Say i want to play farmer. Is it better to start as a techer to say 3500 labs and tech out agri tech to 200k? Then switch to farmer? And buy other techs from selling bushels? Or best to tech it out then switch and top up other techs?

that depends bushels price, if its highish like 40 then then its better to batchexplore and build and sell bushels and buy techs, if price is 36 or under then teching might be good.

If you're switching to farmer, you should get bus/res/agri in a 15-15-70 ratio before switching to farmer.

The way I do farmer is I get to about 560-580 tpt on 1900ish acres (with 40 bpt), then I get about 8k each bus/res techs, then about 40k-45k agricultural tech. After that I switch to farmer, do a batch explore from 1900 to 3800 acres, and then rebuild as farmer on 3800 acres. Then, I spend the next 80-160 turns building even more construction sites, and spending 80-90% of the proceeds of my food sales on more technology, and just 10-20% of it on military. Thus, before I start expanding beyond 3800 acres, I should have over 100k total technology points in my production techs, often over 120k.

thanks.

I got bpt to about 30 i think which was about 100 cs. Then i build about 300 farms to keep food production up enough to sell bushels to explore and build labs up to 3500 labs to sit me total just under 4k acres. Then tech biz, mil, weapons and agri. I got mil to about 40k, biz at 40k, weapons at 40k and agri to 180k then explore out to 10,000 acres building farms. Then drop labs and build out res in farms. Then sell food on market to buy military, to grab up for 20k acres building farms out to 20k, then top up tech and finish around 18mil nw... :( I get stuck there.

How do i jump from their?

that strategy i find only works in a good tag, otherwise i get him and stuff's up the strategy. :)(

I do that startup in primary. You should not have any farms while you're teching, and you should tear down your labs as soon as you are no longer using them. You're also teching way way too long. Teching only 60k points at 1900 acres has always worked well for me. You're allowed to buy tech, you don't have to produce all the tech you ever use.

so tech to 230% or around 60K agri. your saying tech it out, tear down labs build farms. Explore or hit out build farms and buy tech??? In a simple form ?

Yes, but make sure you spend a lot of time building construction sites after switching & growing to 3800 acres - that gets your tech levels right back up to good levels again, rather than starting to try and grow fast when your technology levels cannot sustain fast growth.

I don't know if the markets are still the same as they were last time I played, but I never found a tech startup to be that effective. It seemed that by the time I was done with the exploring and building phase, tech prices were low enough to make the tech start phase unnecessary. I remember adding up the cost of tearing down all those labs to rebuild, the turns where most of your land is producing nothing, and finding that just focusing on growth until tech prices came down a bit was the way to go.

Of course, that was 5 years ago. Maybe the markets rise and fall at different points in the reset now.

tech prices are over 3k and near 4k or over until 4th week of set (2 months sets) and then they drop to 2k and lower.

Have you tried doing a tech start on under 2k acres and being fully converted before turn 400? If not, you're doing it too slowly.