AI CEO Controls

[buells]

There are a few more toggles I would like to have for managing the subsidiary companies to deal with their sometimes annoying behavior and some micromanagement heavy lifting:

1. When you allow them to close unprofitable firms, sometimes they will shut down R&D operations for no good reason. I'd like to be able to specify what kinds of firms they can shut down or at least prevent them from closing R&D firms with active R&D projects.
2. When you prevent them from choosing R&D projects but allow expanding in R&D, they will just keep building R&D firms. I guess the answer to this is to turn off allowing expansion in R&D, but sometimes if you forget they will build 10 or 20 useless R&D facilities that just bleed cash until you do something.
3. There should be an option for both the parent company and subsidiary to demolish and sell land or just demolish all firms of a certain type (e.g., all factories, all retail stores/retail stores of a certain subtype (like computer, department store, etc.)).
4. I know special dividends were removed for some reason, but that creates some major problems. If I have my subsidiary issue tons of shares to the parent company to get to 75% control, the sub winds up with lots of trapped cash while the parent company has lots of debt. Maybe limit special dividends such that the pro forma debt to assets % at the subsidiary is below some threshold?

For example, if I have $100 of cash + $100 of other assets and $100 of debt at the subsidiary, I could dividend out up to $75 of cash such that the asset coverage remains greater than or equal to 1.25x (or equivalently, LTV is less than or equal to 80%). Real life bonds often have restricted payment covenants that limit the amount of dividends and share repurchases relative to the outstanding indebtedness, but they hardly ever outright forbid them.

[David]

There are a few more toggles I would like to have for managing the subsidiary companies to deal with their sometimes annoying behavior and some micromanagement heavy lifting:

1. When you allow them to close unprofitable firms, sometimes they will shut down R&D operations for no good reason. I'd like to be able to specify what kinds of firms they can shut down or at least prevent them from closing R&D firms with active R&D projects.
2. When you prevent them from choosing R&D projects but allow expanding in R&D, they will just keep building R&D firms. I guess the answer to this is to turn off allowing expansion in R&D, but sometimes if you forget they will build 10 or 20 useless R&D facilities that just bleed cash until you do something.

3. There should be an option for both the parent company and subsidiary to demolish and sell land or just demolish all firms of a certain type (e.g., all factories, all retail stores/retail stores of a certain subtype (like computer, department store, etc.)).

I would recommend that you create a poll for your suggestion to gauge the community's interest in it. There would be a higher chance that the dev team will implement it if the interest level is high.

You could see some examples of the polls in the Suggestions forum at http://www.capitalism2.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14

4. I know special dividends were removed for some reason, but that creates some major problems. If I have my subsidiary issue tons of shares to the parent company to get to 75% control, the sub winds up with lots of trapped cash while the parent company has lots of debt. Maybe limit special dividends such that the pro forma debt to assets % at the subsidiary is below some threshold?

Special dividends will be available in the next version 6.5.00.