How to achieve dominance with subsidiaries?

Berbe · Post by **Berbe** » Thu Jan 03, 2019 9:54 pm

Attempting to beat scenario 4 Industry Dominance, I attempted the following:

Spawning subsidiaries with the most qualified CEO, focused on a single product class
Setting high dividends (100%) and injecting cash (either issuing shares to parent or direct cash injection if 100% ownership) as needed, escpecially during early phases of existence
Snowball cash generated from dividends to spawn more subsidiries and/or help existing ones achieving dominance over their product class

The problems I face are multiple:

There is now way to tell a subsidiary to focus on farm products (livestock, plant) or semi-products, although those categories of product exist. What is a 'class' then?
Thats a problem, as one industry is 'farming', meaning only your parent, humanly-managed company would be able to reach that dominance.
You could attempt to merge Beverage, Food & Snacks subsidiaries into a single one and use vertical integration, but AI seems but at this. Also, note the bad side-effect of having the subsidiary CEO having no expertise in 2 of the 3 product classes it manages, putting them at risk towards opponents.
Related, but different, there is no way to trigger those special Real Estate or Media-focused AIs for subsidiaries you manage, even when you unselect everything but the proper checkbox, thus making dedicated subsidiaries failing miserably
When a subsidiary has the exclusivity of retailing products from another one, those 2 subisidiaries do not cooperate and act as if they were opponents (even though a Group logic exists when selling stuff from warehouses).
That means the producing subsidiary will max-out its prices, rendering the retailing one having no leverage to gain market share and end-up being squeezed up by opponents. Bad for both subsidiaries!
How are you supposed to achieve retailing dominance with subsidiairies without a cross-class retailing one?
To achieve manufacturing/raw resources dominance, ideally you would also need a cross-class subsidiary instead of splitting forces amongst individual, specialized ones. However that means having expertise in a single product class thus showing flanks to opponents on all the others...

From all that it appears achieving farming, mining, manufacturing, retailing, media or real extate dominance with subsidiaries is structurally difficult if not impossible, unless you got lucky.
How is one supposed to do that?