Corporation Purchase Tiers

Type: Systems — Player Mechanic (Economy) Author: Perry Jones Published: May 9, 2023 Source: Medium Status: Canon (published; contains a corrected arithmetic error — see note below)

Overview

Confirms scale: 3,000+ corporations, 700+ planetary countries, 200+ starnations and STCs combined. Several hundred corporations are for sale to players at any given time. Income from owned businesses is paid to the owning player once a month in real-world time.

Confirmed Exchange Rate

1,000,000 Helvatica Dollars (HD) = $1.00 USD This is the first explicit HD-to-USD exchange rate found in the archive — useful for converting any future HD figures.

Note: Superseded Starnation Definition

This article's glossary states a Starnation requires "no less than four permanently inhabited space stations." ✅ The creator has confirmed 2+ orbital stations (per "So You Want to Buy a Country?") is canon instead — this article's 4+ figure is superseded. See Buying a Country. Original unedited text preserved in /raw-sources.

Purchase Tiers (by annual HD income, priced at N × monthly earnings)

Worked examples from the source:

• Tier 36: "Joe's Teas," HD 100,000/year → ✅ $0.10 USD/year real income (corrected from the source's stated "1 US cent per year" — see note below), $0.008333/month → purchase price $0.30 USD
• Tier 30: HD 100,000,000/year → $8.33/month real income → purchase price $250 USD
• Tier 12: up to $1,000,000 USD purchase price for the largest businesses

⚠️ Note: this "Tier 36/30/20/12" business-purchase system is a different tier system from the "Tier 1–4" game-license system seen on the official site (mafstarfleetbattles.com/tiers-1-4, covering things like Restaurant Licenses, Starport Licenses, Building Licenses). Do not conflate the two — they use overlapping "Tier" terminology for unrelated mechanics.

✅ Corrected Arithmetic (per creator instruction)

The confirmed exchange rate (1,000,000 HD = $1 USD) means HD 100,000/year equals $0.10 USD/year, not the "1 US cent per year" stated in the original published article — that phrasing was a math error in the source text. The $0.30 USD purchase price itself was already correct (36 × $0.008333/month, which is consistent with $0.10/year), so only the annual-income figure quoted in prose needed correcting, not the final price. The Tier 30 example was already internally consistent and required no correction. This is now the canon figure going forward. The original unedited "1 US cent per year" text remains preserved in /raw-sources/3000-corporations.md for reference.

Open Questions

None remaining — see above for the corrected figure.