting to have these companies arise naturally. By simply tying the spawning chance for a X type of a company to existing buildings and their profitability it would still allow the player to influence what companies are created and make it so that this whole mechanic is far more reactive to what is actually happening in the world. So say if one decided to build a economy heavily focused on coal extraction and build quite a lot of profitable coal mines that would almost guarantee that a coal related company would arise. That would still leave space for state owned companies so companies created by the players themselves. The player could then use one of their company slots to instead create their own state owned company and pick exactly which type they want to create. Of course both of these should depend on what laws are in play so say a laissez-faire law should either make it impossible to create new state-owned companies or at least make it very hard to do and limit their number. I think that would be a far more interesting system to engage with compared to the player just being able to completely customise what companies are created in their country. The creation of autonomous investment and other mechanics intended to make the game feel more alive were a good direction and Im somewhat concerned that these companies are taken in the opposite direction.

We've talked about making Companies appear more "naturally" and we're still investigating options there.
For the first release of the open beta it's not going to happen though.

Furthermore two questions:
In the current system how will companies interact with economic and other laws?
There are already ownership methods for buildings will those interact at all with companies? So for example would companies not affect guild owned buildings or be available only for buildings with public stock ownership?

As mentioned before on laws: We will add more differences between laws in their relation to Companies in the future, not for the first release though.
On the ownership methods: Currently there's no impact. We'll see if we want to change that going forward.

And one more suggestion:
Would it be possible to make companies employ a certain number of capitalists which would take away a portion of the profits of all buildings associated with the company for themselves? It would be a interesting way to represent stock owners and since the company would now have its own pops with certain wealth it could perhaps enable expanding the mechanic in the future to say make companies able to invest or acquire assets autonomously?

Might be possible, but we haven't investigated it very far. Maybe we will take another look at that in the future, not for the open beta though most likely.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

Additionally, Can companies be broken up?

Yes, in the first release it is actually way too easy to do so. That is NOT the intention going forward. You should be able to get rid of a company, but only under certain circumstances or with pretty big penalties. How they will look like I cannot tell you right now as we need to invest more time into designing these.

Do companies influence IGs at all? ie will trade unions look for breaking up monopolies suppresses wages, industrialists looking for government support of their companies etc.

Not at this point. Maybe in the future.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

You state that Flavored Companies tend to be restricted to a certain culture and/or geographical region. I am assuming that Rheinmetall is regionally restricted. Can you give an example of what you would call a culturally restricted company?

The "Egyptian National Railways" is a historic company which would be culturally restricted. But since it's more of a country-wide administration kind of thing, we're likely not going to add a specific state that you need to own to found that one for example, whereas Rheinmetall will require you to own (well you guessed it) the Rheinland.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

What keeps tying company bonuses to prestige/rank from becoming a winmore mechanic? The economic snowball is already rolling fast, I feel greasing the slope is a bit overkill. It also seems like that will eventually conflict with any future system for multi-national companies.

We'll need to keep an eye on how that feels. It's a great opportunity for something to adjust during open beta based on player feedback.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

A general note on historic/flavored companies:
They won't be in the first release of the Open Beta. That is because we're planning to add quite a large number of them and it will simply take more time to get them in.
We're hoping to get them in for the first update during Open Beta, so probably sometime in September.
We'll keep you up-to-date on it of course.