Having a Monopoly on an industry implies that no other entity should be able to own those buildings. It does prohibit non-monopoly holders from constructing new instances of those buildings, but as of now it is not preventing other entities from buying available building levels.
The tooltips and even dev diaries do specify that a Monopoly is exclusively for construction and makes no mention of buying existing buildings. I was going to report this as a bug but I searched the existing reports and found numerous similar reports already, none of which seem to have gotten any traction from the developers. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks a Monopoly should include both purchasing and construction.
So I have to ask, were monopolies explicitly designed to only limit construction rights, or is there any intent to make them limit purchasing buildings as well? Or alternatively maybe a company with a monopoly could be able to purchase building levels from other companies that dont have the monopoly. I would certainly like this to be able to ensure for example that I can give foreign investment rights to say Germany and have my Artillery Foundries run by Krupp, while giving my own company a Monopoly on Iron Mines to ensure the profits from that industry stay home.
EDIT: The tooltip for Monopoly Charter does say that it automatically allows privatization of that industry by that company, which seems to imply that it can privatize buildings that aren't set to allow privatization. What it actually does currently though is simply set the buildings to be able to be privatized in general which makes them available to any buyer whether they have the monopoly or not. Perhaps another potential resolution would be to change this so that the buildings stay set to no privatization but allow the monopoly holder to privatize them anyway?
EDIT 2: I dug deeper and found this from PDX_H4n1bal in the dev replies for Dev Diary #147:
"A monopoly prevents any other actors in the country from buying up levels of the specified industry as well as building new levels."
So I have my answer. I will add to the growing list of bug reports for this. If nothing else I am relieved that Monopolies are in fact supposed to work the way I thought.
The tooltips and even dev diaries do specify that a Monopoly is exclusively for construction and makes no mention of buying existing buildings. I was going to report this as a bug but I searched the existing reports and found numerous similar reports already, none of which seem to have gotten any traction from the developers. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks a Monopoly should include both purchasing and construction.
So I have to ask, were monopolies explicitly designed to only limit construction rights, or is there any intent to make them limit purchasing buildings as well? Or alternatively maybe a company with a monopoly could be able to purchase building levels from other companies that dont have the monopoly. I would certainly like this to be able to ensure for example that I can give foreign investment rights to say Germany and have my Artillery Foundries run by Krupp, while giving my own company a Monopoly on Iron Mines to ensure the profits from that industry stay home.
EDIT: The tooltip for Monopoly Charter does say that it automatically allows privatization of that industry by that company, which seems to imply that it can privatize buildings that aren't set to allow privatization. What it actually does currently though is simply set the buildings to be able to be privatized in general which makes them available to any buyer whether they have the monopoly or not. Perhaps another potential resolution would be to change this so that the buildings stay set to no privatization but allow the monopoly holder to privatize them anyway?
EDIT 2: I dug deeper and found this from PDX_H4n1bal in the dev replies for Dev Diary #147:
"A monopoly prevents any other actors in the country from buying up levels of the specified industry as well as building new levels."
So I have my answer. I will add to the growing list of bug reports for this. If nothing else I am relieved that Monopolies are in fact supposed to work the way I thought.
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