What I would love to see next: A Corporation Overhaul

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Hello again :slight_smile:

Seeing as the Gateways are being released soon (woot!), and the next major step for the game has yet to be announced, I’d like to take this opportunity to raise my own feelings on the game, provide my own recommendations for what would personally interest me, and see what the community thinks about it.

In brief summary of what comes next: I’d like to see the Corporation system overhauled, with a focus on providing active in-game systems that facilitate player cooperation.

Corporations are presently incredibly limited in functionality, and I’d like to see a general increase in said functionality to at least bring them up to speed with basic social functionality.

In no particular order of perceived ease of implementation:

[What I would consider to be] The most important features that corps need:

  • The ability to kick companies
  • User hierarchies (ranks, roles, etc)
  • Shared Inventories to help with avoiding single points of failure from a player burnout or PRO loss, etc
  • Collective bank accounts to simplify accounting.
    • Ideally, a corporation would be allowed to create as many bank accounts as it wants, and assign different people to managing them, eventually with advanced features like restricting how much can be transferred out to any one target, and total, over a given amount of time.
  • Some form of Corporate CX, with an interface that matches the ease of use of the primary CXes.
    • What I wouldn’t want to see is basically a restricted Local Market. That would end up unused as it fundamentally doesn’t scale
    • In the far future, it would be great to have features like fixed price ranges, limits on how much worth of a single commodity any one player can buy at one time, and other administrative features I haven’t thought of.
    • I recognise there are worries of “further siphoning economic activity behind corporations”, but I honestly believe that groups will always try to push for, and will keep pushing harder for internal markets, because:
      • They (myself included) believe that the degree of control afforded by it makes the game more fun to most players, on average, than being at the whims of the uncontrolled market
      • I do not believe this playstyle should be punished, be it through inconvenience or policy, because as I understand it this is fundamentally an economy simulation game, not a free market simulation game.

Features I would personally really like to see:

  • Shared Corporation Inventories
  • Corporation owned super-freighters (Can only dock to stations / dedicated corp space dockyards)
    • This would best coincide with a new inventory transfer system. Imagine the following:
      • From your main company, you open the buffer that shows the details of the freighter. You can open the freighter’s inventory (in read-only mode) as you would a regular ship’s inventory.
      • From both the inventory screen and the freighter’s fleet entry, there would be a “Transfer” button. This would open a new “virtual” inventory.
      • A player can drag as many items as they want into this virtual inventory. Once they hit “confirm”, all of the items would be bundled into one BLCK/SHPT, and placed onto the ship’s inventory. From there, the player can click on the BLCK/SHPT at any moment while the ship is docked, and a prompt will appear to unpack the shipment, as well as detail what is contained within the shipment. This unpack will not succeed if the player does not have the inventory space available.
      • A corporate player with appropriate permissions would be able to forcefully unpack a shipment to their own inventory (as a safeguard)
      • Similarly, permissions to direct a ship would be able to be given to roles and individual players
  • Corporate stations (or just mini-space-outposts for now)
    • Cheaper private space-bound warehouses
    • Dedicated planetary orbit shuttles with super fast engines to save on fuel, and then offload to space infrastructure for more efficient space-craft
    • Dockyards for aforementioned Super-freighters
  • Corporation buildings and projects balanced towards smaller corps to keep them relevant
  • A database of Custom Contract Templates that everyone in-corp can use
  • An Asset Transfer and Lease System. For example:
    • A corporation could lease a fully built ship to a player. The ship would not be modifiable, and would automatically return to corporate control once the lease expires.
    • A corporation could set up “Base Templates”, preload them with all needed materials, and then send it to a player. Once a player accepts (assuming they have the permit) The base would be instantly setup onsite and built to the template specifications.
  • Actual functionality to the corporation buildings. For example:
    • Requiring an “FTL Lab” on planet belonging to your corp in order to access the recipe for some super advanced FTL components on said planet
  • Multiple types of Corporate Governments, each with their own benefits and restrictions
    • Autocracy
    • Elected Council
    • Parliamentary Council
    • Rotating Leader
    • etc

Please do share other Corp-related features you think would be interesting to add! I’ll be adjusting this post as I get the time to refine my ideas further, and properly explain why a corporate overhaul is at the top spot of my “most-needed” list.

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I like this.

I’m stunned that corporations can’t kick people That’s really basic stuff. Obviously you’d need to be able to manage ranks and roles before adding a kick command.

Let me expand on the notion of a private market, I think it would be very cool to allow a corporation to rent a warehouse, and to create a members-only private market in that place, with total inventory space limited to the warehouse size.

A facility that allowed pooled shipping would be awesome too. The corporation can have their bus drivers stop, pick up and drop off from shared storage, and then go again. Basically this is the ‘multiple shared inventories’ idea.

Being able to configure a corporation as ‘Democratic’ would definitely result in emergent gameplay, too.

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I agree that corporations and cooperative play in general (along with QoL improvements) should be the next focus of PrUn development. I think that the context window already provides the infrastructure necessary for corporate accounting, etc., and could easily be updated to include inventories.

That said, I don’t think corporations should be exclusive, or at least players should be able to also join cooperatives. That would make the already flourishing community cooperatives a lot easier to manage and track financial for.

Finally, while I like many of the ideas and would support them in stages (corporate shipping would take a long time and shouldn’t delay faster features), I do have grave concerns with corporate CXs. This game thrives off of player exchange and if we move additional commerce off of the CXs, it will likely endanger some regional CXs as going concerns. It also deprives everyone of the valuable pricing that comes from CXs (which many corporations derive their own prices from). I think recurring contracts and better saved contract templates could facilitate QoL improvements for internal “markets” without threatening a core, vital mechanic of the game.

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Indeed.

In regards to CXes, the fact is that most of the major corporations already have internal CXes, it’s simply less convenient to use them as we have to code external websites to keep track of our commodities, and then send ingame contracts with delays between players. Fundamentally, we’re never going to stop doing this, and the lack of an easier means to do so is by far the biggest factor in burnout that we see in players of our corporations (other than the hassle of managing base logistics which is inherent to the current game system). There will always be an interest in listing on the Faction CXes because most everyone is already based there, and you can add downsides to faction CXes (like some sort of commission paid to the faction SEC-like body) to keep them competitive (Even if I think they don’t need it).

I believe that yes, some traffic will reduce on the CX, but that is a natural consequence of any QoL improvement towards facilitating inter-player cooperation, and I believe the benefits are worth it.

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I like this idea. The only thing I would be leery of the is the corporate CX. We already see so much CX trade siphoned with corporate trades, this would make their internal market too powerful.

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Interesting ideas. As someone who spends more time out of corporations rather than in them, I don’t have alot to comment about these ideas, some strike me as more difficult to implement then others.

I would like to see a space elevator as the next big build for a planet to avoid the time/expense of having freightors land on the surface (ie getting into orbit would allow you to transfer cargo to your base) - this is kind of a different take on your “super-shuttles”.

Also, maybe the ability to build a “ship” with no engines (SF/FF) or Bridge (BR1/2) to act as a stationary warehouse in orbit where the shipyard is located. Would act as a “space-station” for the builder.

Also, just for the record, I have nothing against “private” CXs. Corporations already do private CX stuff - this just makes it easier for them (and yes, I have done it too when I was in corporations). Although maybe we don’t limit private CX’s to an individual corporation - letting the “owner” let anyone they want to be able to trade on it - maybe it is a company/planet improvement building.

Later all.

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Oh, another thing that I do think is sorely needed is some degree of “persistent in-game communication”. Planetary Administrations at minimum (And ideally, corporations too) should be in possession of bulletin boards, where they can write arbitrary information. Individual entries can be pinned, the board possible having an appearance similar to the NOTS panel as players are already familiar with it, with the Creation, Deletion and Pinning of messages handled via motions.

This would allow coordinated efforts to actively inform otherwise chat-unobservant players, and also provide a much more efficient means of informing all local residents of new establishments (Like the existence of a new high tier planet, or a player-run developmental organisation) without having to repeatedly clog up planetary or global chat.

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A corporation overhaul to me would be addressing a few core points:

Player orgs like corporations in a multiplayer game can provide community, friendship, and reason for players to stick around. The player-to-player interaction generates “free gameplay” that doesn’t require the devs to make content. I think many of us long time players stick around because of our community interactions, wheeling and dealing with other players, building cooperatives, shared supply chains, etc.

Corporations don’t give us too many tools to do that, so they mostly get ignored, OOG is sort of an outlier in that regard.

Mechanically, corps give you almost nothing. (more about HQ bonuses later). Ideally, some sort of real mechanical reason to join a corp would exist, and push people to want to find a group to join. The social benefits already exist outside of the game, but because of the free-flowing nature of trade, and the low identity and buy-in for current corps, the social benefits aren’t really exclusive to corps. Everyone’s pretty nice in PRUN, so you’ll find good trading partners outside of corps, and there’s no shortage of advice. These social aspects of the game are great and shouldn’t change, that’s why corps need unique benefits.

Mechanical bonuses to corps don’t need to be production efficiency bonuses. We’re used to that being the only lever to pull in the game. We could instead think outside the box and consider things like corp-researched recipies - unlocking alternate recipes for everyone in the corp. We’ve got a new infrastructure system in the Connectivity Release, corp infrastructure could give various interesting benefits that don’t invalidate the profitability of new players, the way high efficiencies bonuses could.

Even more community benefit can be gained if buidling these bonuses could be something the corp bands together to work towards. The common goals/upkeep give players something to coordinate and build a community around. If the cost is high enough, people will need to join corps to achieve them. Right now, corp HQs are cheap enough that people build solo corps just to get the bonus where they want it.

OP’s ideas about collective bank accounts (a corp context?), or collective storage are great. If the super freighter is owned by the corp context, and collective storage can be accessed by corp users and the corp context, you have a really interesting system! If you need to make contracts to swap materials between the corp and the players, it’s a lot of extra clicks.

At the core, PRUN is a logistics game, and the corp owned freight are an interesting twist on that.

Limiting corp size or connecting a cost to the corp size is also important. PRUN is a bunch of min-maxing math nerds, so if everyone can join a single giant corp to maximize their utility, they’ll do it. Some sort of cost or limit on corps is key to making it into a social group - you need mechanical costs (expectations or obligations) and the people create the common identity of the group.

I don’t think OOG would go heavy into roles/permisisons/councils, etc. That’s never been our style. But a lot of games implement role based permissions. (Although I could see reusing the motion system for corp invites, etc).

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