We've talked about making Companies appear more "naturally" and we're still investigating options there.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.
For the first release of the open beta it's not going to happen though.
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.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?
On the ownership methods: Currently there's no impact. We'll see if we want to change that going forward.
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.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?
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