Kind of late to the party here, but I think the main reason is that we can't be sure that convenient for us status quo will keep up. Wayne CEO board just made significant overstep with medicine monopoly. It got Lois attention, it got Bruce attention. Barbara going to get hired by Wayne company and we all know how she likes snooping around. She is absolutely going to find all their wrongdoings because their protections are nowhere close to LexCorp's. It is absolutely nice for us, but only short term. Eventually Bruce is going to expose board's crimes and replace them with someone actually competent, like Lucious Fox. If we had a bit of trouble competing with Wayne Enterprises while they shoot themselves in the foot at every turn, imagine what a nightmare it would be if we had to compete with such juggernaut under competent leadership. At this point if Batman ever decide that he can't do everything alone or he need a hero team to counterweight LexCorp one (like how he decided that he need to buy Daily Planet to keep LexCorp in check) then he would be able to do it easily.
So... this is extremely doom-focused.
- You assume that the batfamily will be able to track down and utterly wipe out the Court of Owls where Ras al Ghul could not... while dealing with everything else they have to deal with. This seems really improbable, for a number of reasons... not least of which is that the Court of Owls has the same kind of plot-protection that any of the other major players does.
- You seem to assume that this will happen sometime soonish... when they currently don't even realize that a conspiracy
exists... and this isn't the first such overstep he's had to deal with.
- Worth noting here that canon Batman wasn't ever able to eradicate the Court of Owls.
- You assume that a post-Court Wayne Enterprises will be a Large Problem somehow... as opposed to, say, being a situation where we could work out a reasonable separation of interests with Wayne and then largely stay out of each other's way. If Wayne
did somehow gain full control of his company (good luck) and keep it (
good luck) that doesn't meant that he's going to be an all-in enemy to LexCorp. That's not the way he's played thus far, and I don't expect him to suddenly change.
Then, of course, there's the kicker. Okay. Sure. Let's assume you're right. Given that, how does putting a Tower in Gotham actually help? I mean, if Wayne has full control of his company, wouldn't that mean that we
wouldn't want to antagonize him unnecessarily? Like, being on good terms with him seems like the sort of thing that would reduce the overall friction and difficulty that he'd pose. Isn't that a good thing? Why would we not want that?
Note: Put Lex Tower in orbit or on moon surface, before Bruce can do his Justice League satellite base thingy.
Currently, there's no such thing as a Justice League, and if there was, it wouldn't be space-capable.
Now, I absolutely agree that at some point we want a Lex Tower (Moon) to play with, but we are
way out in front on this one, and we don't need to rush it until we actually start getting meaningful competitors.
That said, we're not the only ones who wound up with Brainiac tech, so the Space Race
is going to be a thing... and yes, we want to be the front-runner. I just don't think that "Bruce Wayne" or "the Justice League" are likely to be meanignful competitors there once it starts up. I think we're going to mostly be competing with places like Russia and China.
That is actually quite good. Think about it. The more we push them, the more shady stuff they throw at us, the longer the rope we can hang them with. We don't provoke Batman. We help him and Barbara and Lois to take down Wayne Enterprises. We just need to make sure that it is spectacular fall, and not just clearing of the house from bad apples courtesy of Batman.
So now you've turned a 180. Now you're saying that planting an enormous LexCorp Tower on Gotham soil and deliberately antagonizing Wayne Enterprises higher-ups
isn't going to upset Wayne. No. We're actually
helping him. We're doing it to
befriend him.
Pull the other one. It's got bells on it.
...especially because, if our goal is actually to help out Bruce in a way that he'll appreciate and that will help him fight the Court of Owls, the first, easiest, most obvious step is to straight-up tell him, billionaire to billionaire, that he has a conspiracy issue.
So to sum it up:
-We need to deal with Wayne Enterprises before Bruce has time to put them in good order with Barbara help
-Provoking Wayne Enterprises in legal ways keeps them imbalanced and increasingly prone to costly mistakes, that we can leverage toward more bad publicity and to keep Lois and Bruce attention on them, while keeping them together.
-Lois hit piece against Wayne company is great, but we need much more if we want to leverage any monopoly accusations into bringing government hammer on them.
-Bad intent wards and high tech defenses can allow us to cut out our own corner of Gotham without the need to spend even one cent on the rest of it. Ideally the rest of Gotham goes worse without us doing anything illegal, just due to effects of wealth redistribution.
-At some point we may want to send Livewire to pick up on Wayne's company shady secrets, and feed them either to Lois or Vicky. Probably best not to hire Vicky until then.
- There is no "deal with Wayne Enterprises". We're not goign to be able to knock them out of the running, and putting a Tower in their territory will not actually limit their ability to do us harm in any meaningful way.
- Provoking them in legal but obvious ways will absolutely draw both the attention and ire of Batman, who doesn't like the fact that we're constantly stirring stuff up in his backyard. It will cause Lois to pay attention to us, when right now we want to minimize our profile in her life.
- We're not going to be able to bring the government hammer on them - not when Wayne is out there actively cleaning house right now. Our lawyers are really good... but they're not
that much better than the Wayne lawyers. Also, it would be a massive escalation, and it wouldn't be a killing blow. Ever if we brought a suit and won it, all it would do would be to cost them some money and force them to grant a few concessions. That's not removing them from the board. Again, right now, they are not fully our enemy. Changing that is not to our advantage.
- Carving out a single chunk of Gotham to clean up does... what, exactly? The stuff you're talking about here is going to take an incredible amount of effort and resources (warding an entire chunk of the city?) and at the end... you have bragging rights? I think at that point you mostly just have bragging rights. I just don't think that bragging rights are worth enough... especially when this is going to draw the ire of a
whole bunch of crazy people. "Bad intent wards" aren't foolproof. If nothing else, dynamite has no intent, and it's entirely possible to blow up the wall that a set of wards is on. Sure, you could bring in security too... but they'll suffer attrition, and that's even
more expense.
Now, sending in Live Wire to go digging for shady secrets is a potentially interesting plan. The question, though, is how to use them. How could we deploy such a thing in a way that would make it more likely for Lois and Bruce to stay together, while in other ways generally benefitting us rather than costing us. That's a tricky one.
Also quick reminder that we have not kept Barbara with us because she is such awesome hero unit. We kept her with us so she does not help Batman to work more effectively. Barbara getting back to Gotham and resolving issues with Wayne Enterprises may be enough for Bruce to turn things around. We need to either prevent it, sabotage her, or assist her in taking down corruption in Wayne Enterprises but in such way that entire Wayne company goes down too.
This is purest fantasy.
- Barbara just isn't
that good. She's a hero unit, she's useful, but she's not a game-changer.
- Bruce isn't even close to "turning things around". Right now, he's like Superman. He has vague suspicions, but he's not even aware that he's
in a fight.
- There is
absolutely no way that the entire Wayne Company goes down. It's not on the table. Not even remotely. They are too solidly entrenched.
I talked specifically about Wayne Enterprises in this part and Court infiltration of it. Sorry if it was not clear. My guess is that it will take much less time to deal with Court in Bruce own company, especially if he have Barbara help.
Oh - if you're just talking about purging it from his company, then yeah. He'll do that. He's
done that.
Repeatedly. Then they infiltrate patsies and suborn existing employees and regain influence and after a while they have their hooks in the company again. It's not just that Wayne Enterprises suffers from an internal infestation (though it does). It's that it's
in Gotham. See that bit where we don't want to put a Tower in Gotham.
Many of them actually prefer seeder part where doing crimes easier, if they were up to challenge they would have went to Metropolis, it is not like they are bound to Gotham. They operate in Gotham because they like it here. And there actually less crime prone parts of Gotham so it is not like we are planning to kick them out of their turf.
And if they try regardless and really find any shortcoming in our defenses then it is something that we can study, improve and implement countermeasures across other Towers. Better test it on Gotham tower than on our main one.
You're conflating two different things here, and it's letting you ignore the weakness in your own arguments.
- There's the Tower. With a decent amount of effort, we
can fortify a Tower. It's not going to be trivial (especially with the almost inevitable heroic opposition, every step of the way) but it is doable.
- There's the area
around the tower, that we're trying to build up and make look good, effectively, fill with wealthy, happy people. Keeping this area safe from Gotham crazies and infiltration and massive embezzlement is going to be much,
much more difficult and expensive. If we decided that this was our Most Important Objective, then we could probably pull it off... but it's not. It's
really not. This whole "put a Tower in Gotham" idea is a vanity project with
extremely dubious benefits. It's not worth the kind of investment you're suggesting here.
Only at the start. They will be too busy fighting to keep Wayne Enterprises under control the moment Batman decides to act or after we anonymously leak some more of their secrets.
The Court has many heads, and gets a lot more than one action per round. I guarantee that fighting to keep control in Wayne Enterprises won't be enough to stop them from tying to drain as many resources out of us as they can and gain as much influence in LexCorp as they can.
We are private company, if we found it in ourselves to put in effort to improve our land then we already done excellent job. Expecting from us to go out of our way for the parts of Gotham that belongs to Wayne Enterprises and should be maintained by them is ridiculous. What next, saving cats from the trees?
It's not that. It's that choosing a chunk of a city and turning it into, effectively, a walled-in LexCorp enclave, is weird. It's
weird, and not in a good way. We already drew some heat for Alexandria, and at least in that case we could honestly say that they'd invited us in and made us the offer themselves, and we were just running with it. Deciding that we want to move into Gotham (and only
part of Gotham) in the same way, while also pissing off a lot of the wealthier and more influential Gotham natives? That's not going to end well.
I agree if we build a tower in Gotham it's after the Court is gone but i want to figure out how to make Talon's before there eradicate
The Court is going to be here for a
while.
Unfortunately, learning how to make Talons is going to require, essentially, winning a shadow war with the Court on its own turf... and that's after we find out they exist at all and then find out enough about them to know about the Talons. Technically, I suppose that putting a Tower in Gotham would make that more likely... but only because it increases the chance that one or more Talons would attack us. That doesn't feel like a benefit to me.
