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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #147 - Everything Companies

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Hello Victorians,

Happy Thursday! It’s Lino, Game Design Lead on Victoria 3 and I welcome you back to another Dev Diary!
Today we’re looking at (almost) everything to do with Companies. Most of what I will talk about today is part of Charters of Commerce, which releases on June 17, but we will also talk about some additions and changes for Companies that are coming with the free 1.9 Update alongside the DLC.

Before we begin: As always, any values, texts, designs, graphics etc. are work in progress and are subject to change.

So, one big ambition we had for Companies with this update was to not only expand interactions with them and add functionality to them, but also to make observing them grow a bit easier and more enticing. For that we overhauled the Company interface panel and added a bit of functionality to it. I will be going through these changes later in this Dev Diary, but before then we will talk about all the individual parts that make the whole.

Alright, let’s get into it, starting with Company Charters (of Commerce).

Company Charters​

Company Charters are a new way for you to enable your companies to expand their wealth and reach. They all provide new, different sets of rights to the company in question. What those rights are, I will talk about in detail further down. Hand them out to a company you want to see grow and then watch and observe as their line go up!

Hmm… What could these icons stand for? Continue reading to find out!
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Every country gets a number of free charters which you will be able to hand out across all your Companies. You can go over the limit, but then each charter will cost you additional authority. For example, if you have five free charters to spend, you can put all of them onto one company, increasing their opportunities by a lot but be left with no charters for your other companies, or you can spread them equally, specializing all companies only a bit in order to see them succeed. The choice is yours!
The number of free charters can come from different sources, e.g. economic system laws, certain technologies and also the rank of a country will increase the limit.
As this free charter functionality is a very late addition in our process, we are not making full use of this yet, but we see potential in adding it as an effect to the completion of certain Journal Entries, events or Power Bloc Principles for example and are also happy to take your feedback for where you believe this could be added. Similarly, modders are also able to use this where they see fit since it is a regular modifier.

Without further ado, here’s the first Charter which we are introducing with Charters of Commerce.

Colonization Charter​

While the era of the big company-states started to end in our timeframe, there certainly were ambitions by some to continue the trend.
When you hand out a Colonization Charter to one of your companies, you select the target state to be colonized. Then, a colony will be created which will be supported by your company.
The colony receives a bonus to its colonization speed and upon fully colonizing one state region, this will actually turn the colony into a new country, led by the company you gave the charter to.

“I know a good name - Fordlandia!”
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The new country is a charter company type subject of your country and behaves like any other regular country pretty much.
The new country has a connection to your company though of course and receives a bonus to construction of new buildings and throughput. The country gets the same bonuses the company receives for industries that are in the company’s supported building types and a fraction of them for any other buildings. On the other hand, a company country cannot have companies on their own. Of course if they go fully independent they will be able to do so like any other country.
Now you may wonder what that means for the chartered company countries that we have at game start and I will talk about that later in this Dev Diary.

Connected to the company, the new country benefits from the expertise
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Trade Charter​

The Trade Charter is quite straightforward. It allows the company in question to build, buy and run trade centers.
Once you’ve granted your company a Trade Charter, trade centers are added to the company’s building types, making company-owned Trade Centers profit from the same bonuses the other industries do.
Trade Centers run by a Company additionally have a Trade Advantage bonus for goods that are produced by their building types.

Companies exporting goods they produced
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Industry Charter​

Similarly to the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter allows your company to expand into a new type of business.
Depending on scripted options, using this charter will allow you to grant your company the rights to expand into a different industry entirely.
When we scripted these options, we looked at historic expansions that the companies have done or have added vertical integration industries that were the most fitting. For example a furniture company likely received logging camps as an additional option if there was no other historic precedent.
Just like with the Trade Charter, the Industry Charter adds the selected option to the building type list of the company, making any company-owned levels benefit from throughput bonus and boosting construction. You can only assign one Industry Charter per company

What to do? Some companies have more than one choice
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Investment Charter​

You can grant an Investment Charter to companies to bolster their investments in foreign countries. How that works is that companies can establish a Regional Headquarter in any country where they have at least 5 owned levels and you have foreign investment rights.
The Regional HQ, similar to the main Company Headquarter, serves as the place to display ownership of local investments and simultaneously as the place to collect the income of those buildings. It sends the profits to your home country’s investment pool so that capitalists in your country can use that to build even more wealth.
But here’s the catch - the presence of a Regional HQ allows the company to use the foreign country’s investment pool to construct or buy additional building levels, bringing more options of aggressive foreign acquisitions to the table.

“They're turning profits in the name of prophets”
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As a side note: Although foreign investment works in subjects etc. without having any DLC, we felt it was best that we also unlocked the full foreign investment pact when owning Charters of Commerce since the Investment Charter becomes a lot more fun when you have access to that. So both DLCs, Sphere of Influence and Charters of Commerce will now unlock foreign investment rights.

Monopoly Charter​

Monopoly Charters allow you to choose an industry (or more) of a company to grant them exclusive building rights of that industry. This industry list does include any industry the company has gotten access to via another Charter though, so for example you can use the Industry Charter to unlock logging camps for a company and then subsequently grant the same company a monopoly for logging camps.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200
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So what does the monopoly actually do?
Well, like a proper monopoly should, it increases prices of the produced goods. We modify the selling price in building levels affected by a monopoly. The company’s potential profits are increased by this since they’re selling goods at a higher price. This will in turn of course increase the market price too, according to how much of a good is produced under a company monopoly. An active monopoly will also make it so that companies can purchase buildings of the fitting type for a big discount from other owners. Which other owners? I will talk about that further down this Dev Diary.

Additionally, we have a nice tie-in with the Treaty system that Alex presented last time. As part of a treaty, you will be able to request a country to give monopoly rights to one of your companies, further increasing their profits from ownership in foreign lands.

This brings us to the end of the Charters part, but as I mentioned before we have a couple of things that we will roll out for everybody with the free 1.9 Update that releases alongside Charters of Commerce.

Free 1.9 Update additions​

Since the inception of the companies feature, we’d been thinking about a potential expansion of the system, namely characters leading them. With 1.9, we’re laying the groundwork for future work in that regard.

Executives​

Introducing Executives, a new role that characters can have. They serve as the head of a company, not only running it, but also being the face of the company towards the outside world.
Executives will come with some new character traits that we are adding which will boost certain aspects of companies, e.g. a free charter to spend or a bonus to throughput in the company’s owned levels. These traits are not done yet, so I cannot show them at this point.
Executives will boost the political power of their affiliated Interest Group, similar to how generals do it at the moment. The amount is dependent on how well the company they are leading is doing. Like other characters, Executives can end up as heads of Interest Groups as well if circumstances line up accordingly.
If a company forms a new country via the Colonization Charter, it is also the Executive who will be head of state of the new country. At least at the start, depending on the country’s laws of course they might have elections that change the ruler for example.
We have a number of historical Executives that can show up in the game to lead your historical companies, fully equipped with custom DNA. For all other Executives we generate a random character as we usually do.

Don’t you want this young Alfred Krupp to give you company?
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We hope to expand on this in the future to make Executives have more impact on your political life so that Companies feel even more like an actor within your country, maybe even to the point where granting them too many privileges will actually turn them into a potential danger. But that will require more work in the future.

Interface​

Now that I have shown all the individual bits, we can finally take a look at the interface changes we have done. First, here’s a look at the list of companies which remains accessible via the Companies button on the left navigation bar.

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You can see, all relevant information is still available, though the positioning may have changed due to the addition of Executives and other information. We can see Prosperity now has a dedicated icon, but apart from that it’s more or less the same.
We do see a second tab in the panel though, which is a global display of Companies, in which you can compare all established companies. You can sort the list by country, names of the companies or the profit they make and can also see how many of their building types they own.

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Now, if we look at a specific company’s interface, we will see a lot of changes.

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In the first tab we get an overview of the company, the bonuses they provide, their building types, Executive and so on. On the bottom you can see the buttons to assign Company Charters. They can be found there in all tabs of the company interface, so that you don’t have to go back to the Overview tab each time you want to assign one. Depending on which ones are active, we see additional industry types added to the company’s list or an additional widget informing you about which monopolies the company holds.
If you scroll down a bit, you will also find a summary of Regional HQs and colonies that are attached to this company. But for a detailed view we should look at the second tab, Assets.

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Here we can see all building levels owned by the Company’s HQ and also attached countries, colonies and Regional HQs and their assets (if they have any).
If you want to see more data on how your company has developed, you should look into the third tab, Statistics.

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As the name suggests, this tab features multiple graphs that show you the development of the Company with information about productivity, profit, prosperity, number of building levels and levels of each type, making it the perfect place to see how your assignment of Company Charters affects your Company for example.
I for one really enjoy seeing the numbers grow and we hope you do too.

Next up, we have a couple more changes unrelated to the interface that I’d like to bring to you.

Various changes​

People with a keen eye may have seen in my screenshots that the Hudson Bay Company is listed as a British company.
That is because we are making it so that all three historical establishments of company countries (HBC, EIC, Russian-American Company) will start as former colonies with respective ties to their original companies. So the Hudson Bay Company will be a country tied to the Company HQ of the Hudson Bay Company in London for example.
This change included some minor adjustments to owned building levels and sadly the removal of the Great Western Railway from the game start so that Great Britain has space to have the EIC and HBC as historical starting companies. Of course the Great Western Railway is still available if you want to form it at a later stage.

For 1.9, we are also changing the way Prosperity is gained. We are making it so Prosperity has a target value that it is drifting towards instead of a constant upward or downward movement.
The target value is influenced by the current productivity of the company and also the number of staffed building levels the company owns. Additionally the popularity of the Executive leading it can impact the target value too. With a high popularity it increases, low popularity decreases it of course.
Similarly, the speed at which Prosperity drifts towards its target value is affected mostly by the size of the company and a base value.

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As the way companies work has changed quite drastically over the years, in particular with 1.8 and 1.9, we are also conducting a small pass over the forming conditions of companies. We are now making it so that forming a company can be done with privately owned buildings that you pay for and also we are generally making the establishment slightly easier by reducing the number of required building levels. This won’t affect all companies and not all affected ones to the same degree, but should make more companies’ establishments viable.

Furthermore, we are of course introducing a new set of historical companies, some of which are going to be free, most of which are going to be part of Charters of Commerce.

I have one last thing that I’d like to talk about today, which is that with 1.9, companies will be able to buy building levels owned by financial districts and manor houses. This is a big change that we had wanted to do for a while and should smooth out some of the behaviour where companies and other private owners are playing a cat and mouse game to profit from throughput bonuses and generally makes companies more competitive.
This does not mean that other private owners can do the same. We will evaluate in the future if we want to add that functionality, but for now we are already happy that we could bring this improvement to you.

Alright, that’s it for today. In two weeks we will be back with our next Dev Diary where I will talk about and walk you through how Prestige Goods work.
Until then, have a nice day!

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Can I sell my foreign assets directly to my companies? I.e. if I am Belgium and get investment rights in the Ottoman Empire, could I build 5 tool workshops and sell all 5 directly to John Cockerill in order to get the Regional HQ and benefit from the investment charter? Or is it still a free for all to see which financial sector/company buys the tool workshop when privatised?
 
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I better have the ability to have a baby in suit and monocle as a company executive or I'll riot! Victorian Boss Baby!

Joke aside, this all looks so cool. I for one love the Charters being tied to Authority, because it has the knock-on effect of making other choices more interesting, such as taxation, edicts bolstering/suppression. Also, it makes authoritarian governments a bit more powerful.

Lastly, please add to your future plans to automate PM switches for privately-owned buildings (buildings owned by financial districts, manor houses or company HQs). Allowing the State to fully control the PMs for all the buildings in a state is at the same time annoying, immersion-breaking, and prone to big disruptions in the state market prices.


Edit: I forgot to ask, what prevents me from giving a Company Industry and Monopoly charters, watch it get huge, then revoke those charters knowing that the company is now big enough to effectively continue to be a monopoly without me incurring an Authority cost?
 
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I'm liking what I'm seeing. I have a few questions:

1. What happens to your company HQ owned buildings if the company becomes independent? EG I'm Britain, and I lose control of EIC. What happens to all the plantations the EIC headquarters in London owned, both in and outside of India?

2. Following on, what happens to the EIC company when it becomes the British Raj and likewise the HBC when it joins Canada.

3. Has any thought been given to switching the Laissez Faire Company slot bonus to a free charter bonus? One of the annoyances with the Laissez Faire Company bonus is that it makes it more annoying to switch economic systems throughout the game, which I don't think is optimal from a gameplay perspective (and from a gameplay perspective, companies are now supposed to be more permanent).

4, Will there be a way to "Gift" buildings to a company? The lack of this can make it very difficult to scale up companies.

5. Will there be some new alternative ownership structure for companies introduced for Command Economy/Coop Ownership countries? It would be good for Command Economies to be able to have companies as "State owned enterprises" EG Gazprom, with the ownership pops being bureaucrats instead of capitalists.

6. Has any thought been given to give Corporations some free money bonus when buying state owned buildings, to match their construction bonus? It's annoying that the optimal way to use corporations now is to NOT build their associated industries at all.
 
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PDX_H4n1baL said:
The money comes from the investment pool and disappears. This is because there's no good place for the money to go to at this point. We hope to find a more elegant solution to this in the future.
Click to expand...
Uh, then can the game be modded to prevent these sales of building levels?
Ideally, I'd like to see a merge of the investment pools and buildings' cash reserves, so that ownership buildings' cash reserves are uncapped and serve as investment pools, allowing multiple investment pools in one country- one investment pool for each owner building (company hq, financial district, manor, worker owned building).
 
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Will the HBC and EIC still be unique countries with its own unique tag and flags? Or are they generated country tags now?

Because I noticed in some screenshots the Hudson's Bay Company is now called 'Hudson Bay Country' and it's not using its unique flag.
 
WombatOverlord said:
Maybe in addition to the free charters granted by laws, governing principles, like corporatism, could give a discount to authority cost to make up for their relatively reduced authority bonus.
Click to expand...
While I like this suggestion, it does seem a little redundant alongside also giving free charter slots.

I assume that if you don't have the DLC then you will be able to play with chartered companies if you start as a country that begins with one, but will be otherwise unable to use any of the new charters - is that correct?

If you don't have the DLC, will there be some alternative bonus given instead of free charter slots?

Although the new content looks great in a vacuum, it's worth noting this is probably the most core gameplay impactful "DLC-only" mechanic which we've seen so far for V3 (you still can make and use Power Blocs without the relevant DLC, they're just more restricted).

I'm also mildly concerned that much like Power Blocs, this feels like power creep which the AI will be terrible at effectively using, and it's going to just be another way to make your economy massively outperform the others. Hopefully I'm just being pessimistic.
 
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PDX_H4n1baL said:
The money comes from the investment pool and disappears. This is because there's no good place for the money to go to at this point. We hope to find a more elegant solution to this in the future.
Click to expand...
Could it go from the cash reserves of the company's buildings into the investment pool? Not sure if the numbers work out, but it makes sense to me.
 
imo there should be some kind of political element to privileges given to companies . thinking about historical monopolies , especially later ones , breaking their monopoly was like a whole thing , and it doesnt seem accurate imo that you can just revoke it to save authority . also , is it possible to give foreign companies certain privileges ? if so could this be incorporated into the dlcs treaty features ( e.g you enforce a treaty on someone that lets your companies monopolise their opium or something ) ?
 
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If you gave a country Investment and Trade Charters, then a Monopoly of Trade, would they monopolize all trade in countries that you imposed the monopoly on?
 
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Question about the investment charter, because I don't really understand if this is an opportunity for both countries, or a bad thing that is imposed upon one by the other :

The investment charter create another headquarter in another country, that "centralize" the ownership and gains from the owned buildings
So, if I understand correctly, for a country A having an investment charter in country B :
- This is "better" for country B than a classic A company investing and bringing the money back to A, because the headquarter is actually in country B, so the capitalists are taxed by country B, and only the investment still go to A. So B lose less money.
- The bonuses and executive is the same than the "mother company" ?
- Will the executive have a political influence on IG of country B ?

- Are all new building build by the original company automatically owned by the second headquarter ?

- Is this still working IF I cancel the foreign investment rights ?
- Are the nationalization still possible even with the investment rights ?

Thank you !
 
Wow, that's strong. The last time I was this impressed by a DD was when ownership change was announced.

Acknowledging that it's solid work that has surpassed my expectations greatly and made me very happy, I'd still like to add some important points that are yet lacking.

1) The first and the only major one is that you got monopolies wrong. In most cases the monopoly status is not a medal to be bestowed. It's the factual market share that defines a monopoly. And the way that a firm with the monopolistic position increases profits to personal gain and public harm can be perfectly realised through existing mechanics without artificial price bonuses: the profits are increased by reducing the supply while maintaining a high enough market share that your supply reduction affects prices heavily.
Of course, this can only work if the company could buy out the competition, but guess what, in 1.9 it can! It's really weird that you didn't go this last step so that the monopolies become much more realistic, become more like rivals to their societies (unless heavily regulated) than boons.

Other complaints in no particular order:
2) companies should appear organically and eat one another instead of taking up some government-bestowed slots
3) assets should have a numerical value attached and we need to see the value line going up, not only the profit line
4) political demands from large companies is a huge untapped potential. You clearly acknowledge that, still, I'd like to focus on that, and on the fact that it will work much better with points 1 and 2 realised. Companies should mostly be adversaries with their own goal rather than tools
5) IP should be abolished (or at least left only to individual MHs/FDs), and companies' cash reserves should be directly used for construction and acquisition
6) company construction and throughput bonuses should be heavily nerfed
 
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This looks quite interesting! I especially like the mention of being able to unlock more charters with other means which sounds quite interesting!

However I think that having historical companies with special bonuses is not an ideal choice. I would prefer it if companies start without bonuses and if you could later unlock them, e.g. with charters. This would allow the player to have a bigger impact on the choice for bonuses and would level the differences between countries. Additionally it would be more realistic.
Let's take Krupp for example. It started as a company that produced iron and steel. Then it went into the production of weapons. I think the new charter system could depict this very well. Thanks to this specialization Krupp became better and better at producing weapons which could unlock additional bonuses that you could get by using charters again.

another thing I would love to see would be random companies named after their executives. I think that would add a lot of flavor and would fit better than companies mostly being named after states or countries.

But again: I already really like what you are doing with companies and think it will make the game way better. So, thank you a lot for your work!
 
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yurcick said:
Wow, that's strong. The last time I was this impressed by a DD was when ownership change was announced.

Acknowledging that it's solid work that has surpassed my expectations greatly and made me very happy, I'd still like to add some important points that are yet lacking.

1) The first and the only major one is that you got monopolies wrong. In most cases the monopoly status is not a medal to be bestowed. It's the factual market share that defines a monopoly. And the way that a firm with the monopolistic position increases profits to personal gain and public harm can be perfectly realised through existing mechanics without artificial price bonuses: the profits are increased by reducing the supply while maintaining a high enough market share that your supply reduction affects prices heavily.
Of course, this can only work if the company could buy out the competition, but guess what, in 1.9 it can! It's really weird that you didn't go this last step so that the monopolies become much more realistic, become more like rivals to their societies (unless heavily regulated) than boons.
Click to expand...
Not true. States did award monopolies to companies. Off the top of my head, the most obvious was the Russian Vodka monopoly.

State monopoly - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
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Don_Quigleone said:
Not true. States did award monopolies to companies. Off the top of my head, the most obvious was the Russian Vodka monopoly.
Click to expand...
Of course, this did happen, I never claimed it didn't (hence the word "most cases"). But
1) my perception is that there has historically been many more organic monopolies than explicitly granted ones. There is a huge gray area in between, of course, where companies were favoured by governments which led to them becoming monopolies, but the current solution doesn't seem to portray this either
2) in either case the price effects are not realised through the mechanism the DD describes. It's not that "this company is called a monopoly and so it's able to raise prices". It's "this company's share is so big that if it decreases its output, there are effects on prices that, if chosen right, significantly increase its profit. That's why it's called a monopoly"
 
yurcick said:
Of course, this did happen, I never claimed it didn't (hence the word "most cases"). But
1) my perception is that there has historically been many more organic monopolies than explicitly granted ones. There is a huge gray area in between, of course, where companies were favoured by governments which led to them becoming monopolies, but the current solution doesn't seem to portray this either
2) in either case the price effects are not realised through the mechanism the DD describes. It's not that "this company is called a monopoly and so it's able to raise prices". It's "this company's share is so big that if it decreases its output, there are effects on prices that, if chosen right, significantly increase its profit. That's why it's called a monopoly"
Click to expand...
The monopoly price effect scales by the amount of supply controlled by the company, so that part is not entirely left out. It also works like you describe in the World Market, where monopolistic prices start happening when a single supplier controls 50%+ of exports.
 
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Renarin said:
If you gave a country Investment and Trade Charters, then a Monopoly of Trade, would they monopolize all trade in countries that you imposed the monopoly on?
Click to expand...
That is correct.
 
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Helmut von Dandy said:
Could it go from the cash reserves of the company's buildings into the investment pool? Not sure if the numbers work out, but it makes sense to me.
Click to expand...
All company investment comes from the investment pool, so this isn't possible at the moment. I would like to split out company investment to be separate, but this isn't happening for 1.9 at least as it's quite the undertaking.
 
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