Corporations

Status: draft v0.1, 2026-11-09. Act IV of the player arc (GAME-DESIGN.md §5). Depends on COLONIES.md (influence and system control), TRAVEL.md §4 (gate policies) and ECONOMY.md §7 (markets and contracts). Numbers are shapes, not balance.

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1. Why corporations exist

Because the content that keeps an eternal universe alive is other players, and because nothing in this design lets one person be self-sufficient:

• A colony has too few slots to do everything (COLONIES.md §3).
• Colonies extract nothing, so an industrialist needs miners and miners need buyers (COLONIES.md §4).
• Controlling a system takes concentrated commerce, which is hard to generate alone.
• A gate chain is a project, and a defended frontier is a rota.

We never need to require cooperation. The systems already make it the obvious move.

2. What a corporation is

Four things, and deliberately no more:

An identity	A name, a ticker, an emblem. It appears on everything you own and everything you do.
A wallet	Shared credits, with a ledger.
Assets	Colonies, gates, ships and stockpiles can be owned by the corp rather than by a person.
Roles	Who may do what with the above.

There is no corporate skill tree, no corp levels, no corp buffs, no upgrades. A corporation is a container for people and property, and its power comes entirely from the people and property inside it.

3. Roles

Five, and we should fight hard to keep it at five. EVE has dozens and nobody understands them.

Role	May
Member	Dock, use corp facilities, see corp chat and the ledger
Trader	Place and cancel market orders, set market tax rates, accept contracts
Industrialist	Run production queues, use blueprints, draw from corp stockpiles
Officer	Command corp fleets, set defences, set gate access policies
Director	Spend the wallet, set the system tax rate, conduct diplomacy, change roles, dissolve

Everything is logged. Every withdrawal, every order, every policy change, with a name against it.

4. Betrayal is allowed, and permanently expensive

A Director can empty the wallet and walk. We are not going to prevent that, because the attempt would mean locking the game down in ways that make honest play worse, and because the stories this produces are among the best this genre has ever generated.

What makes it survivable is a rule we already have: one account, one character (GAME-DESIGN.md §10).

• The thief is named in the ledger within seconds.
• They cannot re-roll. That character is them, forever, and the record follows it.
• Every corp they ever apply to can see what they did.

Reputation is the only real currency in a world without alts. Theft is therefore a one-shot weapon with a lifelong cost, which is exactly the right price: rare, memorable, and never a strategy.

No mechanic needed. The identity rule already did the work.

5. Corporations and system control

The Empire appoints a colony, never a corporation (COLONIES.md §5.1). Influence is the tax a colony pays, and it does not pool across members.

This matters more than it sounds. A corporation does not take a system by having more people in it — it takes a system by concentrating its commerce into one of its colonies: buying and selling through that market, routing its production there, feeding its revenue until it out-pays the incumbent.

Three consequences, all good:

• Headcount alone wins nothing. A corp of fifty who do not cooperate loses to one well-fed colony.
• Taking a system is an act of logistics, visible in public numbers, that the incumbent can watch happening and respond to. No surprise coups.
• Someone has to be given the chair. The corp must decide which member's colony becomes the capital, and that is a real internal political moment — the kind of decision that makes a corporation feel like an organisation rather than a chat channel.

A solo player can hold a planet and pay tax forever. They will not control a busy system. That is the honest shape of the promise: solo is viable, solo is not sovereign.

6. Diplomacy

Standings between corporations, set by Directors:

Allied	Passage through Allied-policy gates, shared intel if you choose to share it
Neutral	The default. Nothing is owed.
Hostile	A declaration of intent, no mechanical effect
At war	Mutual legal violence, including inside Imperial Core space

War declaration is the only way violence happens in the Core (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §2.3), alongside consensual duels. It costs credits, it is public, and it is mutual the moment it is declared — you cannot declare war on someone and remain safe from them.

Standings also drive the Allied gate policy (TRAVEL.md §4.2), which is where diplomacy acquires physical consequences: a change in standing can strand a fleet mid-route, and everyone knows it.

There are no alliances-of-corporations. Corps plus standings is enough structure to express any coalition people want, and a second tier of organisation is a second tier of UI, permissions and politics for very little gain. If the players build something we did not anticipate out of standings alone, that is the correct outcome.

7. Contracts

The thing that lets strangers do business, and the mechanism behind every profession that is not "own a factory".

A contract is an escrowed agreement: what, where, by when, for how much, against what collateral.

Hauling	Move this cargo there. Collateral covers it if you do not.
Supply	Deliver this much of this material by then.
Bounty	Paid on a named target.
Escort	Be in this convoy, on this route, at this time.
Protection	A standing agreement: I defend your system or your colony, and I compensate you if I fail.

The last one is the important one, and it is player-run insurance. A corporation can sell security as a product — underwriting a frontier colony, collecting a premium, paying out when a raid gets through. It gives military corps an income that does not require them to be the aggressor, and it gives a lone industrialist a way to buy safety without joining anything.

Contracts are also how a corporation employs non-members without diluting itself, which keeps corps small and sharp rather than bloated with people who just wanted the hangar.

8. What corporations do not get

Worth stating, because each of these will be requested:

• No corp-wide bonuses. No "+5% mining for members". That turns joining into a stat check and makes unaffiliated play strictly worse.
• No pooled influence. §5.
• No corp skill training. SKILLS.md is about a person's time; there is no second clock.
• No forced taxation of members' personal income. A corp takes what its members agree to give it, through corp-owned assets and contracts. Tax between colonies is a system mechanic, not a social one.

The design is consistent about this: a corporation is leverage, never a multiplier.

9. Implementation notes

• A corporation is a row, a wallet, a membership table and a role bitmask. The ledger is append-only and readable by every member.
• Asset ownership is a nullable corp id on the thing. Personal and corporate ownership are the same code path.
• Standings are a sparse pair table; default neutral, so it stays small.
• Contracts are rows with escrow held server-side. Expiry is a job in the one jobs table (ARCHITECTURE.md §3).
• Nothing here ticks and nothing here is realtime. Corp chat is the only live-ish surface, and it can be polling until it hurts.

10. Open questions

• [ ] Is there a member cap? A hard cap is crude, and without one a thousand-player corp is possible. Influence not pooling blunts the worst of it, but a cap may still be needed to keep the political map from collapsing into two blocs.
• [ ] Can a corporation own a colony directly, or only a character who grants it access? Direct ownership is cleaner for continuity when people leave, and it weakens the personal stake that makes betrayal meaningful.
• [ ] How does a war end? A timer, mutual agreement, or a surrender payment? Endless wars are a known failure mode and need an exit that is not just boredom.
• [ ] Should war declarations cost more against a weaker corp, to blunt newbie-hunting? It is a common fix and it is also a distortion. Leaning: flat cost, and let reputation handle it.
• [ ] Do contracts need reputation scores, or is a public history of completed and failed contracts enough? History is more honest and harder to game.
• [ ] Can a Director be removed by the members? A founder with absolute power is simple; a corp held hostage by one person is miserable. Possibly a supermajority vote with a long timer.

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Changelog

• 2026-11-09 — v0.1. Corporations as a container for people and property with no multipliers of any kind: five roles, an append-only ledger, and betrayal permitted but permanently expensive because one account means one character and reputation cannot be re-rolled. Influence does not pool — the Empire appoints a colony, so a corp takes a system by concentrating its commerce into one member's colony rather than by headcount. Standings drive gate access and war; war declaration is the only legal violence in the Core. Contracts carry every profession that is not manufacturing, including player-run protection insurance. No alliances-of-corporations.