(06-14-2013, 07:11 PM)Sabre Wrote: I get what you mean Reaper. Kusari suffers because they are doing the "jack of all trades, but master of none" route. sure they can do all these things but not to the same level as the more 'specialized' companies and corporations in the other houses.
in simpler terms, kusari economy is "good at everything, great at nothing". which actually makes it weaker, when compared to other houses. its a house of cards. if samura and/or kishiro go 'pop', kusari economy is screwed
This doesn't need to be true at all, and probably it isn't. Let me explain why.
Samura and Kishiro are not the large, singular companies we're typically used to in Western economies . If you were to take the distinction between a classic government and a company, then imagine the Keiretsu somewhere between both. They are not single companies. In fact, they are many different companies organised around what you could call a private financial authority. Take some big companies you know and imagine them working under one name while each company retains considerable autonomy. They're corporate alliances.
You could say that they organise the rules and regulations to which an the members of the economy must adhere, much like a government does. It's just that you have different competing sets of rules. There will still be fierce competition and specialisation. Who they are is not so much set in stone. It's very much possible for a company to leave one of the conglomerates and join another. It's just that we're not shown this in Freelancer.
One difference is that conglomerates don't go broke. Either their members go broke individually, or the conglomerate breaks up, members leave, others join, and so on. Any conglomerate that wants to go to war, would have a very difficult time convincing the member companies to go to war, unless it would really be financially beneficial, because members could just leave when things go sour. As a result you won't see militairy campaigns but a tug of war between conglomerates attempting to convince companies to join them rather than the other. Real war remains waged by the government militairy.
It's a very different way of organizing the economy, and a very interesting one in terms of mechanics, because it's nothing like what we're used to.
