Some thoughts on how- if Mega-Corps are ever the focus of a re-balance by the Custodian Team- Branch Offices could be tweaked to give more variety/viability to different building types, rather than a few always-optimal choices.
The Problem: Branch Office Buildings aren’t balanced amongst themselves.
Currently in Stellaris, Branch Offices for normal (non-Criminal Syndicate) mega-corps work in the following way: you diplomatically arrange a Commercial Pact with another empire, you establish a Branch Office for an considerable early-game energy and influence sum, and then you pick a Branch Office Building from the list of available buildings. With a few later-game exceptions, nearly all branch office buildings are available at start, and do not need to be upgraded/replaced/maintained once established. The only ways to lose a branch office against your will is if you lose an Expropriation War from the host empire, or a hostile takeover by another megacorp.
Branch Offices have two main components: the Branch Office itself, and the Branch Office Buildings. The Branch Office itself boosts the Megacorp’s admin sprawl by 2 and gives energy scaling with the planet’s trade value, base 50% of trade value. Brand Office Buildings (BOBs), on the other hand, typically give a flat bonus to the Host Planet, and a flat bonus to the MegaCorp empire. The designer intent is a more symbiotic relationship, where
On the host side, most of these bonuses are low-value clerk jobs that boost trade value with host empire +4 trade that must reach Capital to be useful, but Mega-Corp branch Office +2 value regardless, fitting the theme of Corporate-benefiting relationship. While there are a few exceptions- farm/miner/soldier themed buildings give +1 worker job- these will rarely be seen from a Player Mega-corp because of the other half the consideration, the MegaCorp benefit.
On the Mega-Corp side, BOBs provide flat bonuses that are worth 1-2 workers of base output. ‘Worker level’ buildings Food/Minerals/Energy/Fleet Capacity (farmers/miners/technicians/soldiers) are +10 each. ‘Specialist Economy’ Consumer Goods/Unity/Science are +6 (Alloys are +3). Nearly all branch office benefits to the Mega-Corp are flat, so a BOB will give +X resources regardless of whether the Planet produce 100 or 0 of the resource, and whether it has 100 or 1 pops on it. The current balancing system instead is balanced by mineral cost and upkeep- worker buildings cost 500 minerals/2 energy upkeep, while specialist buildings are 800 minerals/3 energy upkeep. Technically they also have a start-up time difference, with worker buildings take 360 days and specialist-tiers taking 480, but since they never close that’s pretty much irrelevant.
The Balance Issue is that there’s basically no reason to ever go for the worker-job buildings, which are the buildings that actually provide the host planet the +1 job of type symbiotic bonus. For 300 minerals (trivial if you can already afford 1000 energy branch office start-up costs) and 1 more energy per month (covered by the Clerk job value to the Branch Office these specialist BOBs provide instead of a free scientist/unity/etc.), you’re giving your own empire far better value. +6 science is basically 2 pops (1.5 scientists, no CG upkeep) and the potential +4 branch office income from the two Clerk jobs, while +10 minerals to provide the CG to provide scientists does NOT boost branch office value and is a lower pop saving (because two miners can have more and greater boosts to output, because you do need to pay the increased upkeep of specialist pops and the energy upkeep of the specialist buildings that employ them).
And that’s not even touching the real MVP building of the Commercial Forum- one Merchant job to the player (great for the recipient, +6 energy to the branch office), and a 25% branch office energy income, which turns that +6 (half of Merchant trade value) into a 7.5-8, for the same 800 minerals, before you factor in the trade % boost to other pops trade value on planet. By comparison, the pure-energy generating BOB, the Amusement Park, only provides 10 energy to the player.
Between Specialist and Worker Branch Offices, there’s pretty much no reason to ever use your extremely limited branch office slots on worker branches, especially if you are having an empire resource shortage. Energy is outmatched by the Commercial Forum as soon as a planet has 5 pops or so. Mining Consortiums take over 4 years to pay themselves back, at 2 energy upkeep a month all the while. Early Game food can be entirely covered by Starbase Hydroponic Bays. Etc.
And, on the flip side, the specialist buildings offer the least synergy to the target planets, because clerks are bad for most builds. A planet you build your mega-corp Private Research Enterprise is going to be less likely to actually support science for the target, as it falls behind economically. This is especially true if the planet targeted is a resource world (as most early ones are) and doesn’t have the specialist jobs to rise to.
Put it all together, and for the MegaCorp and the Host both, instead of a diversity of situationally-chosen branch office buildings, nearly all Branch Offices will employ the same uniform deployment order of buildings. And- since the order barely changes over time because the flat outputs have differing worth- branch offices buildings are soon forgotten and rarely changed regardless of the planet’s developments.
So, the problem in summary-
-Resource Buildings don’t give resources worth the opportunity-cost of going specialist.
-Specialist buildings make the planet built on less-likely to specialize in an anti-symbiosis.
-With strong optimal developments for the Mega-Corp, every Branch Office will follow the same approach.
How can we change this?
Or rather:
How can we re-balance buildings to incentivize the player to build resource-buildings over specialist buildings, encourage the theme of symbiosis at the Specialist level, and prevent uniform Branch Office development Plans?
Proposed Idea: Scaling Branch Office Benefits (Based on Planetary Employment) (And Other Symbiosis Synergies)
The crux of this idea is to change the Branch Office Building benefits from being a flat benefit to the Mega-Corp to being more of a benefit that scales with the employment on the planet corresponding to the branch office building in question, with every kind of Branch Office Building giving the +1 job-of-type.
This would- should- give less value in the very early game, but also give far more value over time, and make the Mega-Corp’s investments something to re-look over time as they try to match what the partner has developed. The more pops the host nation employs in the given specialty, the greater the benefit for the Mega-Corp. In exchange- in the benefit of symbiosis- the Mega-Corp’s Branch Office investment incentivizes the further economic development of those resources, from the starting +1 job to things such as district cost/job upkeep reductions.
For an example, let’s start with the example of the mineral-focused Private Mining Consortium.
Currently, the PMC gives the Target planet +1 miner job, technically synergizing the mining theme, and gives the Mega-Corp +10 minerals. The +10 minerals never changes, regardless of whether any mining districts are ever built on the planet.
In this alternative, the Mega-Corp gets a flat +1 mineral per miner on the planet with the PMC. That includes the free miner job, of course, but also every miner job employed thereafter. If the planet grows to a mining hub with 10 miners, +10 minerals. 20 miners, +20 minerals. Etc. If no miners are used because they turned it into a farm world, no benefit. You made a bad bet of an investment, some corporate risk.
Same thing with Specialist-tier branch offices. Instead of a private research enterprise giving +6 science of all types back to the Mega-corp, it gives +1 science per scientist employed. The science-BOB offers the target +1 science job (helping, rather than hindering, their specialist economy development), but in the early game this is likely to be a lot less useful to the player than a building matching what jobs are employed.
Intended Impact:
The expected impact of this would be… well, an early-game nerf for the Specialist-tier branch office buildings, obviously, but also a general progression-over-time buff and incentive to diversify your corporate building types across the game, giving reason to review your corporate assets and reorganize as needed
Branch Office Buildings would shift from instantly adding a number of flat number of nominal pops to your empire (ie, effectively 1.5 miner pops per 10 mineral PMC), a value that is most-significant early and doesn’t change, to adding an initially smaller fraction that scales with your target planet’s growth. To get the most value, the Mega-Corp should occasionally review and replace Branch Office buildings to match colony development. A mining corporation becomes outdated when an early mining colony transitions to another specialty, encouraging active attention (and support) to your symbiosis-partner.
This- more than anything else- would be the real balance to avoid the Mega-Corp monotony, and balance between building types. ‘What Building Is Best’ is no longer ‘the specialist building you can afford,’ but rather be ‘depends on the world.’ You could still build a science-BOB on every planet, for example, but +1 science from the scientists would be unlikely to be as competitive as whatever the planets are specializing in.
Additional Implication:
A branch office ‘bonus per job’ rather than ‘trade-centric’ approach could be- hypothetically- compatible with Mega-Corps investing in Hive Mind/Gestalt Empires. They’d still be no energy gain from trade, of course, but could be useful investment partners for your worker economy, when you have the energy to support. Possible, but not critical to this overall idea.
On the Recipient End-
On the host/recipient side, the Branch Office Building could give incentives to further develop that type of job. Mechanically, this would probably work best with district cost savings, job upkeep reductions, and- potentially as a later tech-enabled development- productivity boosts to the target. Maybe even event-oriented offers to cover the cost of buildings or districts.
For our Host’s perspective, then, a mining-BOB doesn’t just give +1 miner job, but also gives a X% cost reduction to building more mineral districts on that planet. Which, of course, means the AI can buy them quicker, and the player can plant these incentives on planets that already have good district synergy whether planetary modifiers or district numbers. And- in terms of upkeep- maybe the corporate-BOB reduces the job-upkeep costs for that job type, so Miners who would otherwise cost X consumer goods in living standards get a Y% reduction in pop-upkeep needs.
(Hypothetically, this might be implemented by Branch Offices each having their own ‘job types’ on planets to replace the old types. Same bases/modifiers apply, but a ‘Corporate Miner’ instead of ‘Miner’, with the job having different codings instead of an applied modifier, with part of the coding being that minerals are sent to the Mega Corp tied to the branch office.)
For specialists, same concept. Science labs are X% cheaper. Consumer good upkeep for scientist jobs decreased Y%, letting them employ more, even as you get more benefit. As you are incentivized to ramp up your science production sooner than later, the Mega-Corp reaps more science benefits.
Intended Impact:
This part of the balance is intended to address the symbiosis synergy issue. If the Mega-Corp should be balanced by the value of its branch offices, the partner should be balanced by benefiting from going along with the Mega-Corp’s desires. In terms of cost/upkeep savings, this means making it more affordable to do, well, whatever, and hopefully avoiding an economic crash.
Ideally, this will create a dynamic push-and-pull dynamic where the MegaCorp and normal empire are influencing eachother. The normal empire will always prioritize its own needs, leaving the Mega-Corp to ‘catch up’ to it. On the other hand, a skillful Mega-Corp can anticipate the market, build the incentives early, and get their payoff if/when worlds develop along the Branch Offices they already established because of the symbiotic discounts.
At the end of the day, the Mega-Corp will always benefit disproportionately from its successful Branch Offices investments, since it's getting bonuses worth pops rather than discounts, but these investments can enable, not limit, their partner’s symbiotic growth.
Balance Considerations
To start, the +1 [resource] per job is an example, not a necessarily balanced number. Whether it’s +1 minerals, +.75 science, or +.5 alloys could balanced by time (or in-game enablers).
Regardless, the changes listed so far would have a significant impact to the Mega-Corp game, making them far more of a mid/late bloomer (as galactic population grows) vis-à-vis an early-game power. Which is fine- not everyone needs to or should be a rush build- but it would be a bit of steeper curve to get them to galaxy-dominating positions.
One aspect of this is the loss of flat bonuses from branch offices. In the early game, these are the most powerful tool Mega-Corps can do, as the flat gains that don’t depend on pops are relatively easy to afford. 3000-ish energy and 3000 minerals for a permanent +18 science per neighboring power’s guaranteed worlds would be valuable even without the branch office trade value. However, these gains needed to be rebalanced to encourage the other branch offices that were previously strictly non-optimal.
On the flip side, later game this change might need some limiting factor to keep it from being too powerful, since it’s basically just effectively adding free pops based on other people’s pop-specialization. Even if it’s at a rate of 1/10th of a pop, and every Mega-corp pop is working a trade or admin cap job, having many branch offices with many empires would have one of the largest pop-economies in the game. Players would likely need to gang up on Mega-Corps in the mid-game to limit their spread of branch offices.
What that limiting factor should be, not sure because it’s not clear just how strong it would be. I’d suggest a scaling admin cap per pop benefited from, but with the upcoming change to unity and admin cap that might not be possible. An upper cap on the amount of resources a Branch Office Building collect? Or a reduction to the value of the Branch Office money?
But that may not be as big an issue as it initially appears. In order to have a Branch Office benefits that give you an economy like no other in the galaxy, you must… not be conquering the galaxy, and letting it develop huge economic capabilities that can be used against you. And even then you need your targets to be economically optimized to optimize yourself, which isn’t likely to happen.
If it's only strong situationally, it may not be an issue. Different empire builds do perform differently in different game settings. Clone Empires can be major players in a small galaxy, or a footnote in a large galaxy too big to hold. Mega-Corps would be a build that scales with how large the galaxy is/how many branch offices they can afford, being most powerful in the late-game of a large-galaxy, and that may well be a good place for them- the sort of empire you want to subjugate earlier than not, and for whom even subjugation may not be too dangerous to be worth it due to late power spikes.
And as for Criminal Syndicates, the Irish step children of Mega-Corps...
Syndicate has problems that need larger changes than Branch Office building rewards to be rebalanced. Syndicates have to spend more influence than other mega-corps to replace offices that close; Syndicates can’t steal Branch Offices from other mega-corps; Syndicates have no way of preventing their defeated Subsidiaries from closing their branch offices. Any changes that address these would have implications for a Building rebalance.
In lieu of major reworks that depend on other major reworks, I’ll leave a few possible Syndicate options in the current model.
Option A: Syndicate Branch Offices Buildings add crime to their jobs
This is simpler, in that if you can scale the Branch Office income you should be able to scale the crime on a planet. In this case, every time a Branch Office building would add +1 mineral, it also increases crime on a planet by +1 (or +2 for specialists) per job affected, on top of whatever crime is naturally added by the building.
This could/should help Criminal Branch Offices stay open and above enforcer-cutoff. Currently, most worker-level Syndicate buildings add only 25 crime to a planet, or 1 enforcer’s worth. Specialists add 40 crime, meaning it takes two specialists to negate the crime of it and 15 pops. But if the jobs also added crime, so that every pop adds +2 crime rather than +1 by existing, it could really ramp up the crime rate*.
*This would still benefit from, say, a planetary limit on enforcer buildings to 1 per capital colony tier, meaning you could build as many branch offices as they could build enforcer buildings for a general stalemate until later game.
Option B: Syndicate Branch Buildings Steal Resource (Bonuses) From Jobs
Another option is to have Syndicates weaken the primary economy of the planets they’re on. Technically they already do this- criminal jobs prevent people from being workers, employing more enforcers is a pop tax in reduced output and increased upkeep- but we could skip the middle-man and directly tax the target by targeting their resource bonuses.
In this context, instead of getting +1 resource per job, Syndicates could get a starting flat amount (akin to current BOBs), and then get some/most of any bonus resources that the planet’s pops would get as a result of planetary features/specialization/technologies. IE, for a base 4 mineral miner that is producing 5 minerals due to a 25% planetary designation, the Syndicate gets 75% of that bonus (.75 minerals per miner) and the target empire gets only 25% of the bonus (4.24 instead of 5).
This could be used to separate from the (currently under-developed) crime system, and stick in the role of the of Syndicates as parasites who rob growth. The Syndicate it unlikely to get a strict return-on-investment if their buildings can be regularly shut down, but by weakening the planetary economy’s output the Syndicate economic war can slow down and restrain the target’s growth until the Syndicate can subjugate, at which point the Syndicate no longer cares as much when the target closes the office with enforcer-spam.
For the Defenders, it would be a bigger problem, especially the more specialized their economy is, but not a lethal problem. As long as the branch offices still close regularly, the only economic penalty that will endure will be the energy income if subjugated. At which point, an early subsidiary should be able to unite with any other and overthrow the Syndicate. That said, I would fully agree that the Defender should get more tools to counter the Syndicate short of war.
But that’s all on that.
The Problem: Branch Office Buildings aren’t balanced amongst themselves.
Currently in Stellaris, Branch Offices for normal (non-Criminal Syndicate) mega-corps work in the following way: you diplomatically arrange a Commercial Pact with another empire, you establish a Branch Office for an considerable early-game energy and influence sum, and then you pick a Branch Office Building from the list of available buildings. With a few later-game exceptions, nearly all branch office buildings are available at start, and do not need to be upgraded/replaced/maintained once established. The only ways to lose a branch office against your will is if you lose an Expropriation War from the host empire, or a hostile takeover by another megacorp.
Branch Offices have two main components: the Branch Office itself, and the Branch Office Buildings. The Branch Office itself boosts the Megacorp’s admin sprawl by 2 and gives energy scaling with the planet’s trade value, base 50% of trade value. Brand Office Buildings (BOBs), on the other hand, typically give a flat bonus to the Host Planet, and a flat bonus to the MegaCorp empire. The designer intent is a more symbiotic relationship, where
On the host side, most of these bonuses are low-value clerk jobs that boost trade value with host empire +4 trade that must reach Capital to be useful, but Mega-Corp branch Office +2 value regardless, fitting the theme of Corporate-benefiting relationship. While there are a few exceptions- farm/miner/soldier themed buildings give +1 worker job- these will rarely be seen from a Player Mega-corp because of the other half the consideration, the MegaCorp benefit.
On the Mega-Corp side, BOBs provide flat bonuses that are worth 1-2 workers of base output. ‘Worker level’ buildings Food/Minerals/Energy/Fleet Capacity (farmers/miners/technicians/soldiers) are +10 each. ‘Specialist Economy’ Consumer Goods/Unity/Science are +6 (Alloys are +3). Nearly all branch office benefits to the Mega-Corp are flat, so a BOB will give +X resources regardless of whether the Planet produce 100 or 0 of the resource, and whether it has 100 or 1 pops on it. The current balancing system instead is balanced by mineral cost and upkeep- worker buildings cost 500 minerals/2 energy upkeep, while specialist buildings are 800 minerals/3 energy upkeep. Technically they also have a start-up time difference, with worker buildings take 360 days and specialist-tiers taking 480, but since they never close that’s pretty much irrelevant.
The Balance Issue is that there’s basically no reason to ever go for the worker-job buildings, which are the buildings that actually provide the host planet the +1 job of type symbiotic bonus. For 300 minerals (trivial if you can already afford 1000 energy branch office start-up costs) and 1 more energy per month (covered by the Clerk job value to the Branch Office these specialist BOBs provide instead of a free scientist/unity/etc.), you’re giving your own empire far better value. +6 science is basically 2 pops (1.5 scientists, no CG upkeep) and the potential +4 branch office income from the two Clerk jobs, while +10 minerals to provide the CG to provide scientists does NOT boost branch office value and is a lower pop saving (because two miners can have more and greater boosts to output, because you do need to pay the increased upkeep of specialist pops and the energy upkeep of the specialist buildings that employ them).
And that’s not even touching the real MVP building of the Commercial Forum- one Merchant job to the player (great for the recipient, +6 energy to the branch office), and a 25% branch office energy income, which turns that +6 (half of Merchant trade value) into a 7.5-8, for the same 800 minerals, before you factor in the trade % boost to other pops trade value on planet. By comparison, the pure-energy generating BOB, the Amusement Park, only provides 10 energy to the player.
Between Specialist and Worker Branch Offices, there’s pretty much no reason to ever use your extremely limited branch office slots on worker branches, especially if you are having an empire resource shortage. Energy is outmatched by the Commercial Forum as soon as a planet has 5 pops or so. Mining Consortiums take over 4 years to pay themselves back, at 2 energy upkeep a month all the while. Early Game food can be entirely covered by Starbase Hydroponic Bays. Etc.
And, on the flip side, the specialist buildings offer the least synergy to the target planets, because clerks are bad for most builds. A planet you build your mega-corp Private Research Enterprise is going to be less likely to actually support science for the target, as it falls behind economically. This is especially true if the planet targeted is a resource world (as most early ones are) and doesn’t have the specialist jobs to rise to.
Put it all together, and for the MegaCorp and the Host both, instead of a diversity of situationally-chosen branch office buildings, nearly all Branch Offices will employ the same uniform deployment order of buildings. And- since the order barely changes over time because the flat outputs have differing worth- branch offices buildings are soon forgotten and rarely changed regardless of the planet’s developments.
So, the problem in summary-
-Resource Buildings don’t give resources worth the opportunity-cost of going specialist.
-Specialist buildings make the planet built on less-likely to specialize in an anti-symbiosis.
-With strong optimal developments for the Mega-Corp, every Branch Office will follow the same approach.
How can we change this?
Or rather:
How can we re-balance buildings to incentivize the player to build resource-buildings over specialist buildings, encourage the theme of symbiosis at the Specialist level, and prevent uniform Branch Office development Plans?
Proposed Idea: Scaling Branch Office Benefits (Based on Planetary Employment) (And Other Symbiosis Synergies)
The crux of this idea is to change the Branch Office Building benefits from being a flat benefit to the Mega-Corp to being more of a benefit that scales with the employment on the planet corresponding to the branch office building in question, with every kind of Branch Office Building giving the +1 job-of-type.
This would- should- give less value in the very early game, but also give far more value over time, and make the Mega-Corp’s investments something to re-look over time as they try to match what the partner has developed. The more pops the host nation employs in the given specialty, the greater the benefit for the Mega-Corp. In exchange- in the benefit of symbiosis- the Mega-Corp’s Branch Office investment incentivizes the further economic development of those resources, from the starting +1 job to things such as district cost/job upkeep reductions.
For an example, let’s start with the example of the mineral-focused Private Mining Consortium.
Currently, the PMC gives the Target planet +1 miner job, technically synergizing the mining theme, and gives the Mega-Corp +10 minerals. The +10 minerals never changes, regardless of whether any mining districts are ever built on the planet.
In this alternative, the Mega-Corp gets a flat +1 mineral per miner on the planet with the PMC. That includes the free miner job, of course, but also every miner job employed thereafter. If the planet grows to a mining hub with 10 miners, +10 minerals. 20 miners, +20 minerals. Etc. If no miners are used because they turned it into a farm world, no benefit. You made a bad bet of an investment, some corporate risk.
Same thing with Specialist-tier branch offices. Instead of a private research enterprise giving +6 science of all types back to the Mega-corp, it gives +1 science per scientist employed. The science-BOB offers the target +1 science job (helping, rather than hindering, their specialist economy development), but in the early game this is likely to be a lot less useful to the player than a building matching what jobs are employed.
Intended Impact:
The expected impact of this would be… well, an early-game nerf for the Specialist-tier branch office buildings, obviously, but also a general progression-over-time buff and incentive to diversify your corporate building types across the game, giving reason to review your corporate assets and reorganize as needed
Branch Office Buildings would shift from instantly adding a number of flat number of nominal pops to your empire (ie, effectively 1.5 miner pops per 10 mineral PMC), a value that is most-significant early and doesn’t change, to adding an initially smaller fraction that scales with your target planet’s growth. To get the most value, the Mega-Corp should occasionally review and replace Branch Office buildings to match colony development. A mining corporation becomes outdated when an early mining colony transitions to another specialty, encouraging active attention (and support) to your symbiosis-partner.
This- more than anything else- would be the real balance to avoid the Mega-Corp monotony, and balance between building types. ‘What Building Is Best’ is no longer ‘the specialist building you can afford,’ but rather be ‘depends on the world.’ You could still build a science-BOB on every planet, for example, but +1 science from the scientists would be unlikely to be as competitive as whatever the planets are specializing in.
Additional Implication:
A branch office ‘bonus per job’ rather than ‘trade-centric’ approach could be- hypothetically- compatible with Mega-Corps investing in Hive Mind/Gestalt Empires. They’d still be no energy gain from trade, of course, but could be useful investment partners for your worker economy, when you have the energy to support. Possible, but not critical to this overall idea.
On the Recipient End-
On the host/recipient side, the Branch Office Building could give incentives to further develop that type of job. Mechanically, this would probably work best with district cost savings, job upkeep reductions, and- potentially as a later tech-enabled development- productivity boosts to the target. Maybe even event-oriented offers to cover the cost of buildings or districts.
For our Host’s perspective, then, a mining-BOB doesn’t just give +1 miner job, but also gives a X% cost reduction to building more mineral districts on that planet. Which, of course, means the AI can buy them quicker, and the player can plant these incentives on planets that already have good district synergy whether planetary modifiers or district numbers. And- in terms of upkeep- maybe the corporate-BOB reduces the job-upkeep costs for that job type, so Miners who would otherwise cost X consumer goods in living standards get a Y% reduction in pop-upkeep needs.
(Hypothetically, this might be implemented by Branch Offices each having their own ‘job types’ on planets to replace the old types. Same bases/modifiers apply, but a ‘Corporate Miner’ instead of ‘Miner’, with the job having different codings instead of an applied modifier, with part of the coding being that minerals are sent to the Mega Corp tied to the branch office.)
For specialists, same concept. Science labs are X% cheaper. Consumer good upkeep for scientist jobs decreased Y%, letting them employ more, even as you get more benefit. As you are incentivized to ramp up your science production sooner than later, the Mega-Corp reaps more science benefits.
Intended Impact:
This part of the balance is intended to address the symbiosis synergy issue. If the Mega-Corp should be balanced by the value of its branch offices, the partner should be balanced by benefiting from going along with the Mega-Corp’s desires. In terms of cost/upkeep savings, this means making it more affordable to do, well, whatever, and hopefully avoiding an economic crash.
Ideally, this will create a dynamic push-and-pull dynamic where the MegaCorp and normal empire are influencing eachother. The normal empire will always prioritize its own needs, leaving the Mega-Corp to ‘catch up’ to it. On the other hand, a skillful Mega-Corp can anticipate the market, build the incentives early, and get their payoff if/when worlds develop along the Branch Offices they already established because of the symbiotic discounts.
At the end of the day, the Mega-Corp will always benefit disproportionately from its successful Branch Offices investments, since it's getting bonuses worth pops rather than discounts, but these investments can enable, not limit, their partner’s symbiotic growth.
Balance Considerations
To start, the +1 [resource] per job is an example, not a necessarily balanced number. Whether it’s +1 minerals, +.75 science, or +.5 alloys could balanced by time (or in-game enablers).
Regardless, the changes listed so far would have a significant impact to the Mega-Corp game, making them far more of a mid/late bloomer (as galactic population grows) vis-à-vis an early-game power. Which is fine- not everyone needs to or should be a rush build- but it would be a bit of steeper curve to get them to galaxy-dominating positions.
One aspect of this is the loss of flat bonuses from branch offices. In the early game, these are the most powerful tool Mega-Corps can do, as the flat gains that don’t depend on pops are relatively easy to afford. 3000-ish energy and 3000 minerals for a permanent +18 science per neighboring power’s guaranteed worlds would be valuable even without the branch office trade value. However, these gains needed to be rebalanced to encourage the other branch offices that were previously strictly non-optimal.
On the flip side, later game this change might need some limiting factor to keep it from being too powerful, since it’s basically just effectively adding free pops based on other people’s pop-specialization. Even if it’s at a rate of 1/10th of a pop, and every Mega-corp pop is working a trade or admin cap job, having many branch offices with many empires would have one of the largest pop-economies in the game. Players would likely need to gang up on Mega-Corps in the mid-game to limit their spread of branch offices.
What that limiting factor should be, not sure because it’s not clear just how strong it would be. I’d suggest a scaling admin cap per pop benefited from, but with the upcoming change to unity and admin cap that might not be possible. An upper cap on the amount of resources a Branch Office Building collect? Or a reduction to the value of the Branch Office money?
But that may not be as big an issue as it initially appears. In order to have a Branch Office benefits that give you an economy like no other in the galaxy, you must… not be conquering the galaxy, and letting it develop huge economic capabilities that can be used against you. And even then you need your targets to be economically optimized to optimize yourself, which isn’t likely to happen.
If it's only strong situationally, it may not be an issue. Different empire builds do perform differently in different game settings. Clone Empires can be major players in a small galaxy, or a footnote in a large galaxy too big to hold. Mega-Corps would be a build that scales with how large the galaxy is/how many branch offices they can afford, being most powerful in the late-game of a large-galaxy, and that may well be a good place for them- the sort of empire you want to subjugate earlier than not, and for whom even subjugation may not be too dangerous to be worth it due to late power spikes.
And as for Criminal Syndicates, the Irish step children of Mega-Corps...
Syndicate has problems that need larger changes than Branch Office building rewards to be rebalanced. Syndicates have to spend more influence than other mega-corps to replace offices that close; Syndicates can’t steal Branch Offices from other mega-corps; Syndicates have no way of preventing their defeated Subsidiaries from closing their branch offices. Any changes that address these would have implications for a Building rebalance.
In lieu of major reworks that depend on other major reworks, I’ll leave a few possible Syndicate options in the current model.
Option A: Syndicate Branch Offices Buildings add crime to their jobs
This is simpler, in that if you can scale the Branch Office income you should be able to scale the crime on a planet. In this case, every time a Branch Office building would add +1 mineral, it also increases crime on a planet by +1 (or +2 for specialists) per job affected, on top of whatever crime is naturally added by the building.
This could/should help Criminal Branch Offices stay open and above enforcer-cutoff. Currently, most worker-level Syndicate buildings add only 25 crime to a planet, or 1 enforcer’s worth. Specialists add 40 crime, meaning it takes two specialists to negate the crime of it and 15 pops. But if the jobs also added crime, so that every pop adds +2 crime rather than +1 by existing, it could really ramp up the crime rate*.
*This would still benefit from, say, a planetary limit on enforcer buildings to 1 per capital colony tier, meaning you could build as many branch offices as they could build enforcer buildings for a general stalemate until later game.
Option B: Syndicate Branch Buildings Steal Resource (Bonuses) From Jobs
Another option is to have Syndicates weaken the primary economy of the planets they’re on. Technically they already do this- criminal jobs prevent people from being workers, employing more enforcers is a pop tax in reduced output and increased upkeep- but we could skip the middle-man and directly tax the target by targeting their resource bonuses.
In this context, instead of getting +1 resource per job, Syndicates could get a starting flat amount (akin to current BOBs), and then get some/most of any bonus resources that the planet’s pops would get as a result of planetary features/specialization/technologies. IE, for a base 4 mineral miner that is producing 5 minerals due to a 25% planetary designation, the Syndicate gets 75% of that bonus (.75 minerals per miner) and the target empire gets only 25% of the bonus (4.24 instead of 5).
This could be used to separate from the (currently under-developed) crime system, and stick in the role of the of Syndicates as parasites who rob growth. The Syndicate it unlikely to get a strict return-on-investment if their buildings can be regularly shut down, but by weakening the planetary economy’s output the Syndicate economic war can slow down and restrain the target’s growth until the Syndicate can subjugate, at which point the Syndicate no longer cares as much when the target closes the office with enforcer-spam.
For the Defenders, it would be a bigger problem, especially the more specialized their economy is, but not a lethal problem. As long as the branch offices still close regularly, the only economic penalty that will endure will be the energy income if subjugated. At which point, an early subsidiary should be able to unite with any other and overthrow the Syndicate. That said, I would fully agree that the Defender should get more tools to counter the Syndicate short of war.
But that’s all on that.
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