House Corporations and Border Worlds 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Karst]

I have, probably unsurprisingly, always liked the idea of more active corporate rivalries and corporate IDs.
You have to be a little careful with some of those lines, though.
If you changed the "can attack ships belonging to factions hostile to [house] to global, you have re-created the House Intel IDs. Like....that's the LSF & Co line. Probably a bit much for house corps.
You could certainly add "can attack combat ships belonging to [rivals] outside of house space. That'd be fine.
The wartime profiteering lines, the global "can engage in piracy against Corporate ships considered hostile", is indeed useless without house wars, but that's what it's for. If there is a war again, it'll be quite powerful. I guess you can use it against OSI as a Liberty corp. But it's "working" as intended.
What I'd actually really want to see is "Can engage in piracy against non-allied Corporate (maybe also Unlawful) ships outside of house space". That opens a bit of a can of worms in terms of who "allies" are by the rules, but the current limitations of 1-3 rivals means dangerous border worlds piracy isn't all that realistic.

I don't know if Corp ZOIs really need adjusting. Corporate IDs aren't heavily reliant on them. Since they have global ally clauses, they can join fights with their allies anywhere, and their piracy lines are also not ZOI restricted. There are probably some cases in which a corp could use an extension, though. Of course, their engagement lines are heavily limited by "hostile by [house]" instead of "hostile by [faction]", though changing this on a broad scale would also raise questions about who enemies by the rules actually are. Questions that already exist for factions that do have those lines.

I'm sure House corps could get some more generous piracy/engagement lines, but they probably shouldn't be turned into global multi-function IDs that combine the most powerful aspects of all others.

Oh, and to those people that will when this topic comes up always talk about "they should hire mercs": Sorry, hiring mercs isn't gameplay. If a corporate faction wants to do that, good for them, but they are gaining literally nothing in terms of the actual game from it. I don't blame any faction that doesn't have a BB. Mercenaries and Bounty Hunters and the bounty system frankly don't fit all that well in the type of game this is.

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