Selling off parts of my company/franchises

[rlilewis]

Hi peeps,

Apologies if this has been suggested already but as my mega-corp (EuroCorp) grows ever larger and my search for greater profits grows increasingly more greedy, I am finding myself being held back by my old trade routes that still require significant management and maintenance yet don't generate enough profit to warrant my attention. There is nothing more annoying to look through my list of trains (sorted by profit!) and find certain routes making losses due to a change in goods accepted, competitors stealing business or a lack in industrial output and then having to actually do something about it when I am trying to focus my attentions on my next mega project that will bring in billions of dollars.

Rather than simply get rid of these old routes and let my competitors get free cash I would prefer instead to package up certain trade routes and either outright sell them or offer them as some kind of franchise/lease agreement so they will deal with the mundane aspects of their management and can collect some decent revenue and they can pay me a certain proportion of those profits as a tax.

IMO this is a win/win for everyone (more for me than others!) since I no longer have to bother worrying about them and can concentrate on what I want to do and I get paid money over time plus the competitor gets a nice startup business.

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On the flip side I sometimes really enjoy taking over an opposition company and then massively expanding upon or dramatically increasing the efficiency of their trade routes and seeing the huge jump in profitability/new jobs etc. The problem is of course that then I get lumped with all the other crap (and their debts). It would be awesome if I could make them an offer (based on its current annual profits) and buy up certain routes from them. Again another win/win since I get a run down business that I know can earn so much more and they get some cash to spend on their next loss making endeavour.

[Level Crossing]

That is logical but, I think, quite hard to implement.

It might be easier to code to allow buying certain trains from the AI (once, of course, the Infrastructure Sharing patch is complete).