The conditions required to fully capitalize on this aspect of the AI's behavior are, while the game is paused:
- 1. The save has the full talent system enabled.
- 2. The AI corporation has R&D staff with less than 80 loyalty in a specific city, in a product segment. For example, the city Potosi and the product segment drugs.
- 3. There are 0 drug talent that are unemployed in the city(Potosi). This can be achieved by the player corporation hiring every drug talent in the same city the AI corporation has R&D staff in.
- 4. Your drug R&D talent salaries are high enough to ensure that they cannot be headhunted by the AI.
- 5. You then raise one talent's salary by a few million percent, then replace that talent by headhunting the AI's drug R&D staff(It is important to also ensure that this new talent has more than 80 loyalty). This should quickly bankrupt the AI corporation and increase your pricing power.
This probably isn't a viable early game strategy due to the cost of building R&D centers, but it's fun to play around with this in the late game. A fix probably isn't needed to prevent this exploit/strategy since it requires a lot of set-up.
[*]It seems that high R&D salaries are only maintained if they are engaged in a research project; your talent in step 5 needs to be active in a project, or their salary may just reset when you replace them with a new headhunted person.
[*]Raising your own R&D salaries are also useful if you want to lower your stock price for stock buybacks.
[*]I found that after talent salaries rise above about $1bn, the displayed value turns negative, then becomes 0 as you continue raising their salaries. The salary is actually still in the billions or more.
[*]This is also a quick way to bankrupt cities, if the AI corporation has enough land, and the city does not have enough money to buy back the land when the AI corporation goes bust.
[*]If you have an AI CTO, they will also try to fill R&D vacancies regardless of cost. So you may be vulnerable to going bankrupt yourself if you're not careful with steps 3 and 4.
[*]An unrelated finding is that, even when my R&D salaries are high enough to ensure 100 loyalty, my AI CTO will still raise their salaries. Which is weird.
