Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

In the real world, every so often people pass away and have to pay estate tax or split their stake in a company among their heirs. One thing about the game that can get kind of annoying is that if there is an entrenched competitor which owns most of their company's stock, it is impossible to ever buy them out. Outcompeting them and pushing them into bankruptcy is often not realistic on any timeline that makes sense. Maybe every so often the AI characters could die or retire or something and be forced to sell off some of their stock. I'm not sure what the most elegant way to implement this is, but it could improve playability in the late game. The hard part might be making it seem unfairly advantageous for the player. Maybe the player could have a similar kind of "dynasty" where you could set a level of estate tax. The player would have reason to build up personal wealth in liquid assets to be able to keep intergenerational control of the company. It could add an interesting new dimension to the gameplay objectives.

What is the average number of game years in your games? For what you suggested to have an effect, a typical game will need to last at least 60 years or longer, assuming that on average a business owner is the helm of his/her company for 40-50 years before retirement or passing away.

Coincidence or not, I was thinking the same thing.

For my part, a game can last several decades and sometimes more than a century...

The concern, if we implement this system: how can we justify the fact that we are still alive after 80 years?

The player can have an heir as well, with the attendant complications. My games can certainly run this long. I would actually be happy with more "creative destruction" such that the map winds up with fewer firms and is more playable over a long span of time (obviously there is a problem with a huge number of firms slowing down the game over time).

For a game lasting 70 years, for example, the liquidity events you described will only happen once for the player character in the entire game, right?

True, true, but my thought was that more dynamism later on might make a game more interesting for longer. If we are talking about initial settings, the character age could be whatever you want (20, 40, 60, etc.). Obviously this is not a must have, but some dynasty element could be an interesting way to explore new possibilities. It kind of reminds me of the hit HBO show Succession.

Maybe another way to make the game more interesting for longer would be to have more possibilities for dominant players to get disrupted or change their behavior a bit. Mature real life companies are more apt to use debt to return equity capital to shareholders who prefer to diversify into stocks and bonds. Maybe the NPCs could be set up to try to hold more treasury bonds and global stock and pay out more dividends/share repurchases once their companies are large enough.

FYI, there is a post with similar ideas: http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewto ... =49&t=7325

I think the late game needs some more attention perhaps something like a technological breakthrough making some products irrelevant and creating new products and groups where you can compete in. This would have an impact on large corporations like in the real world. I would also like the AI to focus more on specific product groups, instead of most of them going for a generic approach diversifying in almost every category making it difficult to catch up later on.

I would recommend that you create a poll for your suggestion to gauge the community's interest in it. There would be a higher chance that the dev team will implement it if the interest level is high.

You could see some examples of the polls in the Suggestions forum at viewforum.php?f=14