The "leveraged" subsidiary start

[mojo4567]

Recently I have been having fun abusing the fact that subsidiary's can take out a loan on a parent companies loan and wanted to share my strategy. This strategy is more long term for custom games and I havent had much success using it in scenario games.

1. Start the game. Immediately setup a subsidary company and give them 95% of your starting capital.
2. Take out the max loan on your subsidary, have them setup a subsidary and give the subsidary 55% of their total capital. Take out the max loan on that subsidary as well. (I.e. if you started with 500mil subsidary 1 should have 400 mil in cash and a 450mil loan, subsidary 2 should have 1,000mil in cash and a 500mil loan at this point)
3. Repeat step 2 until you reach your 4th-6th subsidary created and start creating subsidiarys with 75% of the total capital (depending on the "risk" you want to take on for the game).
4. Continue doing this until you have a ridiculous amount of money given to your last subsidary. Don't take out a loan on your last one (of course)
5. Unpause and start the game. Immediately your subsidiarys will start taking over every possible industry.
6. Play the game! Your first 2-3 subsidiarys you created will struggle a lot but you have to keep them alive by any means necessary or else you will lose the entire chain of subs underneath them.
I have found purchasing some real estate with your 5% capital left and just borrowing tiny amounts of money to inject into the subs so they can leverage it again works well until they start turning a profit is pretty effective. Having the companies IPO early for expansion cash is nice, however the subsidiarys then tend to sell your stock which is annoying so i tend to keep them private and just jack up the dividend rate really high until I can merge my way down the chain of subs.

EDIT:
Forgot to add that picking CEO's is super important, make sure your first couple companies have a CEO with beverage/food/furniture/ect proficiency so they can survive early, but they also need a good retail score.

I also wanted to point out just how hard it is to move money upstream with subs. This is probably by design so you cant just take out huge loans and then bankrupt the company, however I think that could be fixed by having the loans carry over to the parent after a company goes bankrupt. Either way I think adding something like an extraordinary dividend so you can move money upwards faster would be a small thing that adds a ton to subsidary gameplay.

[lagrelax]

No need to bet this complicated. As there is a workaround to get cash from your subsidiary. Just let your subsidiary A setup another subsidiary B and inject all money of A to B. Then merge company B, all the money will go back to your own company. This is a known abuse cuz you can end up keeping the following loop: create subsidiary, maxi out loan, transfer the money by setting a new subsidiary, IPO your first subsidiary and sell our your shares. You got all the cash and left a empty company but tons of loan to the market