Force subsidiary strategy change

[_white_]

I have created a tech subsidiary focused on R&D and tech sale only, hired a proper CEO, and as expected the AI designated itself as Tech Focused and managed to sell a tech every now and then to other companies. However, 27 years later the game decided to spawn a Tech Focused AI company as a newcomer, which immediately forced my tech R&D sub into Diversified strategy, which seems to prevent/heavily discourage other companies from making tech offers as after this change even those few techs that were reliably selling are now being ignored. I don't see any option to force my subsidiary back to Tech Focused apart from killing off the new tech company, but there is nothing that prevents the game from spawning another. Is there any way to force my corporate strategy on my subsidiary back to Tech?

[_white_]

I decided to acquire and merge the new Tech company Sinopec into Royal Labs, as expected once the new Tech company disappeared mine switched back to Tech Focused (is there a way to raise this limit?), however AI companies still ignore tech researched by the company that they were previously buying, which implies the AI isn't properly recognizing it as a Tech company once again.

Also, the CEO keeps complaining about not having 15m in cash regardless of the amount they have, I've seen this bug before but it always went away without a problem.

https://easyupload.io/qfb4se

[David]

https://easyupload.io/qfb4se

I can't access the download link you provided. Could you please check it?

[_white_]

The link is working for me, it could be some regional limitation so i reupped it to filebin, i reckon that worked last time

https://filebin.net/l8syl228h81zshar/WHIT_002.SAV

It basically comes down to three parts:

- there is no way to explicitly set the company focus, you can play around with what the CEO is allowed to do which works well to indirectly set this property, but a direct override for it would be great for situations like this
- it seems there is only a single Tech Focused company slot, if one exists then no further will be created (this makes sense) but if that one happens to be your subsidiary then the game may spawn a new Tech Focused competitor regardless, which will remove that status from your company and sales with it. Player owned companies should be ignored in this scenario in my opinion.
- i opened a separate bug report for this issue as the AI seems to be ignorant towards tech in general (including buying tech), but I can see a new patch for this so I'll go ahead and see how it works

[David]

I loaded your save game and ran it for a couple months. I didn't notice any change to the Focus of your subsidiary Royal Labs - please see the attached screenshots.

[_white_]

I realize the save is a bit late, it was made after I killed off Sinopec, the tech company that spawned recently. When I forced them to switch away from tech (before merging them) my company immediately switched back to tech focus, suggesting that there is either a hard limit of 1 on companies with that strategy, or the code that spawns newcomers has some cap that does not interact well with subsidiaries. A couple of years after that save another tech company (Vivendi) spawned, with the same result. Similar to Sinopec, i bought my way in and forced them away from a tech focus, which again worked to revert my sub to tech, but I decided to keep them around as deadweight to prevent the game from spawning another newcomer, as it will always be a tech company.

This is the most recent save with a gutted Vivendi:

https://gofile.io/d/pDr9lN

[David]

I just tested it and it is possible to set any subsidiary to Tech Focus by changing the CEO management policy according to the attached screenshot.

I could change all of my 3 subsidiaries to Tech Focus.

[_white_]

It seems this particular problem manifests when;

- my subsidiary is the only Tech Focused company
- the game spawns a newcomer with Tech Focus (it seems to always prefer spawning Tech companies when there are none, apart from mine)

When this happens, whatever method spawns the Tech newcomer it will also remove the Tech Focused strategy from my subsidiary (forcing it back to Diversified), and no amount of playing with CEO management, including the options you have shown will make my sub revert to Tech Focus as long as the nemcomer Tech company has the same focus. If you buy your way in and change the newcomers focus to something else my sub will instantly switch back to Tech (this is what i did twice in that save to make it work), from this point they are able to coexist but otherwise this newcomer company seems to enforce a 'monopoly' when it spawns. I know that is not an explicit mechanism in the game but it is the end result.

If you quickly merge up a company or two in that save then the game should spawn a Tech newcomer and you will see how it kicks over the strategy of my sub. This behavior also applies to the AI.

EDIT: I tested this a bit further and it seems to happen to the AI as well, I noticed this before but always thought it was just the previous company trying to avoid competition, but if there is already one AI Tech company, and another one spawns as a newcomer then the previous Tech company will immediately change its strategy to diversified. I believe its the same effect (some balancing mechanism maybe?) forcing them as it is forcing my sub to change.

[David]

Do you have a save game just before a new AI tech company emerges, so that we can load it and observe the forced strategy change happen?

[_white_]

Unfortunately I do not, but in my experience this is a fairly universal behavior whenever a tech company spawns so I'll upload a save from my current game when i see this again