Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

AI executive salaries gameplay balance improvements in version 10.0.07

CEOs of your subsidiaries generated in the beginning of the game will have salaries.

C-suite executives will ask for higher salaries when the company’s profits are higher.

The salaries of executives without any skills have been significantly reduced when they are running profitable subsidiaries for you. This also applies to executives helping you to run your company.

AI CEO persons will give themselves a small salary even if their companies are not profitable.

(You can use the Executive Salary Modifier under the Subsidiary DLC page of the New Game Setup menu, or a script, to lower their salaries if you find the salaries too high. )

Oh wow I just brought up a save game and my executives were all asking for huge raises! To be fair my subsidiary companies are very profitable so it seems fair.

The problem with this is the following, we are not always able to maintain that astronomical profit.

When the company is at a loss or has low profits, we still have to pay the same salary to our executives, and there is no option to lower the amount.

Another example, let's assume that our company has a good profit coming from the stores, if I transfer these stores to another subsidiary, technically my profit will decrease if I don't have another source of income, but I will still have the executive charging the same amount of wage.

Perhaps the right thing to do would be to maintain a fixed salary, and a bonus that he would receive the following year based on the profit accumulated from the previous year.

We could pay this bonus in cash or issue shares to pay for it if the company was publicly traded.

Companies generally have this bonus system for their executives. I don't know if it would be easy to program this in the game. Maybe the way it is being done through salary will be easier.

You could even have these two options to negotiate with executives. Pay a higher salary, or negotiate a percentage of the previous year's accumulated profit.

In terms of gameplay, it would be interesting for the player to choose whether to pay a fixed monthly fee or pay a bonus amount all at once the following year. If he doesn't have the money, he will have to sell the properties to pay or issue shares.

I have to agree with the post above, would be nice to slash the salaries of your CEO's if your profits drop or you are making losses for some time. A way to lower the salaries instead of just increasing would be more realistic.

hmm.

cantdownloadit wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 6:21 pm hmm.

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Could you provide please provide your save game for our testing?

cantdownloadit wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 6:21 pm hmm.

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Wow, how much profit was your company making to get that?

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Also, I do like the suggestion of perhaps having bonuses instead of salary rises. Maybe even providing stock in the parent company.

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 8:01 am

cantdownloadit wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 6:21 pm hmm.

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Wow, how much profit was your company making to get that?

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Also, I do like the suggestion of perhaps having bonuses instead of salary rises. Maybe even providing stock in the parent company.

i was playing with 1000% starting salary which accounts for much of it - presume without this there wage would be 34.9 billion, but ive always done that to try give them a better salary later game.

my subsidiary in question in that game made about 140 billion a month.

(dont have save any more though i dont believe).

with this setting its quite likely my AI manager would end the game richer than me !!.

cantdownloadit wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 12:53 pm i was playing with 1000% starting salary which accounts for much of it - presume without this there wage would be 34.9 billion, but ive always done that to try give them a better salary later game.

my subsidiary in question in that game made about 140 billion a month.

(dont have save any more though i dont believe).

with this setting its quite likely my AI manager would end the game richer than me !!.

So it is not a bug. That's good.

It seems that letting users adjust salary costs with a slider will be the best approach as different players prefer different play styles.

David wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 1:44 pm

cantdownloadit wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 12:53 pm i was playing with 1000% starting salary which accounts for much of it - presume without this there wage would be 34.9 billion, but ive always done that to try give them a better salary later game.

my subsidiary in question in that game made about 140 billion a month.

(dont have save any more though i dont believe).

with this setting its quite likely my AI manager would end the game richer than me !!.

So it is not a bug. That's good.

It seems that letting users adjust salary costs with a slider will be the best approach as different players prefer different play styles.

Yes, it seems hard to balance it though, the difficulty seems to be making it a reasonable salary while the business is small, while not making it a super giant salary when the business is very large.

e.g taking apple as an example, google suggests its profit for 12 months ended 31/12/23 was $173 Billion, but Tim Cook's salary was "only" $63 million.

its also worth noting in the real world, in large corporates, shareholders would have some input on salaries paid by companies, so in the test game i made for instance, i can see the shareholders objecting to 25% of the company profit being paid as a salary, and significantly reducing their dividend, so i think there needs to be some cap on max pay.