This Corp is "where the rubber hits the road" in the
Galactic Milieu assemblage of games; it pays the hosting and bandwidth bills upon which ultimately the entire edifice stands/depends.
The hard fact is that the game's foothold upon
the planet known as Earth does have to interact with that planet's financial systems, if only at this crucial point where the software meets the hardware. General Holding Corp, also known as General Hosting Corp, was formed to encapsulate that critical interface.
This is also the Corp which pays the salaries of the professionals who keep the game servers running, buys more hardware in which to run the software, foots most of the bills for software development and testing, hosts the "mining pools" various factions use in generating cryptocoins and so on.
Basically all aspects of the game which require hosting and bandwidth obtain it from this Corp and thereby do their part in supporting the infrastructure upon which they all ultimately rely to weave together all the many and various components and subsystems into the whole fabric of the metagame that is the
Galactic Milieu.
In particular, the
Freeciv based nations pay in accordance with the "square miles" figures shown for their nation in the
Freeciv servers running the worlds upon which they operate. This cost is rationalised into the game setting as the cost a political party needs to pay in order to control that nation in the ways that a
Freeciv player controls a nation. It is thus the price that must be paid by a nation in order for it to be played. It thus should act both as the moat or "advantage of the incumbent" that any players thinking of taking over a nation face in real costs and as the liability that players seeking to maintain control of a nation must deal with in order to retain control. Basing this fee upon the number of square miles the nation is represented as controlling provides a useful metric for correlating the size of the nation according to the
Freeciv system with such things as the number of "regions" it would take to fully represent the nation's entire territory using
Open Simulator. Considering that one square mile would actually be somewhat larger than a block of four "regions" by four "regions", one tile of a
Freeciv planet would require at least 160,000 "regions" to fully represent even if we fudge the numbers by pretending that a square only 1024 metres by 1024 metres is a "square mile". Thus even fudging to make square miles cheaper it is clear that planetary surfaces are not cheap to fully represent at a scale where people can walk around on them in three dimensional immersive representation. It is hoped and intended that even the small peek into the actual cost of fully representing territory that is provided by the almost token fees the nations pay to this Corp for their hosting will have the side effect of encouraging nations to be populated by numerous players per nation rather than being "one-player nations", but ultimately it is really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much it is really going to cost to fully flesh out each nation in the ways ultimately intended.
-MarkM-
