Jun 18th 2011, 0:12:06
Ideally, enough turrets that nobody can break you and take your land.
Of course, if you invest in tech and try to build a good country, you won't have enough resources to keep your defenses up to that level in the early-mid game.
Turrets are the best for pure defense, but because someone, somewhere will always have enough military (usually commies/techers) to hit you, then you need to ensure that they don't hit you too much.
Keep enough turrets to limit them to one or two hits at a time from readiness losses/ military being away on PS and enough tanks that it will take less than a day to be able to turn them into a parking lot from AB's if someone gets greedy and farms you.
Troops? You can probably live without them, useful for a casher to protect population or to destroy food stocks left in the country, but on the solo servers, killing a country is improbable.
As you get into the mid-late game however, prevention isn't the best course, if you plan on netgaining, you'll be trying to limit expenses while saving cash, keeping up adequate defense is fine, but going overboard to make yourself unbreakable is a little too much. Once you have enough cash on hand from stocking, you can always retaliate buy just buying enough jets to get your land back.
If in doubt, check the news in your game, mark off the numbers of people who are landgrabbing and spend a few turns spying on them and see what their militaries are at, so you can adjust accordingly.
You did make spies right? So many people in tourney have terrible spals...
edit: this is one of possibly many opinions, so don't take it as the absolute truth.