I was making a game and abandoned it and now I want to use the existing "engine" for another game, it's not very important, there were two topics about it:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/641550-how-to-retheme-this-game/

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/645163-economy-game-factory-or-corporation/

The thing is I have this LAYOUT and mechanic HIRING WORKERS (and firing, paying salary, assigning to projects, displaying, generating names and portraits, etc). I want to keep/reuse these if possible.

The theme for the game would be "Megacorporation" (tycoon).

Question, how to make a game about a (mega)corporation? How it should work?

IMPORTANT: I need something that would fit with the layout (picture above) and have a strong use of workers/employees and is turnbased, singleplayer only.

Also, something reasonably simple for me to implement, please, please, please

My idea so far (just a rough example, please post yours OR help refine this one):

- you have the core corporation employees (accounting, legal, etc) they form some departments I guess

- there are factories (available in the game), you can buyout/takeover these

- when you buy a factory you need to assign to it a manager from your corporation staff

- a factory probably could have like 5-12 workers (smaller portraits) that come with the factory, you don't hire them yourself, only the manage (AI) deal with these. Each of these factory workers have just one stat (a bar displayed below the miniportraits) which is efficiency. You have also some factory salary probably.

- your goal would be to buy and sell factories while keeping your megacorporation strong and profitable, probably you would try to make sure that your factories are performing better that other factories (that are independant), also some chains of production could be possible I guess.

- you are the only megacorporation, there are no AI megacorporations (purely to make it simplier for me to implement this, alternatively I could make some fake/extremely simplistic competitors mechanic if we invent one), but the factories that are not owned by the player are competing with player's factories (and other factories)

In short the player runs a corporation (big bureaucratic structure) that has employees but produce nothing. Their whole purpose is to boost/manage/acquire factories. Factories are the "competition blocks", various factories compete with other factories for profit. Your goal is to obtain and maintain the factories so you have a good profit.

Why did you give up on it in the first place?

Seems to me like the retheme thread have a fair amount of good ideas.

I'm not sure how to answer this... Sure, there were good ideas there and the megacorporation one is the one I liked the best so I want to pursue this theme. And that's why this topic. I'm looking for ideas/feedback on a turn based game where you play as an owner/top manager of a megacorporation and where the game's layout is similar to the one on the screen provided if possible.

Anyway, what you think about such game, where you buy factories/small companies (as a megacorporation) and run them trying to monopolize the market? Or do you have a better idea for a mechanic that would fit megacorporation tycoon theme?

More ideas/details:

- where you buy a factory you could do it for 3 reasons: because the factory is good and you want to have it, because the manager is good and you want to have him in your corporation but you don't care for his crappy factory, because the factory owns a patent which you later can use to fire legal actions against other companies/factories so only yours survive (or so they lose so much money they become very cheap and you can buy them for yourself)

- where you acquire a poor factory you might want to increase its efficiency by buying more machines and therefore fire some unneeded workers (or just replace the workers because they are crappy), this would cause some problems (strikes or legal?)

- each factory would sell one (or more) products (or services), it competes for market share with other factories of the same type