The Corporate Machine

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The Corporate Machine
Developer(s)	Stardock
Publisher(s)	Take-Two Interactive
Release date(s)	July 14, 2001 (NA)
Genre(s)	Strategy
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: Everyone (E)
Platform(s)	PC
Media	CD-ROM

The Corporate Machine is a computer game from Stardock in which the goal is to create a corporation in one of four industries (automobiles, aircraft, computers, and soft drinks) and eventually dominate your rival companies. To win you must have a monopoly in your chosen market (getting 55% to 65% of the market depending on the amount of opponents.)

1 Starting Out
2 Exploring
3 The Sales Executives
4 Your Company Sites
5 The Marketing Department
6 The Manufacturing
7 Research
8 External links

[edit] Starting Out

When starting out you must first pick your company specialty. Three specialties are available; marketing, Labor and research. For example, picking research will have your company doing more research in less time but your marketing and manufacturing skills are going to be weaker. After picking a specialty you will go to the start game screen where you will pick how many opponents you will face, the difficulty of the game, what map you will play on (real maps as well as fictional are available) and what industry you will start. Then you can start your game at your home site (which is randomly chosen on the map) and your one executive.

[edit] Exploring

To Introduce your product to other regions you must first investigate them. This process can take from 3 to 10 weeks depending on how far they are from your sites. After an area is explored you will see what the targeted area desires in a product, their concerns with price, how rich the region is, and if they have any area bonuses.

[edit] The Sales Executives

The sales executives are basically you suck-ups in the company that got where they are by kissing ass. They are however very valuable to your company as they help your product get out. In whatever region he is situated he will increase your market penetration (the amount of stores your product is in) and two other adjecent areas with diminishing returns. To gain more sales executives you must meet a certain profit each year. This gets harder later on as the amount that you must make to gain a new executive increases. This is not the only way to gain executives (more on this in the Tricks of the Trade section)

[edit] Your Company Sites

These places are where your operations come from. Your manufacturing, researching, and marketing buildings can be built and upgraded. On your first site you will have a marketing office and a garage, but every site after will only have a sales office and has to have everything built. To gain edge in the market you need information which can be formed in the form of graphs that are accessed by building and upgrading your intelligence building. Company stores can be built at any of your sites to decrease employee expenses. To get better manufacturing you will need trained employees which can be achieved with the training building, starting with Basic Training and upgrading it further. You employees of course can not work well if they are not happy so you can build a Cafeteria to boost morale and upgrading if your choose. These buildings are good, since if you lose market leadership in an area where your site is your employees' morale will drop sharply. Your marketing, manufacturing, and researching buildings can be accessed in order to make adjustments to the multiple things in your company.

[edit] The Marketing Department

When you build the marketing building you have a dial increasing the amount of marketing associates which can be used to create marketing campaigns. As campaigns are created your marketing associate availability drops and your are forced to build more marketing buildings in order to have more campaigns. These building can be upgraded to have more employees and to have different more powerful marketing campaigns.

[edit] The Manufacturing

You start out with a simple garage and can upgrade it to bigger factories. In this screen you can choose to hire or fire employees as your demand rises or falls. This is the screen where you adjust the price of your product. If your product is better compared to other companies you can afford to overcharge a little. Be careful not to raise your price too much as your demand will drop quickly if there are different companies in the same area and you could lose market leadership in that particular area.

[edit] Research

This is where your scientists develop new technologies to upgrade your product. The bigger your research building, the more scientist you can hire and that means that upgrades will come faster. This screen has a researching queue which you can put four things at once so you don't have to constantly come back to this screen and choose new technologies but do it only periodically.