Corporate R&D

The R&D system lets CEOs invest in research that accumulates an R&D Score, which periodically generates breakthroughs — revenue boosts to your sectors, and for extraction corporations, permanent state resource capacity growth.

How It Works

Set a daily R&D budget from the CEO Budget tab. The budget is deducted from your corporation's liquid capital each turn (spread evenly across turns). In return, your R&D Score grows each turn:

Score Accumulation Formula

baseGain = 1.0 (if any R&D budget is set)
scaledGain = 0.65 × ln(1 + budget / 100,000)
decay = 3% of current score
newScore = max(0, (1 − 0.03) × oldScore + (baseGain + scaledGain) × diminishing(oldScore))

Key properties:

Property	Value
Starting score	0
Decay per turn	3% of current score
Diminishing returns above	Score 100

The 3% decay is slower than logistics (which decays at 5%), meaning accumulated R&D degrades more slowly. You can let spending dip temporarily without losing most of your progress.

Innovation Checks

Every 6 turns, the game rolls once to determine if a breakthrough occurs. The probability is:

probability = min(1, rdScore / 200)

R&D Score	Chance per 6-turn window
0	0%
50	25%
100	50%
150	75%
200	100%

At score 200, every 6-turn window produces a breakthrough. At score 100, one in two windows does.

Breakthrough Effects

When a breakthrough fires, one random sector owned by the corporation receives a revenue boost. The size of the boost is randomly rolled within a fixed range — your R&D Score only governs how often breakthroughs fire, not how big they are.

Corporation type	Boost range per breakthrough
Regular	1% – 5% (uniform random)
Extraction	1% – 3% (uniform random)

The boost is applied directly to the sector's revenue. You also receive an in-game notification when a breakthrough fires.

Extraction Corporation Bonus: Capacity Growth

For extraction corporations, breakthroughs also permanently increase state resource capacity — the available pool of oil, iron, coal, and other resources in the sector's state.

Total capacity increase per breakthrough:

totalIncrease = rdScore × 50  (at score 200: 10,000 units)

This increase is split across all extractable resources in your active operating strategy, weighted by each resource's supply rate. For example:

Oil & Gas strategy (oil 0.4, natural gas 0.2): ~67% goes to oil, ~33% to natural gas
Iron Mining strategy: 100% goes to iron

Capacity gained this way is permanent — it represents genuinely unlocking new deposits. This capacity does not decay.

Budget Cap

R&D spending counts toward the 150% overhead cap:

marketing + logistics + R&D + CEO salary ≤ 1.5 × daily revenue

If combined overhead exceeds 150% of daily revenue, the game will not let you increase any of these budgets further.

Strategic Considerations

When R&D pays off:

If you own a large extraction corporation, R&D provides a compounding advantage over time — higher capacity means more supply, affecting commodity prices and your own margins.
For any corporation at high score (150+), the near-certain 6-turn breakthrough window means consistent sector boosts (averaging ~3% for regular corps, ~2% for extraction), effectively supplementing your growth rate.

When R&D is less valuable:

Small corporations with 1-3 sectors: a breakthrough selects a random sector, so the effect is diluted across a small base.
If your liquid capital is tight, R&D competes directly with marketing spend. Marketing Strength has a more direct effect on market capture.

Score maintenance:

At 3% decay per turn, a score of 100 loses about 3 points per turn without spending.
At the equilibrium point, spending equals decay. For score 100: decay ≈ 3/turn, so you need enough budget to generate ~3 score/turn to hold position.