Corporations

Corporations are player-owned businesses that generate revenue, employ workers, and interact with state economies. Every character can found exactly one corporation. Corporations earn money each turn, respond to economic conditions, and can become a significant source of personal wealth and political leverage.

Founding a Corporation

To found a corporation, you need ₳1,000,000 in personal cash. That cost is deducted immediately, and your new corporation starts with ₳1,000,000 in liquid capital. You can optionally commit up to ₳50,000,000 in additional starting capital (deducted from your personal cash).

At founding you choose from 17 sector types:

Your chosen type is the corporation's primary type. Sectors matching your primary type receive a +5% profit margin bonus. You can later add a secondary type for a +2.5% bonus on sectors of that type.

The CEO receives 10,000,000 shares at ₳0.10 initial price. Your corporation's HQ is set to your current home state.

Public vs Private Corporations

When you found a corporation, you choose between two structures:

• Private — you own 100% of shares. Other players see only your name, sector, headquarters, and credit rating. Your treasury, income, dividend rate, share price, and per-sector financials are not visible to non-CEO viewers.
• Public IPO — additional shares are issued to the public float at the same per-share price as your founding commitment. The cash raised flows into your corporation's treasury. You keep your founder shares (10,000,000) but your ownership share drops because total shares went up.

Float % is capped at 49% so a founder always emerges from an IPO with majority control. After founding, a private corporation can also IPO later via the Go Public action in the CEO admin panel (96-turn cooldown since founding or last privatization).

Privatization Buyouts

A CEO who owns more than 50% of a public corporation can call a privatization vote. The vote runs for 24 turns. Eligible voters are non-CEO character and corporation shareholders; the public float doesn't vote (no person owns it) but auto-tenders if the vote passes.

• Buyout price = current share price × 1.10 (10% premium), locked at vote-open time
• Vote passes on simple majority of shares actually voted (abstentions don't count)
• On pass: every non-CEO shareholder is bought out at the locked price; the public float is retired and the corp's treasury receives the equivalent payment; the CEO ends up with 100% of (now-reduced) total shares; the corporation becomes private
• On fail: the CEO's reserved cash is refunded and a 96-turn cooldown applies before another vote can be called
• While a vote is open, the CEO cannot issue new shares, run a stock split, or change the dividend rate
• Cross-currency privatization (CEO home currency ≠ corp currency) is currently blocked

Shareholder Governance Votes

Public corporations use shareholder votes for governance changes, HQ relocation, dissolution authorization, and public share issuance. The CEO opens the vote from the corporation page, and each shareholder's ballot is weighted by the number of shares they control.

Votes run for 24 turns but can finish early once the result is mathematically certain:

• If yes shares reach the required threshold, the vote passes immediately.
• If the remaining unvoted shares can no longer make yes reach the threshold, the vote fails immediately.
• If neither side is certain, the vote resolves at the deadline.

The turn processor sweeps open corporation votes every turn, so passed or failed votes finalize even if nobody opens the vote page. Passed share-issuance votes add the approved shares to public float and credit the proceeds to corporate liquid capital.

Expanding Into Markets

Corporations grow by acquiring sectors in state economies. Each sector represents a slice of a state's market in your industry.

Expansion cost: ₳100,000 per new sector

Each new sector starts with:

• ₳1,000,000 revenue
• 500 workers
• 35% default profit margin

Market Capture (Splits)

To capture unowned market share you perform a "split":

• Cash cost: 5% of the unowned sector's revenue
• MS cost: Starts at 1 Marketing Strength (MS), then doubles with each split you make: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16...
• Capture amount: 5% of unowned sector as baseline, multiplied by 1.25 (unowned bonus), plus bonus from your marketing strength (1 + marketingStrength / 100)
• Escalation decay: Each turn, your split escalation level decreases by 1 — cost halves back toward 1 MS over time

This means rapid splits become expensive quickly, but waiting a few turns resets the cost.

Unowned Sector Growth

The unowned portion of every market sector grows automatically each turn at the average growth rate of player-owned sectors in that same state and sector type. If no player-owned sectors exist in that combination, it falls back to a 1% baseline growth rate.

This means unowned market share regenerates over time. A sector you partially captured will refill, so sustained expansion requires repeated splits or very high marketing strength to outpace regrowth.

Per-Turn Processing

Every turn, the game processes each corporation through several phases:

1. Revenue growth applied to each sector
2. Profit margins calculated with all modifiers
3. Sector and corporation data saved
4. Corporate tax bases updated in federal and state budgets
5. CEO salary paid from liquid capital to CEO's personal wallet
6. Dividends distributed to shareholders
7. Pending share orders filled
8. Market cap snapshot recorded
9. Open shareholder votes auto-resolved and closing reminders sent

Profit Margin Modifiers

Many factors adjust your sector profit margins. These are additive:

Sectors that don't match your primary or secondary type receive a -15% penalty. Focused corporations outperform diversified ones unless you manage logistics carefully.

CEO Tools

CEO Salary

Set a daily salary (no minimum or maximum). It is deducted from liquid capital each turn. High salaries drain capital and reduce share price over time.

Overhead Cap

Combined daily spending on marketing, logistics, R&D, and CEO salary cannot exceed 150% of total daily sector revenue. The game rejects budget updates that would push overhead past this limit.

Marketing Budget

Marketing Strength (MS) determines how much unowned market you capture per split. MS grows each turn based on your daily marketing spend:

• Base: 1 MS per turn (any spend)
• Scaled: 0.65 × ln(1 + budget / 100,000)

Starting MS is 10. Diminishing returns kick in above MS 100.

Logistical Sprawl

Corporations with more than 15 sectors incur a -0.5% margin penalty per 2 sectors over the threshold. With a secondary type set, that doubles to -1.0% per 2 sectors. Logistics spending raises the threshold (up to 30 sectors at max Logistics Strength of 200) and halves the penalty slope.

Research & Development

Corporations can allocate a daily R&D budget that builds an R&D score over time. Like marketing, R&D grows with log-scaled spending and decays 3% per turn when unfunded.

• Base gain: 1 point per turn (any spend)
• Scaled: 0.65 × ln(1 + budget / 100,000)
• Diminishing returns: Score above 100 grows more slowly

Every 6 turns, the system checks for innovation. Higher R&D scores increase both the probability and magnitude of a breakthrough:

• Regular sectors: 1–10% revenue boost
• Extraction sectors: 1–5% revenue boost plus a state resource-capacity bonus (50 capacity units per R&D score point)

R&D spending counts against corporation overhead and reduces liquid capital like marketing and logistics.

Production Policy

Each sector has a production policy on a -25 to +25 scale. The active level trends toward your target at 1 unit per turn. It multiplies revenue, commodity output (supply), and commodity input consumption (demand) asymmetrically:

Aggressive policy maximizes revenue and commodity throughput but also raises input costs. Conservative policy protects margins by sharply cutting input consumption while accepting reduced output. The asymmetry — input reduction (-15%) outpacing output reduction (-10%) at maximum conservation — is intentional: lean operations waste less.

Operating Strategies

Each sector type has 2–7 operating strategies that change which commodities it supplies and demands. Strategies are how you specialize: an energy sector can run Conventional (fossil fuels), Renewables Focus (solar/wind using electronics and rare earth), or Nuclear Expansion (high output, heavy steel and chemicals). A chemical industries sector can pivot between industrial chemicals, fertilizer production, pharmaceuticals, or plastics.

Strategies have no direct margin bonus — their value comes entirely from commodity market dynamics. Switching to a strategy that supplies a scarce commodity or avoids expensive inputs can dramatically improve margins; switching into an oversupplied market does the opposite.

Switching Strategies

During the transition, commodity flows blend from the old strategy toward the new one. The penalty represents retooling disruption. You can see a before/after comparison of estimated margin impact in the sector detail panel before confirming a switch.

Strategy Overview by Sector Type

For extraction sectors specifically, the Diversified strategy spreads output across all seven resource types at lower per-commodity rates. The focused strategies (Iron & Metals Mining, Oil & Gas, etc.) produce 4–10× more of their target commodity — switching to the focused strategy that matches the scarcest resource is almost always the higher-margin play when a clear shortage exists. See Commodities for a full breakdown.

Telecommunications sectors produce Network Services (subscription-equivalent broadband/connectivity capacity) as their primary unique output alongside software. The three strategies (Standard, 5G/Infrastructure, Cloud Services) differ in how much network_services vs software they supply and in their hardware/energy input mix. Network services have background macro demand from GDP, so there is always a market even before player-built Telecom sectors are common.

Entertainment sectors produce Entertainment Services (event-equivalent entertainment capacity) as their primary unique output alongside advertising. The three strategies (Standard, Streaming/Digital, Live/Venue) differ in output split and input profile. Live/Venue supplies the most entertainment_services but demands construction and real estate inputs for physical venue infrastructure.

Corporate Taxes

Two tax rates apply to each sector: a domestic rate and a foreign rate. A corporation headquartered in the US pays the US domestic rate on US sectors and the foreign rate of any other country where it operates. Both rates are set by legislation in each country. State-level corporate taxes also stack on top.

Economic Effects on Corporations

Your corporation's sectors respond to state and national conditions:

• State GDP growth is driven by the revenue-weighted average of all corporate sector growth rates in that state.
• Commodity markets affect margins — steel shortages hurt manufacturing, oversupply in energy compresses energy sector margins.
• Bills and policies can create subsidies (+15% margin) or trigger tariffs (foreign corps pay margin penalties in target countries).

Shares and Dividends

The CEO sets a dividend rate (0–25% of after-tax income). Dividends are paid each turn to all shareholders proportional to their share count. Players buy and sell shares on country stock exchanges.

Share price formula: The share price is computed from three fundamental components:

• Tangible book per share (weight 1.0): (liquidCapital + sectorNPV + bondHoldings - issuedBondDebt) / totalShares
• Earnings power per share (weight 0.4): normalizedAnnualEarnings / costOfCapital / totalShares
• Growth premium per share (weight 0.1): Gordon Growth Model terminal value using the revenue-weighted sector growth rate, capped just below the cost of capital

The three components sum to a fundamental value, which becomes the share price except during a post-split smoothing window (3 turns after a stock split or reverse split, where the formula biases 70% toward the previous price to avoid instant reversion).

An IMF bailout active on the corporation applies a price multiplier.

National Corporations

Some corporations are government-owned (e.g., the UK NHS). These cannot be purchased or attacked. Their revenue flows through the national budget rather than to a CEO.

Interaction with Politics

Corporations connect to politics in several ways:

• Legislation creates subsidies, tariffs, and tax rate changes that directly affect margins
• Senators and Representatives can advance bills that benefit their sector
• The national budget receives corporate tax revenue — profitable corps help state finances
• The IMF facility and crisis systems can affect corporate borrowing costs and credit ratings

See also: Corporate Bonds, Corporate R&D, Stock Market, Commodities, National Budget