[NOFIX] v2.5.0.2 - Acquisitions - Something wrong when buying a company with marques

[Elouda]

Just had this happen in my current game - Apeson was for sale for a pittance, but they also own Bellesez and Eisenwork as marques - both of which cost significantly more (100 million plus) to acquire. Apeson itself is far less - 32k.

Upon acquisition, what I am assuming was the liquid capital in the marques is transferred to me, kicking my cash up by over 200 million.

The price of subsidiary marques should be included in the purchase price of failing companies to avoid this situation. This would present the choice of buying the failing parent (and its marques) for a larger sum, or picking off the marques for a lower sum (and I assume if no one does this and they are valuable, they may be spun off if the parent dies).

Save included.


  SG8spinoff.zip (Size: 8.25 MB / Downloads: 2)

[Eric.B]

This is a general problem with the game, the values of the subsidiaries are significantly marked up to prevent users from poaching subsidiaries via the stock market. While the parent companies values are calculated via the stock market system.

It's a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation.

[Elouda]

I think the issue would mostly be solved by adding the cost of any marques to the purchase price of the parent if you try to acquire it. A more refined option (feature bounty?) could be to have a menu to choose to buy only the parent and spin the marques off or let others buy them.

Edit: Okay, it seems as if either the parent or one of the marques had 300 million in debt which I somehow overlooked... this may prove interesting.

[Eric.B]

I got a chance to look at the equity calculations. The parent company does take into account marque's equity. The only difference is that when you buy a spin off directly, some of the of it's assets are calculated at approximately 150% increased value. And the player is charged an extra 10 times to buy from the AI than it would be selling to an AI to prevent exploit features.

You said in your save, you got $300 Million in debt and $200 Million in cash. If the marque's cost you $100 Million each to buy, their actual value in the game is $10 Million. Which would account to about $4 Million stock equity each.

So while you got a $100 Million better deal than just buying the two marques outright, with how the game calculates the marque's values, you actually lost $80 Million to $92 Million in the deal.

Thus I don't think I have much to fix here. The prices of the marques are high to fix tactics players were using to break the game. We need more anti-exploitative fixes to the stock system to punish bad behavior, then I can make marque buy prices near equal to the prices used to calculate company equity.

This might be a good idea to add a bounty though for marque/company image. There isn't anything like that in the price calculations.

I also came up with another idea where the AI will bundle debt with the marque's. I could probably then lower the player penalty on the marque prices.