So you are the target of a GS kill run which comes up short. Maybe the enemy did not have enough turns, maybe you are an ace stonewaller. Anyway, what next?

The answer is that your production is crippled. This is because of a programming change which links production to population.

You will want to get production back up again and, other things being equal, this is the way to do it. Of course you want to increase your population but meanwhile you also want to get production moving upwards asap. The first thing to do is to dump as much residential tech onto the market as you can. Try to get it to the smallest level as you can as quickly as you can. This is because your production is linked to the proportion between your actual population and your maximum population. So you want to reduce maximum population. (Maybe you also want to get rid of residences on your land, for the same reason, but I have not tested that.)

Until you can get back up to 20% of maximum population production is going ton stay at the same, miserly level. So put tax to zero. But, oddly, once you get back to 20% or more you should change tax to 70%. This is because the formula for the effect starts with "(1-0.95 x tax rate)". If you put tax to 70% and monitor production turn by turn you will see production rising. If you are a techer put tax to zero on any non teching turn and to 70% whenever teching.

Putting tax at 70% comes with the cost of slowing the recovery of population. But it does give you better production while recovering. If cash and other resources are abundant you may just be able to set tax at zero until recovered. But mostly that won't be the case and you will find the above technique useful.

I got gs'd down to about 10% pop and to recover I sold spies to buy food then (as a rep casher) dumped 50 turns into cashing. -70k ni turned into 1m ni by the end of it and my pop was back to over 100k. only worked because i was able to afford the 15-20 turns of negative income. thanks for this though if i'm in a tighter pinch i'll try it. Can you post one on recovery from mass AB? People who can't kill run i find just AB the fluff out of you!

I have no answer to getting flattened by ABs, Arkuss. Almost certainly you start by dropping most of the empty land (to cut the cost of re-building such acres as you can manage). But apart from that I have nothing to offer.

If you have a worthwhile chunk of Spy/Warfare tech you can turn into quite a surprisingly powerful suicide country after dropping the acres. :)

Going back to recovering from GSs an additional point is that you have to watch out for the point at which you have recovered enough population to get near your maximum because at that point setting tax to 70 will lose you population. So at that point put tax back to 35-37, whatever your favourite number is, and the job is done. Buying (or researching) some Residential is likely now to be a good idea.

if you are really fattened (like not much else left than few cs's) then depending if you have neg or pos income and money in hand and don't want to drop acres then build ents and res (if casher) and when you need money build cs's and back to ents and res.

Thanks for writing this out. I've been using some of your tactics (dumping res research, setting tax to 0.)

Difficulty I run into is not losing too much cash/turn that I can actually recover population. I have enough tech to sell (for now) to be able to sustain myself, but it's proving to be a slow road to recovery (all the while still being attacked.)

as a restart it takes 100 turns to recover to full production if not attacked again.

Didnt know about this change, ty.

It is really boring. You have to play turn by turn.

But this gets you to hate your opponent with a passion :) so it's all good.

Yes, money is a problem. I had a good chunk of cash in hand and could raise more by selling tech. You are protected from grabs by diminishing returns so I guess you could sell off turrets. I managed to absorb the further attacks and flattened my particular opponent in the end. I think we both enjoyed the battle but truly the tedium was hard to take.

If I'm in this mess again I'm going to experiment with the tax to zero aspect. It seems like the right thing to do but I have read some stuff which suggests it might not be right. The tax to 70% part of the technique I can vouch for.