Aug 4th 2011, 18:43:21
estimated calculations for building cost in cash for 3 PS attacks a day (assume each grab = 11% of your land, thus 3 grabs = 1/3rd of your land, and ignore the 1500 base build cost for simplicity).
then we get
build cost = (landsize*3)*(landsize/3) = landsize^2
If your income per acre per turn is 500 (assuming mediocre techs, not great techs), and that 1/5th of that income goes towards tech & military, that leaves $400 per acre per turn that can go towards buildings. Thus with 72 turns in a day you get 28,800 per acre per day to put towards buildings. That would leave just $7200 per acre per day to put towards oil, military and tech. Assuming it all goes into tech, and that tech prices are $2400 after tax (which only occurs very late in the set), then you get 3 points per acre of tech per day while your country grows by 15%. This means you find an equilibrium tech amount of 20 points per acre. If tech prices were $3600 after tax, which is a reasonable estimation for earlier in the set, it puts you at 13.33 tech points per acre, and thats without leaving any money over for military or oil purchases.
If you get the building costs bonus to 50% by mid-set, then the equation is changed to
build costs = 0.5 * (landsize^2)
From the above estimations, you can then see that with the assumptions I've made of $500 income per acre, 1/5th going to oil, military, and tech, and no build costs bonus, that a country can grow to 28.8k acres before its economy no longer permits it to rebuild from 3 PS attacks each day. With a 50% build costs bonus, this amount is changed to 57.6k acres. More than likely, you won't be able to maintain $500 income per acre per turn while landtrading with FFA tech prices, so these amounts are generous estimates that would be difficult to attain. So those two figures are really the cap for how big you could grow while still doing 3 PS attacks a day, assuming that bpt was not an issue. For 28.8k acres doing 3 PS attacks a day, thats about 150 bpt needed, and at 57.6k acres doing 3 PS attacks a day, thats about 300 bpt needed.
Having your farms doing more then 3 PS attacks a day is highly unlikely. Its just not feasible after the first week or so of landtrading. And during the first week of landtrading, you should be spending a lot of turns building construction sites, rather than spending every single turn just grabbing & building production buildings.