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Old 07-20-2017, 06:00 AM   #2
mlangsdorf
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: Campaign chronology seeking constructive criticism

A couple of points:
Assuming they founded their megacorp with 1000 employees (which is a ridiculous amount for a starting company), they would have need an annual growth rate of 78% to hit 3 million employees in 14 years. That's a rather ridiculous growth. The company I work for has a 5 year plan to go from 7000 to 17000 employees, and it involves buying a lot of companies and working hard to maintain corporate culture. Adam and Mary have a 2 year plan to accomplish the same growth.

The corporate value of $2T is a little high for 2M employees, but Apple has that value to employee ratio today so it isn't crazy. Just as a note, modern companies with 2 million employees are Walmart, McDonalds, and Britain's National Health Service, and all of them are considerably older than 18 years.

You should probably read the wikipedia article on the Nobel Prize: Mary is unlikely to have won the Literature award twice (it's generally a lifetime achievement award). Adam is unlikely to have repeatedly won the Medicine prize for inventions that are still in the large scale trials page. Similarly with the Turing Prize: there is a 25+ year delay between doing something and getting the award (the 1994 prize, as a randomly selected example, was for work done continuously between 1965 and 1991). They're not going to give it out for something Mary did last year, especially not a new programming language. (I'm assuming that Mary won the 2018 Turing Award for Irdin, not for creating an AI 5 months earlier because the later option doesn't pass the smell test.)

When you say things like October 30, 2018: Adam creates the cancer cure, I'm really confused about what that means. Is that the day he isolates a cure in the lab? The day he creates an economically viable process to manufacture it? The point at which it finished its clinical trials and could be legally distributed? It really takes 3-7 years in the US between the time you submit a drug to the FDA and the time the FDA allows you to distribute it, and no, you can't say "I found a cure for cancer" and they'll believe you. All those trials are meant to determine that you actually did find a cure for cancer and that it works.

Your chronology is improbable at best and features multiple glaring errors that can be discovered by thirty minutes of research at wikipedia. However, it's your game, so you can come up with whatever improbable background you like. My question would be, what does any of this history have to do with the PCs will actually be doing in the game?
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