Corporations

A faction fights wars and builds stations. A corporation does neither. It is a supra-faction investment fund: it finances the people who fight and build, manages stations it does not own, insures cargo it never carries, and books the difference.

Seventeen of them ship. They are not a faction reskin — they hold no territory, fly no ships of their own, and have no relation value with the player. What they have is capital, favour with each faction, and a grudge list.

The four buckets

Every corporation sits in one of four buckets. The bucket is not a faction alignment — it is how the company presents itself versus how it makes money.

Bucket	Count	What it means
A — Illegal / shadow	5	Openly criminal finance, or a legal business whose margin comes from an illegal arm.
B — Imperialists / war	4	Profits from conflict. Some engineer it; all of them prefer the war to continue.
C — Respectable facade	5	Spotless public record. The methods are in the footnotes.
D — Globalists / peace	3	Genuinely builds, rebuilds and brokers peace — and writes the dependency into the contract.

The roster

Each company has an origin faction (where its money and its politics come from), a field (the business it is in), and a competitive MO — the thing it does that does not appear in its prospectus. The MO is not flavour text: it is what the company’s planning cycle actually does when it has capital to spend.

A — Illegal / shadow

Corporation	Origin	Field	Competitive MO
Amaranth Health Trust	boron	pharma / medical-station finance; shadow narcotics arm	public healer, private narcotics financier; bribes for uninspected convoys
Blackgate Freeport Capital	fallensplit	grey-freeport finance; pirate-loot laundering	launders pirate loot into faction supply; bribes customs
Cinderhaul Reclamation	scaleplate	salvage / reclamation finance; frontier repair-station management	finances raiders to make the wrecks it reclaims
Greenlane Holdings	loanshark	illegal-goods station finance; pirate-raid protection racket	pays pirates not to raid clients, funds those that raid rivals
Quietwater Intelligence	hatikvah	faction-intelligence brokerage	sells the same secret to rivals and profits from the conflict it seeds

B — Imperialists / war

Corporation	Origin	Field	Competitive MO
Ascension Reach Trust	terran	terraforming and frontier-reconstruction finance	makes rebuilt worlds dependent on its origin faction
Bellwright Capital	argon	mercenary and conflict-engineering finance	finances raiders to trigger wars, then finances the reconstruction
Halcyon Arms Concord	teladi	neutral arms-supply finance; munitions convoy insurance	funds both sides and bribes to keep conflicts simmering
Rahar Ascendant Capital	split	conquest and military-expansion finance	bankrolls invasions to open markets by force

C — Respectable facade

Corporation	Origin	Field	Competitive MO
Axiom Claytronics	paranid	high-tech station management; patent licensing	share-raiding and regulatory capture via bribed sanctions
Covenant Trust	holyorder	doctrinal banking, lending and refinancing	sacred-charity facade over usurious, coercive lending
Deeptide Stewardship Fund	boron	mining and refining finance; extraction-station management	ecological-stewardship veneer over strip-mining
Harborlight Commerce Trust	argon	trade and logistics finance; trade-station management	buys sanctions to strangle a competitor’s logistics
Sable Ledger Assurance	ministry	insurance, underwriting and risk pricing	moral hazard: funds the raiders whose attacks raise its premiums

D — Globalists / peace

Corporation	Origin	Field	Competitive MO
Amitra Concord Capital	teladi	peace brokerage and stability-linked trade finance	manufactures dependency through aid; undercuts war-profiteers
Throughline Capital	argon	cross-faction infrastructure and logistics finance	locks clients into dependency and starves protectionist rivals
Verdant Accord Trust	antigone	post-war reconstruction and restoration finance	ties reconstruction aid to long-term management contracts

The dossier

Click any row and you get the company’s file. It is the same file the mod’s own planner reads.

Intentions is the part worth watching. Every planning cycle the company writes down what it intends to buy with the capital it has free, in priority order, and how much it has set aside for each. Reading two dossiers side by side tells you which markets are about to be contested.

This one is a small story on its own. Cinderhaul holds 150 favour at home and 10 with the Teladi — and its second intention is to spend 40 of its Teladi standing discrediting Sable Ledger Assurance, an insurer that funds raiders for the same reason Cinderhaul does. Its third intention is to break into that same Teladi market. It is attacking a rival’s reputation in the market it wants, before it bids there. The chronicle two blocks down already records it doing so.

The Holdings row is the reality check against all that ambition: station-management contracts, 0 held.

Favour — the currency of corporate politics

A corporation holds favour with each faction separately, on a 0–1000 scale. Favour is not the player’s reputation and not the faction relation: it is how much political weight the company can spend inside that faction’s administration.

It is spent to bid for station-management contracts and to run political operations, and its capacity is finite — so a company buying its way into three markets at once is weak in all three. A corporation with money and no favour can do nothing. That is the intended shape: the constraint on a fund is political access, not cash.

There are two ways to get it, and they say different things about a company.

Route	Costs	Loop	Meaning
Passive accrual	nothing	every 12 min	Favour earned from good relations. Slow, free, and a company with none is a company nobody likes.
Favour buying	credits	every 2 min	The company spends cash on access, up to a target per faction (50 by default).

That the buying loop runs six times more often than the free one is the balance of the whole layer in two numbers: a rich company can buy political access far faster than a liked one earns it. The target caps how far money alone gets you — past it, buying stops and only relations move the needle.

Cut favour target per faction to 0 and corporations can only earn favour; they will bid rarely, and the roster’s rich and poor stop separating. Raise it and the buckets with the biggest treasuries take everything.

Lawsuits

Corporations sue each other, and both sides pay.

Two cases are filed per planning pass, and each runs for a fixed number of passes — 8 by default, adjustable from 1 to 16. For the whole of that time both companies carry the cost as an obligation, not a fee. That distinction is the mechanic: an obligation cannot be stopped halfway and is not scaled to what either side can afford, which is exactly why a lawsuit is the kind of thing that can bankrupt a company and a bad trade is not.

There is no version of a suit that is free for the winner. That is what stops litigation from becoming the dominant strategy.

The pairing is random. A case is filed between two active, solvent companies picked at random — not between two companies with a reason. So the litigation on your galaxy’s docket is a background tax on the whole roster rather than a story about anybody, and reading a company’s chronicle will not tell you why it is being sued. Grudge-driven suits are the obvious next step and are not built.

Station-management contracts

The visible economic output of the whole layer. A faction tenders the management of one of its stations; corporations bid; the winner manages the station for a fixed term and is paid for keeping it healthy.

Knob	Default	Notes
Auction loop interval	10 min	2 min on a debug build
Base contract cost	50 favour	the price of one fresh contract
Maximum bid	1000 favour	ceiling on a single offer
Reward on a clean period	200 000 cr + 50 favour	paid per term survived without incident
Reward per production module	50 000 cr	bigger station, bigger fee
Penalty when a managed station is destroyed	200 favour	the manager carries the loss

Bidding strategy is where the buckets stop being decoration. A corporation commits a share of the favour it holds with the tendering faction, and the share says how much it wants that market:

Relationship to the tendering faction	Share of held favour committed
Its own origin faction	100%
An allied faction	85%
A neutral faction	60%

Those three numbers were not chosen by taste. They were set to 100/100/100 as a diagnostic to answer one question — does the share multiplier decide the auction? It does: allied bids went from 0 of 201 awards to 45 of 134. Equal shares also delete the idea the share exists to express, so the shipped values are 100/85/60.

Every number above is a setting, not a literal — the whole layer is tuned from the Settings menu, and the mod’s own driver reads the same values you see there.

Campaigns — how a corporation hurts a rival

A company that wants a market held by someone else does not buy it. It makes the incumbent’s holding expensive.

Raids and assaults. The corporation posts a job on a pirate faction’s board and hires a Pirate Raider hero to hit a rival-managed station. It pays a fee plus instalments over several passes. This is a real hero flying a real ship: he can arrive and succeed, break off at a hull threshold, be killed on the job, or never arrive at all. Each outcome is recorded, and the instalments are owed or released accordingly.

A corporation can only hire a raider it has at least 30 favour with. A war chest with no underworld access buys nothing.

Intrigue. Cheaper, slower, no ships involved. The corporation spends its standing with a faction rather than credits:

• Scandal — the faction fines the rival over its contracts there.
• Discredit — the rival’s reputation takes the damage instead of its treasury.

Both cost the instigator standing with the faction it used, so a company cannot run intrigue forever on one government.

Debt, liabilities and liquidation

A corporation’s capital is not a score. It is spent on favour, bids, campaign instalments and the obligations it has taken on.

• An obligation — a raid instalment, a settled liability — is the only thing that can drive a company’s balance down far enough to matter. Ordinary friction flattens the field; an obligation concentrates the loss.
• A company that cannot meet its obligations is liquidated: it stops planning, its contracts go on the market, and the event is written into its chronicle.
• A stronger company can instead subordinate a weaker one — see Galactic Exchange. A parent may sweep a subsidiary’s treasury, but the subsidiary keeps a floor: 40% of what it was founded with, by default.

That floor exists because a flat figure did not survive contact with the roster. It used to be a fixed 40 000 000 cr, sized for the 100M host companies; against the 20M Tidewater Mutual it was twice the company’s entire capital, so ten sweeps moved 0 cr up and 58 400 000 cr down. As a percentage of founding capital, a 100M company behaves exactly as before and a 20M one keeps 8M.

Chronicle

Everything above leaves a trail. Each corporation carries an append-only chronicle — founding, tenders won and lost, raids ordered and their outcomes, scandals, share movements, liquidation. It is the readable history of a company you never controlled.

What the player does here

Nothing is required. The layer runs whether you look at it or not. What you can do:

• Read the board before you invest. Intentions tell you which markets are about to be fought over; the Exchange lets you take a position in the company you think wins.
• Take their work. Corporations at war with each other hire outsiders — see Corporation missions. Both sides of a feud hire, so the job you take this week is remembered by the company you took it against.
• Watch a war you are not in. Two funds contesting one faction’s stations is a slow, legible conflict with no combat in it at all.

Watching it move without waiting

The planning cycle runs every few game-minutes and a contract term is measured in hours, so a short session shows you a still photograph of a layer that is meant to be watched over an evening. The settings page carries a row of dev levers for exactly that.

Each button runs the same code path the timer runs — it is not a shortcut that fakes the outcome. Mature ALL contracts now pays and renews exactly as the expiry check would; simulate losing a managed station applies the favour penalty without destroying anything. Press four of them in sequence and you have compressed an hour of corporate history into a few seconds, which is the only practical way to tell whether a change to the bidding shares did what you meant.

The buttons are hidden behind (debug) Show debug actions and stay hidden per screen, so a normal game never sees them.

Honest list

• Corporations do not own ships or stations. They manage, finance and insure. The station stays the faction’s.
• The planning cycle is coarse. A pass every few game-minutes, not a live market. It is a strategic layer, not an economic simulator.
• Bid shares are provisional. 100/85/60 is a measured improvement over the diagnostic, not a tuned endpoint. Dedicated tuning is planned once the functionality settles.
• Awards and renewals are throughput, not chronicle events. A contract awarded every cycle would drown the company’s history in bookkeeping, so only the rarer events are written.
• Lawsuits pair at random. Two cases per pass between two solvent companies picked arbitrarily. The cost is real and the motive is not modelled.
• Favour buying outruns earning it six to one. A 2-minute buying loop against a 12-minute accrual loop means capital converts to political access much faster than goodwill does. Deliberate, and the single biggest lever on which bucket wins.
• [MISSIONPAID] has never been observed in a soak. The payment path for a completed corporation mission is built and unit-checked but has not yet been seen end-to-end in a long run — it needs a player to take and finish one.