Faction Standings

[Reverend Del]

I think you'll find in the dystopian era of Freelancer That a corp could easily be as rich as a house, look at Rheinland, easily the poorest of the Houses, Interspace Commerce could easily be richer than Rheinland. It deals almost exclusively in money and they have the monopoly on financial concerns.

As for Synth Foods, Synth is a huge company but it sells small profit commodities at an incredibly high volume, kind of like a futuristic Coca-Cola, whilst it makes a huge volume of cash it's not going to make the kind of cash that an industrial or financial concern is going to make. Logistically speaking paste makes less money than money itself can make.

Also don't forget that number of bases does not equal wealth, although it is one method of indicating wealth, both the LPI and Samura control planets, The LPi's planets are only police bases because they set the law, but it's stations are LPI stations, owned operated and controlled. Samura is different, Samura does own planets, Junyo and Kurile, it also has a controlling interest in the development of Kyushu. Which should be considered a veritable cash cow for Samura in terms of corporate assets.

Zoners aren't rich, but they are influential. The Zoners can pull strings like no other faction in Freelancer, what the Zoners want, invariably they get. It's unlikely that money changes hands very often in a Zoner transaction, pure monetary wealth out in the edgeworlds isn't worth very much if it can't put food on the table or ships into space. The Freeports aren't visited by big spenders they're visited by folks with goods to swap and ships to repair, each Freeport is a neutral space where all can come and go regardless of his affiliation.

The GMG aren't massively rich either, H-fuel is bloody important however, and once again the GMG controls influence, hard to argue against the GMG when your ships can't move because the GMG won't fuel them. That's where GMG's power lies. Trading H-fuel for commodities it needs.

Also Ageira and Universal, two of the big three, the other being Interspace, these corps are rich, massively so. Universal deals in high risk goods, moving them to and fro for large sums of cash. Universal can pull strings in Liberty but that's about as far it's influence travels. Ageira is much the same, only Ageira has the revenue from bloody huge military contracts, which it farms out to it's partner DSE. Combined Ageira and DSE are a powerful and fairly influential company, having a monopoly on Lane and Gate repair is quite a neat money spinner.

So determining which factions is the wealthiest is quite a difficult prospect. Are you going to look at temporal power? Because the easy answer to that is Liberty it has the most populated systems, owns the largest in RP military and is just powerful, but all that comes at a cost, like modern day governments it's likely Liberty has a debt, and not a small one, in terms of actual liquid assets it's probably very poor indeed, relying on it's taxes and careful budgeting to maintain it's status.

Pure wealth is different, in RP there's no doubt Interspace Commerce controls the flow of money, it is the Bank, the Insurance company and the Investment company, there are no others. Others may dabble, but all of it is underwritten by the giant financial colossus that is Interspace. They have bigger budgets to play with than any single House, more cash flows through Interspace per annum than everyone else.

Influence is another good one to judge and easily the single most influential organisation is the Zoners. The canniest of the factions, the wiliest of the factions, the Zoners can pretty much achieve anything with words into the right ear, and that can be worth an awful lot more than money.

Your Corporate Analyst

The Good Reverend.

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Saint Del is considered a holy healer of diseases of children, but also as a protector of cattle.