@Ogrebeef-Backkicker in his post One tweak to make corporations/governors/taxes/upkeep better notices a big problem with corporations, and in my opinion it could be summarized as “the need for 1-person corp to run a planet shouldn’t be necessary”. The current governorship system that’s based on a corporation forces players to pick whether they want to play the corporation game (e.g. teaming up to build a corp HQ and enjoy its bonus) or play the planetary government game (manage the population, programs etc). This choice is entirely artificial and in my honest opinion it would be much nicer if we didn’t have to choose.
Ogrebeef suggested a tweak to improve the situation, but I offer a completely different and more radical suggestion: separate “corporations” from “governments” entirely.
Instead, a planet’s ADM should have something like an “office account” that the governor could transfer money to/from, instead of relying on this wonky “dividend” system. Corporations on the other hand would no longer feature the (now pointless) CORPFIN system, and become a more lightweight feature. This change offers benefits for the players as well as for devs.
For players, we’d obviously no longer have to choose between corps or govs, i.e. no longer having to switch to single-player in order to enjoy that particular feature. Additionally, a dedicated buffer (something like FIN) for planetary finances would make governance cleaner (e.g. payment for an immigration program would no longer appear on the player’s private statement). Transferring the office would also become smoother, as the new governor could get direct access to historical data (rather than asking the previous one for coaching).
For devs, this change could streamline the code and become a scaffold for potential expansions. From the governance side, next steps could include selection of payment source (so the governor could pay for e.g. POPI upkeep directly from the office account), or planetary advertisement programs e.g. as suggested by Ogrebeef in his “Fun starter planet idea”. This kind of stuff would, I imagine, be much easier to implement, if “governance” was a separate subsystem and one didn’t have to touch “corporation” code.
Similarly from the corp side: not having to deal with finances anymore (this whole “buying shares” thing is kind of weird and doesn’t serve any purpose either) simplifies not just the code, but the concept. At first they would seem barren (with only player list and corp project pages), but this would make it easier to think about expanding the corp functionality (e.g. more projects).
TL;DR untie CORP from ADM by creating “government accounts” and remove CORPFIN.
What do you think?