really I know the three biggest ones.

SK, Azi then neo. But what about the other ones? Is Ares 4 or 5? And stuff.

I would guess at Ares 4, MTC 5, just because of Ares' acquisition of some much of CATco, bumping MCT down to the #5 slot. Probably followed by Yam.. sorry, Evo, Shiawase, Renraku, Wuxing, and finally Horizon. just at a guess though.

Why would Shiawase be so small?

The old order in CD was:
1. SK, 2. Azt, 3. Shi, 4. MCT, 5. Ren, 6. Yam, 7. Ares, 8. Wuxing, 9. Cross, 10. Nova

For the new order we only know the top 3 for certain, my guess will be:
1. SK, 2. Azt, 3. Neo, 4. Shi, 5. Ares, 6. MCT, 7. Evo, 8. Wuxing, 9. Ren, 10. Horrizon

Didn't Shiawase get screwed over during the crash? Then again, the crazier family members are no longer at the top, and there wasn't mention of a huge sale in assets...
Also, shouldn't Renraku be lower on the list? It kinda got screwed in the Crash.

speaking of shiawase, has anyone else noticed that they're pretty much invisible?

i mean, you never seem to hear anything about shiawase. they're just sort of... there... never really doing anything noticeable at all... just moving along, making money (somehow) without anyone noticing all the crazy cutthroat stuff that must be going on...

Why is shi so big?

1. SK, 2. Azt, 3. Neo, 4. Ares, 5. Shi, 6. MCT, 7. Evo, 8. Wuxing, 9. Ren, 10. Horrizon

Seem better. Ares did take over at least half of CATco

Being the largest corporation in Asia helps.

eating one allmost third of Fuchi (then second largest, not second smallest like CAT) during the corp war did not do this much to Renraku and Shiawase either!

I put MCT ahead beause they're described as being #2 in just about everything. Yamatetsu ahead becuase I figure that they'd be moving up after grabbing the arco block, landing on mars, and (IIRC) winning the probe race. Seems their going places. Plus in SoTF, Yamatetsu gets it's Feng Shui tied to Wuxing's rising star and gets a boost there too.

What's IIRC?

If I Recall Correctly.

That already became clear at the SR4-errata-thread.

Imo Shiawase is a major player who has his fingers in many different businesses - and a good PR department

Also, as I understand it, under Shiawase Corporate Law, employment contracts and such do not expire just because you are dead. Normally, that's not a big deal. Someone dies, they stop coming into work, that's breech of contract and pay checks get stopped because of it. But if an executive comes back as a Ghost or something, they're still part of the Shiawase family - no questions asked.

That's a really minor, if kind of morbid, part of Shiawase Corporate Culture. Or at least it was. Before the comet.

If someone dies, then a Shedim can take their body and go back to work. The shedim can take the guy's position, their house, their life - all the spirit has to do is fulfill the host's responsibilities. It's all legal in Shiawase Territory. Shiawase was a magical lightweight back in Corporate Download, what are they like now?

How many shedim have "infiltrated" Shiawase? They don't even have to do anything to infiltrate. They just have to show up for work.

-Frank

I would consider Shedims (and Master Shedims as well) to be too strange and unaware of corporate and business culture to be a good employee.

Don't Master Shedim have all of the original person's skills and most of his/her personality? And seriously, if this meant that your employees, as far as you are concerned, never died, would you give a damn whether or not they fit in to your culture?

Master Shedime are verry adept at passing as the person that passed away, just look T2. Sure, they do have some, well, odd interests, but as long as nobody visits thair kitchen, the corp´s not even to know, thair employee became a corps, which was then reanimated by a corps investing, corps infiltrating spirit.

i have this really awesome mental picture of the boss from Office Space having a sit-down talk with a shedim'd employee.

"and if you could cut back on, mmmm, eating the brains of your fellow employees for me? mmmm, yeah, that'd be great."

Well, 1. ordinary Shedim do not repair the damage on a corpse, so if the hostbody died in a violent manner, it will be rather obvious, same goes for rotten corpses (well they may pose as Ghules, but thats not much better). 2. (I´m not sure on this) common Shedime seam to be more or less semiconcious, just imagin the clishé zombi (shawn of the dead, anyone ) and they are only interested in sucking karma and producing more hosts (=killing people). At least they were pictured this way in the fiction part (don´t remember the rules though). But MS are supposed to controll CS, so they may be able to civilize them a bit to ride the monorail unnoticed. I doubt however, that they could ever decive somebode who knew the dead host (well except shawns mom, maybe ).

Come to think of it, Master Shedime are probably good partners in labor intensive industries, even more so then Voudounistas. But thas surely a deal with the devil (no, I did not allude to Damian Knight being a MS. But y´know he´s one of these leonisation-junkies, who knows).

Here is my pitch for Ares being bigger than Shiwise. They were the only AAA in the UCAS(for a long ass time) witch by SONA had large dispoable income than Japan did in SOA. There was only 2 AAA until the late fifties early sixties in their hemisphere. They had close ties to every single govenerning body save Aztlan and the freanchies on the land mass they were in.

They have had 2 votes for in the CC from the start. They bought C.A.T.co.

Shiwise take pride in being unseen.That is great. It just means you can't move things as easy. There are 4 other AAA corps in that area. At no time within the past 30 years were their less than 3 other AAA's within the same land area. Yes they may be bigger than Ren and MCT. That is still 2 other AAA corps who are from Japan.

They gained less than a third of Fuchi. Villers walked out with nearly half do to buyouts and tricky scams. Also a fair amount of fuchi became smaller corps.

In the end it is all about land mass and growing room. name one city that you can Shiwise owns? I can point to two sprawls that are major economic boons that Ares Owns.

Still I have to say the that the best reason why Ares is bigger. Could Shiwise set off a nuke inside of a civilian population center, follow up with biolaogial warfare and not only not get punished but be called heroes? Chi-town for the win!

(sorry for the horid spelling)

Well ther were also a lot of other corps, that picked at CATCo´s corpse.
The fact, that Ares posesses more military assets, doesn´t make it bigger by default.
Allso Shiawase is in bed (quiet literally) with the new Tenno of Japan and has been for the last 5 years. Knight may have liked to do that in the UCAS from 57 on, but Nadja hated him (granted, there were rumors, that heffner was his pupped, but I think that had changed).
As bad as the devastation in Japan was in the YOTC, Shiawase may have profited from most from the rebuilding, of all J-corps, being focused on services and heavy industries.
Shiawase owns power, sanitation and medical contracts in many Cities, just as Knight Errant does sec contracts.
PR does not equal economical power. And the UCAS Gov realy had no chanse, but to laude Ares about Chicagoe, least they´d do nothing more, then there lawyers whittled the demands of the Gov down to and the UCAS would have quiet a problem with the containment zone.

Which resource had the details on Chi Town? I missed about 4 years of books and would love to catch up.

Target: UCAS
Bug City
... Arg, I can´t quite remember, where the 58BugBust was in, but I may take a look at my books tomorrow.
SoNA and Target Awakened Lands hold a bit of info, too IIRC.

I have Bug City since we played there. It was sort of like Escape from New York where we were in a jet that was taken down and we were trying to survive. Having flown in we did not have access to our guns etc. I will look for the other books so I can get caught up.

I've always played bug city like the No man's land story arc from the batman comics in the Nineties.

Shiawase is el Diablo Incarnate. Very under used. My SR2/3 campaign was in Detroit so I used Ares a lot, and have a special spot for them in my decayed shedim infested heart. I've started my SR4 game in Hong Kong and have really latched onto Shiawase as the the big mover and shaker in the Shadows. Here are a few reasons that make them very interesting.
1. Korin "I try to assassinate other board members as a hobby instead of playing golf" Yamana is the largest share holder of this Megacorp bearing the name of the Family that founded it.
2. MIFD. It's like the CIA and FBI rolled into one. The beauty of doing a Shiawase run is that you rarely know it's them that you are working for.
3. Like Ares, AZT, and S-K, they have more than regular security. They have a friggin Military. It takes a a lot of juice to keep and train a military force, even with Desert Wars broadcast rights.
4. The Shiawase Family is literally "In Bed" with the Emperor of Japan. Talk about choice government contracts. How do you think Mitsuhama and Renraku feel knowing the taxes (the few that don't get cooked off by their accountants) are going to big Shiawase projects?
5. Like S-K, they provide a boat load of services that both other Corps and Nations depend on, making them very influential.
I think I'm in !

And people always forget about San Jose.
San Jose is bigger both in numbers of people and the mount of money that goes threw it than San Fran. It also had thousands of Ares soldiers guarding it for many years. Ares has a military force on another nations soil and they didn't care. Largely cause they were more worried about Saito than Ares but that is not the point.

Oh, sure, take all you want, mr. Errent. *aktivateskillswitchsothairtoiletrefreshersreleassevensevenonnextuseandlaunchsprchampaignaboutknighterrentexcessiveviolence*

Yea, think so, I´m just not american, so I didn´t know how it was written