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Many of you have realized that defense contractors of all kinds lend themselves well to Chaos play: combat is omnipresent, demand for implements of destruction is also omnipresent as a result. As a result the majority of active corporations manufactures combat equipment. But for those who, like me, would like to engage in something other than the manufacturing of implements of destruction (I have two alts running such corporations, Dunames and Cathul - Ugohr no longer owns IGR Brokerage as a character but it remains in my fold as a writer since Cathul bought it when Ugohr was on remand ICly)
That's fine but the easy part of running a corporation is to submit Factory subs (or, for service companies, Codex subs: a Codex sub counts for 1 mass-produced item for tier-up purposes). The hard part comes from getting other corporations to sign deals with you and, at higher levels, major corporations (here major corporations are defined as tier-V-VI corporations) or major factions to sign contracts, with misc threads being dev threads for items or Codex locations.
I'll be completely honest: some industries are much harder to play in the absence of a proper economic system, or simply a lack of interest in a given area from other players. For example, no bank has successfully tiered-up in the history of Chaos, and since real estate is considered, for Marketplace purposes, to be a financial corporation, IGR accomplished what was once considered unthinkable: running a financial corporation to the point of tiering-up. That is a topic that has been brought to the floor multiple times, but we all agree that dragging Chaos into some galaxy-wide economic system is impractical for numerous reasons that I won't get into.
For service companies, even harder still is to get the major projects (100, 200 or 300 posts, depending on the company level) done. For this reason I feel that tier-IV is perhaps the highest tier that is practical for IGR to grow to. And for some types of companies, contracts are nigh-impossible to get because their activity sectors have no activity from PCs...