The budget you get, is it partially coming from your 3 sub-companies? As in the corporation takes a huge cut, before operation expenses and what is left is yours? Needs more budget data... >.>
SB actually just put up a small explanatory video of gameplay a day or so ago:
http://youtu.be/i3M9KOTPprYHere's how I understand it:
Assets have Value. This Value starts low, goes high, then drops low again until it hits zero.
Assets are owned by Companies. Companies have Infrastructure which governs how many Assets they can hold. Companies also have Overhead.
Sum(Asset Value) - Overhead = Company Value.
Sum(Company Value) = Corporation Profit.
Your budget is Corporation Profit/2. So when you think about it, your corp is actually investing A TON of resources into you.
That's also why it's unclear to me why my budget fell when I acquired stolen assets. Could have just been timing, of owned assets depreciating in value? Maybe. (Every time though?) Since held assets aren't said to contribute their value (since they're not installed with a Company), they shouldn't have any effect on budget at all.
Which brings to me a suggestion* actually: held Assets should have value and contribute to your Corp's wealth, and their value should depreciate over time while held. This is what my brain expected when I stole my first Asset. I figured it would add, even incrementally, something to my Corporation's holdings and power.
Consider it like this. Warner Brothers acquires the rights to
Predator 3, a movie/entertainment/media Asset. Hollywood is a twitter about what they will do with it, how well it will play among geriatric fans of action sci-fi movies, blah blah blah. WB's stock swells with
potential value. But the Asset is shelved (perhaps because WB doesn't have enough studios with Infrastructure to handle a project like that (gamey reason) or they can't find a director (narrative justification)), and
Predator 3 stays as a held Asset for a long, long time. Buzz for the movie dies down as people expect the project to never see the light of day, and
the value of the movie's raw potential diminishes. By the time WB does release
Predator 3: Obligatory Subtitle, its value is 1/10th of what it could have been because now people are jaded and cynical, and the internet has had a field day with Predator memes.
All held Assets should work that way IMO. If an Asset is held, it should provide like 1/10th of its undeveloped value to the corp's power rating or budget. This value depreciates at a slower rate than normal Asset depreciation. When it bottoms out, it stays there as a near worthless Asset. When the Asset IS finally implemented, it's value range is greatly diminished. (So say it's value range was 5 - 80 before, now it's 1 - 25.)
You can apply this logic to all kinds of Assets. Industrial equipment becomes crapified and outdated if it sits too long in a warehouse. Legislation carries less weight when new legislation counters or supersedes what it was going to do. Computer programs get one-up'd when they're stuck in development hell forever. Professional staff ages or loses their edge sitting around doing nothing. Trends don't take if people can only talk about them for years instead of embrace them. Where would Kickstarter be compared to IndieGoGo, had it launched now instead of when it did?
My reasoning is this: there's only one thing of value I can see right now to stealing Assets of other companies: it hurts their bottomline. Which is great. But those Assets feel dead in your hands afterward (just there to be stolen.) I get there's currently no way to expand into new markets or give held Assets to owned companies, which is what those Assets will eventually be used for. But if an Asset doesn't affect the Corp's budget until something can be done with them, I feel like you don't get a pay off for having done your job.
Sure, your Ops will get experience, but they'll spend Gear too and that will eat into your Slush Fund (once Gear actually starts costing you money.) Things could go horribly wrong too, for an Asset your Corp will just sit on with zero impact on YOUR budget. A poor risk/reward calculation. And it just feels weird that in this highly active and competitive economic simulation, these Assets which are actual things and people and ideas just go into an economic black box after disappearing from the market. Their value to the market place shouldn't become frozen simply because they're inactive. Their value is relative to when the idea/thing/product/person was hatched in the global arms race that is BUSINESS. Downtime is badtime. (My boss is a bit of an entrepreneur so I'm exposed to some of this thinking at work.)
Or, to put it another way. You can't steal the idea for a wearable prophylactic before it hits the market, then release it 30 years later after someone else came up with birth control and expect your product to take the market by storm.
There's balance reasons why you'd want this too. Player steals Assets for 4 hours real time and hoards them. Player then spends the next 4 hours deploying these Assets through new and old Companies, and their profits skyrocket, requiring them to do nothing as a broker because it's just profit from here on out. Player becomes top of the food chain and is bored.
As I understand it, held Assets will either actively or automatically be given to Companies to use right? With how fast you can run Missions vs. how fast Assets depreciate, you can basically create a Fort Knox of business ideas and always have your Companies filled to the brim. Plus Companies develop new Assets on their own, don't they? (Truly, Asset depreciation and the time skip button are what will determine game pacing from the player's perspective.) The only way you counteract hoarding held Assets being a boring and too effective strategy is to start the clock on depreciation
as soon as the Asset comes into the player's hands. This prevents the player from really hoarding (and therefore trivializing) Assets because the real money is being able to deploy Assets quickly so their real value comes out. The rate of depreciation while held shouldn't be too onerous otherwise I personally would feel a little too stressed out (and would get annoyed I can't just make my Corp start a new Company and enter a new Market). But depreciation should definitely be aggressive enough that hoarding held Assets you can steal faster than you can implement is wasteful.
And that cuts to a much smaller topic I'll broach...there's got to be a reason to destroy an Asset vs. steal it. Because from an economic standpoint, I can't see one. Will Steal Missions be significantly longer/more specialized than Destroy Missions? I'd think the difference in the amount of heat generated (stealthy missions vs. guns blazing) would also be a reason to not do destroy missions. A long, quieter mission in my mind is still better than one with short-term, more leath mission with potential long-term repercussions. Destroying an Asset ultimately contributes nothing to your budget at a great deal of risk to your Operatives. So why do it?
Some random questions now that I wrote all that.
-Corporations owning more than 3 companies? Are corps going to have the equivalent of an Infrastructure rating as well? Will that be within the scope of the player's control?
-Missions other than Investigate, against Companies themselves rather their than Assets? For example, Missions to destroy their Infrastructure Rating so they're forced to sell off Assets? Hostile takeovers of Companies? (literally and otherwise)
-So all the data we can see for the other Corps at the start of the game, that's basically our current Intel on them? Does Intel on Corps depreciate just like Intel on Assets do? The concept of Intel perhaps is not explained well enough yet due to the early nature of the UI, how other corporation panels are basically identical in look to your own and still allow you to fiddle with all their buttons. At least I know what all the "[number] Corp name" stuff means now though. Personally, I don't know if I need to see that number next to the corp name everywhere. I think it'd be visually easier (maybe) if the corp name in menus was color-coded based on the "freshness" of the Intel. Gray = Old Intel, Bright White = Current Intel.
And an idea for an event that just struck me:
being headhunted by a more powerful corp! Say the game can track some metric of success (perhaps each Corp expects certain growth out of the player's Corp over time, the value being based on one of the rival Corp's own internal metrics.) If the rival Corp can offer the player a higher Department budget than their current employer, it would offer the player some value between the player's current budget and the actual budget the rival Corp can support. The player could then make a counter offer, and the game could evaluate the offer and reject/accept or rebid it. And of course, the player would be able to take the Slush Fund with them
They'd then become of the broker of the new Corp, with all the Operatives it was using, and the player's old Corp would get a new broker, using all the player's old Operatives against them!
Hrm, now that I mention all that...should we really be able to see a Corp's power rating and income value without any Intel on them? Are there, like, government filings, financial reporting to shareohlders and tax declarations these ultramega corps have to release? Do corps have to justify the budget of their War Department to the global tax payer? I assume because of all the Intel hiding you've talked about, you're factoring this in and we can simply see everything with no Intel decay right now in the Prototype. I'm just curious what's the absolute minimum we can know about a Corp. Market Share?
*long frickin post babbling about things that may already be in the design document, or can be summed up as "balance"
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Topic: Net Gain: Corporate Espionage in 2043. Development probably abandoned. (Read 61981 times)