One company might not be able to *win* versus all the other megas, but a AAA has the potential to do a lot of crippling damage on its way down. If a megacorp becomes willing to do economic MAD, the others will tread carefully, even if they know they'll eventually prevail.

Favors owed, for example. You don't just need ties to other megas, you can call in government favors and tie up the others with frivolous lawsuits. Using favors and bribery, you can make the other megas business grind to a halt while expensive lawyers try and sort things out. Normally, you wouldn't do this, as it'd cost more than you'd gain. But if you're going down anyway....

Or, if you really want to screw someone, buy as much of their stock as you can and then dump it on the market for a fraction of what you paid. If you do this on a big enough scale, you can make their stock value plummett. You'll *lose* billions in the process, but since you're about to die, you may as well hurt them as much as you can.

Those are just a couple of examples of how one mega could hurt another, if they're desperate enough to take a loss doing it.

you can *try* to call in government favours. but odds are good, the other megas also are owed many government favours. collectively, they probably are owed more than you. and the people you're asking for help know that you're going to burn, and that the people you're asking them to tick off are going to still be around.

now, some people may be loyal enough to you to do something as stupid as making a bunch of megacorporations angry at them on your behalf when you're no longer around. but not most.

as to dumping stocks, yes that is a possibility. depending to some extent on the corp, that is... some of them have more stock tied up in the hands of people unwilling to trade than others. and of course, if those in power can manage to buy up the stocks, they can secure their own position even further (and ultimately, since the plummeting value is artificial, it will eventually correct itself).

also, that presumes that an omega order against a AAA doesn't automatically trigger all stock exchanges being shut down to prevent this sort of thing from happening. but that's just speculation. it *is* a pretty obvious target, though.

but again, this presumes that the executive who could give that order is exclusively loyal to aztechnology to the point of being willing to pretty much guarantee their own death. if the executive instead decides that they'd rather be in a position to get a nice cushy job as an executive at whichever company takes over (which they can probably even influence, meaning they can buy that position of power with their complicity to the corporation of their choice), well, that's not likely to happen.

lots of people are fanatically loyal to their mega. most of the executives? probably more loyal to themselves.

Jaid, you just are not grokking the setting here.

A triple-A Megacorp is not just Goldman-Sachs grown to immense proportions. It's Goldman-Sachs with decades of being an unregulatable, army-fielding global superpower.

An army unused is a useless army, and as the cold war showed, you do not have to be able to win a war to make sure that everybody else also loses the war. That is what we're talking about, and yes, they will do that if it comes to it!

That ALSO presumes that everyone in the affected Megacorp is working in Lockstep (with absolutely no dissension whatsoever), which we know is not true. The AAA's, while powerful, are not hyper-coordinated, and middle management on up often sell their loyalty to whomever will pay the highest, otherwise Extractions don't work. You HAVE to take that into account. I do agree, though, that it will be costly for an Omega-Order to be issued, and potentially catastrophic, on more than one level.

Your comparison to the Cold war is somewhat lost on me, though. Who, exactly, forced everyone else to lose that particular war (because not everyone lost out)?

Quoted for truth. These guys in the AAA realm are the de facto world financial system, whether the world of SR likes it or not.

The other thing to keep in mind is that with all of the subsidiaries, shell corporations, and other well-known financial shenanigans, huge percentages of the offensive potential of a given AAA will be "off the books". There are plenty of Shadowrunners and smaller mercenary companies out there willing to be hired no questions asked to do some "weapon systems testing" if it proves necessary. Saying that one of the largest financial powers in the world is completely incapable of fielding forces without an official "Aztechnology" patch on their uniforms in the case of an inter-corporate war is not thinking things entirely through.

Please tell me you are joking.

The cold war was not about who would win.
The cold war was about if i lose, you lose too.
It was all about the victory not being worth it.
Nobody lost and thus everybody won.

Which was not what he said...
And there were losses to the Cold War (the USSR bankrupted itself (whether politically or financially) out of existence, after all - though there were other factors as well)... Not everyone Won (nor did everyone lose), as you indicate (as much as you can win or lose the Cold War - since there was actually no physical warfare between the major players going on, per se). If you just look at the two major players involved, well, there WAS a Winner and a Loser. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

You don't need much, just call in an old favor and stuff gets tied up in red tape forever. And even the smallest megacorp can bribe officials with more money than they've ever dreamed. Normally this wouldn't be profitable, but as a dying gasp?

Damage will be done, though. Every corporation relies on its stock value for quick cash gains, so triggering a temporary crash would cause lasting damage. What's more, if you make another company vulnerable enough, the others will smell blood in the water, and go after them too.

And that would be suicide. Corporations worldwide rely on stock exchanges for a lot of their money. The easiest way to raise cash is to sell and trade stock; but without an active exchange, you effectively can't do that. So all of a corp's assets that are tied up in stock would be, for the duration, utterly useless and worthless.

Loyalty isn't required. Executives who gutted their own companies often get cushy jobs elsewhere, just look at the Forbes 500 for a few examples. What's more likely is that they'll guarantee their own nest eggs, and then do what it takes to screw over everyone else, including the competition.

There's no way any corporation would ever receive AAA rating if the requirement for it was to be able to stand up to the seven or more corporations who already were at the top of the food chain. Yamatetsu, Wuxing, Cross and Horizon clearly entered at the bottom of the list when they joined. If the existing AAA corporations were to have enough troubles for this to happen, why would the winner bother to join the losers' club, rather than enacting its own new world order?

Before trying to get AAA status, a corporation must first adhere to the Corporate Court as a A corporation, and receive AA rating. If it was just about raw strength, the Corporate Court could simply strip any rising corporations of its AA rating and extraterritorial privileges before they become a threat to them. Yet, they don't. Actually, when Wuxing received AA rating in 2047, it wasn't even strong enough to make the Cantonese, right next to the door of their Hong Kong powerbase, accept their freshly acquired extraterritorial privileges. The Corporate Court had to intervene and threaten the Cantonese of retaliations for failing to apply the Corporate Court regulations. That's because the clearly threat for the Corporate Court is losing relevance: the fundamental source of their power is the governments using their rating to say which corp is extraterritorial and which isn't. In turn, this require the corporation who with to be extraterritorial to submit to the Corporate Court rules.

Giving AA rating is small change, though it does give a clear advantage (competition-wise, it would be so easy for megacorporations to ask local governments to enact regulations that will crush their business, and pick up the pieces). Giving the AAA rating cost the existing one a lot of money and a lot of power. They don't do it for free, let alone because someone asked for it. If anything, the AAA corporations are willing to give other corporations AA and AAA rating as tools against each others. Shiawase, Renraku and MCT likely had Yamatetsu voted in to secure a Japanese voting block against their western counterparts. In turn, Ares, S-K and Aztechnology voted for Wuxing to support to Yamatetsu move against the other Japanese corporations on the Asian markets. Those who voted for Cross & Aurelius did it with the intent of primarily hurting Ares, and possibly Novatech as well. So to speak, you don't get to join the AAA league because you may be able to pick up a fight with another AAA. You get in because someone expects you to pick that fight.

Fuchi Industrial Electronics fell as the result of two things: 1) Renraku benefitting from Deus ex Machina (pun intended) technological development that were so advanced that Renraku engineers had a hard time replicating the feat after that person left, and 2) Fuchi own President/CEO and head of its American division divesting assets to another new company (which would become Novatech). The loss of nearly a third of its business did weaken Fuchi.
Then, Fuchi lost AAA rating because the divested assets included JRJ International, and technically JRJ originally received the rating, not Fuchi. When it happened in October 2059, the next election was locked (the seat up for renewal belonging to Aztechnology sole representative), opening a slot in june 2060 at the earliest. At that point, one of Fuchi remaining head decided to jump ship for Renraku, prompting the last one to join Shiawase. These events left them so weak that, less than a decade later, both had become the leading force inside their new respective megacorporation.

So, really, only Renraku had some role in Fuchi demise, and only because of unique circunstances for a plot that was supposed to make Renraku overshadow every other corporation.

About Cross Applied Technologies, I can't say. They killed the owner in a random aircrash, and had Ares taking over the company as the one liner. The closest thing to an explanation we ever got was suggestion of a inside job. At that point, 60% of the corporation belonged to a single individual, so it's not much about defeating a corporation than blackmailing that one guy.

JRJ International was taken over by Fuchi Industrial Electronics.

Keruba International was taken over by Renraku, which was a completely empty shell created for that sole purpose. It was a change of ownership, with little to actual change to management during the first decade. Renraku rose to the top of the new Matrix industry over technologies developped under Keruba name.

BMW, Saeder and Krupp belonged to the same corporation. The name change occured during a reshuffling. The corporation was taken over by Lofwyr, though it's not known when he started acquiring stock. It's supposed to be a dragon's show of force rather than a corporation's show of weakness.

Imagine that today, the whole world declared war on the United States.
The US would go down, but it would do a LOT of damage before it did.

Each AAA is bigger than the USA, with a larger stake in the world economy to boot.

Look at the GFC triggered by one aspect of the US economy taking a dive. Now imagine the whole thing going down, two to three times. That's a AAA dying. It's not pretty.

Imagine that today, the whole world declared war on the United States.
The US would go down, but it would do a LOT of damage before it did.

Each AAA is bigger than the USA, with a larger stake in the world economy to boot.

Look at the GFC triggered by one aspect of the US economy taking a dive. Now imagine the whole thing going down, two to three times. That's a AAA dying. It's not pretty.

the AAAs are not military powers. they *could* be, if they wanted. but large standing military organizations are expensive to maintain, even more expensive to deploy, and make the neighbours unhappy about you, which makes them less likely to buy your stuff, which means they cost even more.

undoubtedly each mega has large security forces. if they wanted to, they could develop a permanent military organization. but they don't. it's expensive, it doesn't directly help the bottom line, and in fact tends to hurt the bottom line. when they need an army, they *hire* an army, for as long as they need it, because they typically don't need it for long (in some cases, hiring an army may take the form of persuading a nation to send in their army).

a corporate war will make a horrible mess of things, that is true, but it is far more likely to involve hundreds of banks than it is to involve hundreds of tanks.

yes, aztechnology will be able to hire shadowrunners through their shadow resources (presumably, anything that can be identified as part of their corporation will have any possible assets frozen, so expect their budget to be somewhat more limited than usual). but so can their enemies. all 9 of them. everything aztechnology can do, can be done by all 9 of their enemies too.

The AAA's all have substantial military forces. Desert Wars is all corp forces, IIRC national militaries don't get involved in it. Aztech has more than the usual amount, since they're effectively indistinguishable from the Azatlan forces. Considering most of a splatbook was dedicated to their forces, I'd say they have a really huge amount.

But you miss the point. Corporate war is about a lot more than military might. It'd be economic and political might as well. You wouldn't make it to AAA status if you didn't have a ton of that, so it's clear that an Omega versus an AAA is going to be tricky at best.

No, aztechnology owns a country of over a hundred million people, a country with a leading military. And that country is not a BRA member, so no other mega has major operations there. This is, oddly enough, not the situation the other megas are in. Aztechnology can deliver significant sized extremely formidable commando units via subs and long range aircraft, they don't need to hire runners to do that kind of crap because what they do in a war isn't intended to be deniable. It's intended to be an object lesson when they kill the CEO and the chair of Renraku, not some frigging mystery.

you think that none of aztlan's many enemies won't join in the fight the moment aztechnology is declared the target of an omega order too? it wouldn't take much persuading at all for amazonia, the CAS, and probably a few others to escalate things from cold war to full-scale war if there was suddenly the prospect of getting backing from the other 9 megas? you realise that the japanese imperial army/navy/etc have invaded large swaths of the world basically because the japanese megas wanted them to, right?

aztechnology has close ties with a nation. so do various other megas, and the nation that aztechnology is closely tied with has plenty of enemies for the rest of the big 10 to persuade to start a war with them.

(also, i'm fairly sure at least some of the desert war units are actually mercenaries).

the megas don't maintain large conventional standing armies. they're expensive, and they don't earn money. they have security forces, and i would expect they each have some conventional military forces (if nothing else, a few of the larger mercenary companies are most likely owned by or closely affiliated with some of the big 10). in some cases (but most likely rare cases) those security forces will even include stuff like tanks, fighter/bomber jets, and submarines.

but if they don't have a pressing need to have a division of tanks at a corporate facility all the time, then having a division of tanks is a drain on resources that isn't earning them squat. they don't need conventional armies to threaten countries (their economic power can crush small countries and cripple large ones), and they don't need the heavy equipment to protect most of their locations because the far more typical threat to their facilities will come from lightly armoured infantry, possibly augmented (ie shadowrunners), and mostly in environments where tanks, jets, etc are not likely to be particularly helpful (having reasonably large numbers of light attack helicopters and similar, on the other hand, seems quite likely).

you don't need ICBMs to deal with shadowrunners or rioters or angry (but poorly equipped) locals. a few people with good quality armour and assault rifles is generally considered overkill (otherwise, why are most security forces given SMGs/pistols and don't even wear security armour let alone military grade armour?). if it isn't making them money, or saving them money, they won't have it. just like they don't put SOTA maglocks on every single door, or have the absolute best in scanning equipment at every security checkpoint, or build every building like it's a bomb shelter. they will use the minimum they can get away with, and in general, they can get away with having few or no regular military units just fine.

A leading military which is, to my knowledge, already heavily engaged on several fronts, possibly to the point of overstretch.
And if Aztechnology were to pull off a hit against one AAA CEO, the other megas won't object-lesson them right back why?

I'll also point out that Aztech has already been the target of intercorp military action: Operation Reciprocity 2048. Which, while certainly limited in scale, was IIRC clearly intended as an "or else" by the other megas. And it didn't make the Azzies go into "kill the world" rampage mode. It made them go to the negotiating table.

Omega Order + 10 seconds: The ZO Gemeinschaftsbank declares a moratorium on all transactions involving Aztechnology corp scrip.
Omega Order + 30 seconds: An Ares negotiator enters the head office of MedíCarro North America and offers the CEO an equivalent of his old retirement fund in Ares Freedom Dollars
Omega Order + 30 minutes: HR reports that all employees have been issued a copy of the Ares company anthem

Omega Order + 2 seconds: Ripple-fired missiles from AZT defense satellites depart the weapon platforms ahead of the incoming weapons fire, fill the orbit of Earth with high-speed shrapnel.
Omega Order + 3 seconds: Those same satellites self-destruct, filling Earth Orbit with even more weapons fire.
Omega Order + 30 seconds: ICBMs launched from AZT surface installations streak skyward. Many get shot out of the sky, not all. Orbit is filled with even more chaff.
Omega Order +31 seconds: The Ares Negotiator and the CEO of MediCarro North America are shot in the backs of their heads by loyal deep-cover members of the Jaguar Guard. Lockdown is ordered, all non-AZT personnel are declared KoS at and in the vicinity of all AZT installations. Any members of AZT who have been in any kind of covert negotiation with any other mega, no matter how high up, have purge issues ordered for them, which are duly carried out.
Omega Order + 45 seconds: Use It or Lose It time for all orbital weapon systems. Thor Shots fall, everybody's arcologies are hit.
Omega Order + 60 seconds: Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank suffers massive hull damage as far more debris than its defenses can deflect (and you HAVE to Deflect, because a molten projectile is just as deadly in space,) Z-O is lost with all hands. The global system of stock markets begins to collapse as all faith is lost in the international trade currency, whose issuing body has just been rendered defunct.
Omega Order + 30 minutes: Nukes begin to fall, along with a host of other upleasantness, most of the Great Dragons retreat to their hidey-holes, the more warlike ones decide "fuck it, I'm not sitting out the end of the world" and get in on the carnage. The Immortal Elves whip up the strongest spirits and sorcery they can to shield their domains as everybody gets involved.

Omega Order + 30 days: The world is a scorched ruin, unfit for habitation by either man nor beast. Nuclear, biological, chemical, nanological, and astral scorched-earth policies have rendered most of the world's breadbasket areas absolutely inimitable to life. Seattle is a smoking crater, as is Denver, Tokyo, Washington, and, quite frankly, every other capital city. Orbit is completely unusable, ruined by a massive and intentional case of Kessler Syndrome, land lines have been severed, anything emitting a Signal 8 or stronger radio signal has been terminated by anti-radiation missiles. Metahumanity is cut off from each other. At this point, the only places with any semblance of the old civilizations are the underwater ecologies which evaded detection, the Mars bases (which will collapse in short order without resupply, which Is Not Coming,) and anywhere which was so unimportant to escape the first wave of WMDs and airstrikes that a Great Dragon subsequently decided to hole up in and protect personally.

Congratulations. You've brought about the end of the world as you know it!

For those that doubt the above, remember that Aztechnology's business plan in the long term is (or maybe was):
1) Destroy the world.
2) Rule what remains.

Sorry... Just don't see it. *shrug*
Your scenario is not the only possible result. It is One POTENTIAL result, but that is it.
Your Shadowrun may work that way, but I would imagine not everyone's would. I know that our Table's would not.

A SMALL faction of Aztechnology (a VERY small Faction) had that in mind. It is not the Majority Shareholder position.

Ah, but actually they are trying to sell this business plan to the sharedholders thanks to excellent PR with the sanitized version being:

1) Destroy the Competition.

2) Rule as the exclusive provider of all consumer goods.

Note how they failed to mention that everyone not working for the AZ is competition and did not go into detail about how they would 'destroy' it or how they are aiming to be the last biz standing, thus being the exclusive provider.

Most stockholders simply felt this is business lingo for aggressive marketing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Always check the fine print. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif)

Sounds like m... Ummm, The agenda for Ares. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Omega Order + 6 Months: The Native American Nations go back to business as usual, finally done being screwed over by everyone involved.

And why exactly would the Azzies feel compelled to push the red button? Are ICMBs headed towards them?


And the Obscuro faction did not want the world to end at any costs, else they could just have started a nuclear exchange. But nukes cannot honor collaborators with power, unlimited access to hookers and blackjack in afterlife, or anything else the Enemy might have promised its cultists.