In a word, they are a bit OP, but not gamebreakingly so.
The big drawback is the empire sprawl penalty which is a +50% penalty for going over admin cap, which is painful if you play wide. To counteract this you do get a +20 admin cap just for taking the civic, but you are cut off from efficient buearcy and imperial perogatives, which means, that unless you take pacifist, you will be capped at 70 admin cap with courtier network from expansion tradition. You can also get a 10 admin cap civic pick with private colony ships, which I personally didn´t think was worth it. (my picks were gospel of masses and free traders, with thrifty as racial trait to maximize trade income)
Well, you have to adjust your playstyle, luckily, megacorp have a mechanic for this problem, franchises, which are special vassals that combine the ability to build starbases at will and a 25% energy production tax they feed back to you. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a bug that even if you are rivals with an alien, your franchises can still open branch offices, something that happened to me while i was playing against a megacorp and left me scratching my head. Saddly you cant open branch offices in your franchises.
The big drawback to the franchises is that the AI is terrible of course, though i highly recommend Glavius enhanced AI mod to help with this, as it does make your vassals smarter (and the enemies too of course). The best strategy seems to be to expand widely and keep making franchises all the time, so as soon as a outlying colony finishes, you might as well vassalize it. Dont bother to build anything on it, the AI seems to materialize resources out of thin air and seems to do waste it all building fleets of worthless construction ships. Yeah. So dont expect your vassals to do anything useful except maybe act as a string of buffers and feed you energy.
Speaking of energy, you dont need any energy districts. In fact, you should probably take Gospel of the masses and go fanatic spiritualist, as that is by far the most OP megacorp civic. With all that trade, switch on consumer benefits policy and militarized economy and scrap your starter civillian factory because you will probably never need consumer goods again. Taking a level of authoritarian and stratified society helps a lot too.
If you do feel the pinch for consumer goods, probably because you have a lot of scientists and priests, you can open branch offices and have them generate consumer goods for you. These goods from branch offices dont seem to take the -25% penalty from militarized economy and any level 1 branch office can make a VR building thingy that produces 10 free consumer goods, you don´t even need to send workers or mats.
What is the offshoot of not needing to employ any artisans or technicians? Well it frees you up to have lots of scientists and metalurgists, for the alloy and science. With such a tight admin cap, you might want to min max it, and donate away any system that doesnt directly connect your worlds. Your franchises will happily accept any star system you give them, the ideal layout for your empire is basically going to be, lots of worlds, and the direct paths between those worlds by which trade flows. Everything else, donate to a franchise. You definately want to win the market capital nomination thingy, if you dont know there is a decision that lets you invest energy and influence to place yourself in running, and an additional booster that improves your odds.
As you start getting into wars, you should just franchise anything you conquer right away, your aim will be to build a core of 70 admin cap, get your worlds to turn into ecumenlopis, work through all the science asap, and then franchise the entire rest of the galaxy. Investing any resources on captured territory away from home will be a waste, and, there is something to be said about just resettling population back to your worlds. So you can conquer planets, resettle their pop on your worlds, then franchise that last pop.
In the end, is it worth it?
Well its different. Personally I am not a fan of franchises, they don´t help much, they don´t contribute naval capacity, and they are pretty weak in anything but defensive war, they do decent job protecting themselves from invasion, and they lower border friction by existing. The overflowing energy and consumer resources is great, you can buy whatever you need from market, but in the end, you will still be weaker than a wide empire that has blown past the admin cap (mostly because you will not have the naval capacity). And while you can do the same, the +50% empire sprawl penalty will put you at a disavantage, so much so that you are better off switching out of megacorp government type completely in late game, which is a thing that you can do.
In fact, that might just be your best option, when you run out of trading partners, you will not get any use out of branch offices, so as you own more and more of the galaxy, via franchises, it may just be better to reintegrate them all at some point, and switch to another civic without the 50% sprawl penalty.
So in the long run, is it worth it? Early game definately, but in late game, if you aren´t playing peaceful federation builder and want to conquer everything, you will be better off switching to something else to avoid that penalty.
The big drawback is the empire sprawl penalty which is a +50% penalty for going over admin cap, which is painful if you play wide. To counteract this you do get a +20 admin cap just for taking the civic, but you are cut off from efficient buearcy and imperial perogatives, which means, that unless you take pacifist, you will be capped at 70 admin cap with courtier network from expansion tradition. You can also get a 10 admin cap civic pick with private colony ships, which I personally didn´t think was worth it. (my picks were gospel of masses and free traders, with thrifty as racial trait to maximize trade income)
Well, you have to adjust your playstyle, luckily, megacorp have a mechanic for this problem, franchises, which are special vassals that combine the ability to build starbases at will and a 25% energy production tax they feed back to you. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a bug that even if you are rivals with an alien, your franchises can still open branch offices, something that happened to me while i was playing against a megacorp and left me scratching my head. Saddly you cant open branch offices in your franchises.
The big drawback to the franchises is that the AI is terrible of course, though i highly recommend Glavius enhanced AI mod to help with this, as it does make your vassals smarter (and the enemies too of course). The best strategy seems to be to expand widely and keep making franchises all the time, so as soon as a outlying colony finishes, you might as well vassalize it. Dont bother to build anything on it, the AI seems to materialize resources out of thin air and seems to do waste it all building fleets of worthless construction ships. Yeah. So dont expect your vassals to do anything useful except maybe act as a string of buffers and feed you energy.
Speaking of energy, you dont need any energy districts. In fact, you should probably take Gospel of the masses and go fanatic spiritualist, as that is by far the most OP megacorp civic. With all that trade, switch on consumer benefits policy and militarized economy and scrap your starter civillian factory because you will probably never need consumer goods again. Taking a level of authoritarian and stratified society helps a lot too.
If you do feel the pinch for consumer goods, probably because you have a lot of scientists and priests, you can open branch offices and have them generate consumer goods for you. These goods from branch offices dont seem to take the -25% penalty from militarized economy and any level 1 branch office can make a VR building thingy that produces 10 free consumer goods, you don´t even need to send workers or mats.
What is the offshoot of not needing to employ any artisans or technicians? Well it frees you up to have lots of scientists and metalurgists, for the alloy and science. With such a tight admin cap, you might want to min max it, and donate away any system that doesnt directly connect your worlds. Your franchises will happily accept any star system you give them, the ideal layout for your empire is basically going to be, lots of worlds, and the direct paths between those worlds by which trade flows. Everything else, donate to a franchise. You definately want to win the market capital nomination thingy, if you dont know there is a decision that lets you invest energy and influence to place yourself in running, and an additional booster that improves your odds.
As you start getting into wars, you should just franchise anything you conquer right away, your aim will be to build a core of 70 admin cap, get your worlds to turn into ecumenlopis, work through all the science asap, and then franchise the entire rest of the galaxy. Investing any resources on captured territory away from home will be a waste, and, there is something to be said about just resettling population back to your worlds. So you can conquer planets, resettle their pop on your worlds, then franchise that last pop.
In the end, is it worth it?
Well its different. Personally I am not a fan of franchises, they don´t help much, they don´t contribute naval capacity, and they are pretty weak in anything but defensive war, they do decent job protecting themselves from invasion, and they lower border friction by existing. The overflowing energy and consumer resources is great, you can buy whatever you need from market, but in the end, you will still be weaker than a wide empire that has blown past the admin cap (mostly because you will not have the naval capacity). And while you can do the same, the +50% empire sprawl penalty will put you at a disavantage, so much so that you are better off switching out of megacorp government type completely in late game, which is a thing that you can do.
In fact, that might just be your best option, when you run out of trading partners, you will not get any use out of branch offices, so as you own more and more of the galaxy, via franchises, it may just be better to reintegrate them all at some point, and switch to another civic without the 50% sprawl penalty.
So in the long run, is it worth it? Early game definately, but in late game, if you aren´t playing peaceful federation builder and want to conquer everything, you will be better off switching to something else to avoid that penalty.
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