hah! someone has too much time on their hands :P not bad... still, all those *'s kinda confuse things, but 6.5/10 - you're ahead of xinhuan... so far...

it might look better if *'s would be -'s or just normal dots.

1 possibility is to do it with dots as market curves and lines being fillers.

I like how this thread has become the second longest thread on this forum in a matter of days!

longest thread in strat room.

lol, I demand an "OLDMAN says" thread!

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crest: nice axe. :P

why are so you good xinhuan?

he's nerd. :P

HEY XINHUAN!

HOW THE HECK DID YOU DO THAT?

NICE ROUND!

HA!

SAM

^_^ I'm glad you noticed!

About 30 days of teching at 2.5b a day, coupled with reselling food for profits, catching 2 food peaks and selling down nearly perfectly with Decay bonus, and doing an end of set sale.

Hey Xinhuan,,

How can I have Millions of Tanks, Troops, Jets, a few hundred thousand total population, but somehow the small minority of my population that label themselves as Humanitarians find a way to stop my massive military.

Shouldn't I just be able to round up and kill these humanitarians? Do I have to be a Dictatorship for that to work? How would I calculate the PCI loss for killing civilians?

Apparently, the humanitarians are your tank drivers.

it would be nice sometime to get rid off humanitarians but sadly its not possible.

Xinhuan - I'm playing Theocracy running half farms and half markets to lower my black market prices but my black market is stilllllll like $10 over. Can you give me some advice please

markets? you mean mil bases? whole set tmbr sux bit-alot and running double strat sux0rs even more, 1st get military tech and if you are going to be theo farmer (yucky) then agri tech too and get rid off mil bases since you need those quite much to have significant effect to priv. prices and convert those to farms.

Mathematically, it doesn't pay to run half of any strat and half of a second strat. You should go 90% farms and the other 5% of your land should just be construction sites and some indies for producing spies.

Xinhuan I enjoy playing reseller in other games. if I want to do a theo reseller what should my building percents be? also if I want farmer is theo really the best race for me?

Also if Im supposed to run 90% military bases for a reseller how do i get tech if I dont build any labs?

You must get the tech _before_ you build any Military Bases.

Farms produce food.
Labs produce Tech.
Rigs produce OIl.
Bus/Res produce $$.
Indies produce military.

But Military Bases produce nothing. All it does is lower your upkeep by a little bit, and lower your private purchase price.

It isn't really a viable strategy to finish anywhere near the top, except for destocking on cheap military after amassing a huge stockpile over the first 80% of the reset.

The only way a Theo reseller makes money is through reselling PM units to public - the cash earned from this is _far_ lower than all other strategies, especially if public prices are terrible (Jets/Turrets are $110ish on Primary atm), and nobody buys troops/tanks on Solo servers.

Generally speaking, people stop spending any turns once you go 90% MBs for the rest of the reset, the high upkeep costs (for keeping so much army to resell with) kills or exceeds most of the income from reselling and it becomes a net loss to spend any turns.

Xinhuan, I have a question for you. I'm comparing a pure commie indy in Primary right now to a indy/farmer rainbow.

Food $50 = $55 after commission
Turret $117 = $105 after commission
Selling one turret can buy 1.914 bushels.
If you didn't have commission, that would be 2.34.

Turret production on one acre: 1.35 * 1.86 * 1.55 = 3.892
Bushel production on one acre: 5.3 * 2.2 = 11.66
Foregoing production of one turret can gain 2.996 bushels.

Part of this is the commission factor and part of it is just that food is currently more profitable than industries are right now. So let's look at the set average.

Bushel 40 = 44
Turret 128 = 115.2
If not for commissions, selling a turret buys 3.2 bushels, better than the 2.996 mark - indies still have had a better overall set than farmers. With commie commissions, selling one turret can buy 2.618 bushels on the average prices for this reset, not even taking into account that the final average price will probably be higher than 40.

Also not taking into account tech of course for which I'm just presuming nice numbers. To get a second tech, ag tech which in this case wouldn't ordinarily even be a secondary tech, it'd be empty and useless, to get it up to something near that would take a lot of tech points. I guess that's what really kills it. If you were leeching tech, though, hehe... Otherwise, well, you'd want about 575,000 ag tech, for about $1900/pt let's just say (who knows when exactly you're buying this stuff...), so that's $1,092,500,000 in tech. Not as much as I expected actually.

So, Xinhuan, my question is, how much money would the farms save over the course of the round? Would it equal to over $1b?

Xinhuan the great I appreciate your advice. I will keep it farmer. After reading the wiki pages on governemnts it appears republic would be the best way to go to farm. If i wanted to build FARM TECH do i need to build labs before I build farms? that dosn't make sense what percentage % of my land would you reccomend i devote to labs?

rep is good as farmer due exploration bonus, but fasc has food prod. bonus and demo doesn't have taxes and has tech bonus. you buy tech with money you get from sales but if you want to tech agri tech then few days (2-3) techphase with 2-300 tpt per turn.

@blid Your calculations only hold if food was $50 all set long, and only if you actually stock food.

Flaw 1) Food isn't $50 all set long. Food is typically 40ish in the first 30-40 days of the reset, and turret prices a lot more than 117, so it isn't remotely near worth it to get any farms before food closes in on $50, and turrets drop to $117.

Flaw 2) You haven't accounted for the fact that after selling turrets to buy food, you still have to sell the food at a later date at ANOTHER 10% commission loss (You still incur this 10% if you built farms for the food to sell). Also food depreciates in value, the $50 food would drop, causing an even further loss. Based on all this alone, a commie shouldn't stock at all, and should just grab until it is time to tech up and cash out.

The farms wouldn't save any money, especially if it's only producing at $33-34 per food in the last 5 days of the set.

NOTE: I'm assuming a 60 day reset here (i.e not Express), you'll have to shorten durations accordingly if it is on Express.

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You don't build labs! There are generally 2 ways for this

Method A) Farm start -> Farmer

You start building farms from the start right away, and use whatever remainder cash you have at the end of each day to buy more Agri tech from the public market. (Don't overspend on buying units and grabbing/building too much land). You want to grow your Agri tech% by maybe 3% or more everyday.


Method B) Tech start -> Farmer

This is a bit more complicated. Generally, you would build an initial 200-300 (indy+farm) which would generate enough cash for you to explore and build another 1.6k labs (so you reach 1920 acres in total) at 40 BPT.

Then you spend ~100 turns teching mainly agri, and some bus/res/weapons. Then you tear down all your labs, and rebuild them all into farms. At this point, you're 90% farms, 5% indies (for making spies) and 5% CS, and you're a farmer with a good initial tech base.

Then everyday just buy enough tech to maintain the tech%, because the additional production gained from having the tech generates the money to buy more tech to maintain the same tech %.

Although this method means you'll be behind other countries in land size by 1-2 days, you will eventually catch up due to having superior food production (and you won't really have to buy any tech in the first 2 days after the tech start).

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Another note is that your "tech per turn (TPT)" has a "% of your land thst is labs" multiplied in it. So the higher % labs you have built out of all your land, the more TPT you get. Anyone playing a techer should be ideally 90% labs, and later on 99% labs when indies (spy production) is no longer needed.

Essentially, the moral is to specialize, and buy everything else you need. A casher doesn't attempt to produce tech or military, and so has no need for Agri tech or Indy tech.

I agree that the farms wouldn't be beneficial for stocking. But I think that Blid has a point when you consider your per turn food usage. I don't know the numbers in how much food a 60k commie would use. I imagine quite a bit. So it may pay for the 1B in the 20 or so days it is a relevant strategy. You would also sell the agri tech at the end of the set to accumulate some of that 1B back (probably less than 25%).

if theo with basic def (and highish spal aka lots of spies) and with 13k acres uses 10k+ bushels per turn while having nice amount of agri tech then 60k acres commy would use 60kish bushels per turn. each farm giving 5.3 bushels per turn commy would need alot farms to have positive bushel production even with agri tech and that land would be away from indy production and money spent on agri tech would be away from indy tech and bushels stocking.

@AndrewMose You would have to buy the Agri tech to begin with, and then sell it for a large loss (20% commission loss, and falling tech prices). I really don't think its profitable at all. In the last 5 days of the reset, 1 acre of indy can easily produce nearly twice as much $$ as 1 acre of farm at $160 prices and $37 food.

Xinhuan, check my post again, I used set average prices as well as the current $50 price.

Also, you don't make more farms than you need and sell food. That's not the idea. You only make the food to support your country.

Let's say an indy country at 30m NW eats roughly 50k food a turn.

Quoting:
"Bushel production on one acre: 5.3 * 2.2 = 11.66"

That means I need to have 50k / 11.66 = 4288 farms to have a net food income of 0 per turn. Let's work out how much 4288 indies would produce.

Quoting:
Turret production on one acre: 1.35 * 1.86 * 1.55 = 3.892

So 4288 * 3.892 = 16688 Turrets

Selling 16688 turrets at $128 with 10% commission gives 1922457 dollars. That can buy 43692 bushels at $40 with 10% commission. So, I would have saved 6307 bushels this 1 turn.

That 6307 bushels is 252k dollars. Multiplying that by 54 turns in a day, that gives a savings of 13.6m dollars over a single day at 30m NW, with a food upkeep of 50k food.

You'll save more if your food upkeep is higher (and thus more farms in proportion), and save less if food upkeep is lower. If I assumed 50k food upkeep as a reset long average (is this reasonable??), I would need 84 days in the reset to make back the 1.1b cost of buying Agri tech, less whatever Agri tech I can sell on the last day at $600 per tech point.

if he keeps up good defense/offense and highish spal his food consume would jump to 80kish at mid level.

It will only be that high for a casher, Marshal.

Oh great Xinhuan. I began this set a few weeks ago having just discovered EE. after many years. I forgot to change my government type from Monarchy when I began. With two weeks left in the set can I change government type without penalty? Forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere.

1st change is always penaltiless, 2nd change has penalty which can be very high.

I think any change from Monarchy has no penalty.

there was something about changing to mono from x govt and then building up or something else and then switching to z govt in old earth but i think it was debated to be waste of time.

I thought it was pretty common, atleast on the alliance server, mono -> rep -> mono -> demo/theo

@AmosMoses You can switch from Monarchy to other governments with no penalty at any point in the reset.

kingofthezeus: don't think so since it doesn't give any benefits. some do it (at least 1 laffer in top10 did it last set) but is it worthwhile is main question.

As a startup, it is on par, not better or worse. Some MD countries did it this set.

yea at start it can give some help but later on set its just extra hassle.

hm

if you are starting your destock, and you plan to switch to theo. You should first switch to monarchy to sell all of your bushels at a higher price on your private, then switch to theo without any cost of the switch. Of course this isn't at all helpful if you sell on the public market.

Ah, that looks solid, thanks... There's also a lot of other moving pieces of course, like the fact that now, when food prices are higher, you're also consuming more, and that you can keep the farms you capture when you grab instead of demolishing them and rebuilding, which could save several hundred million dollars. Hum..

With this set's average prices:

Bushel production on one acre: 5.3 * 2.2 = 11.66

That means I need to have 50k / 11.66 = 4288 farms to have a net food income of 0 per turn. Let's work out how much 4288 indies would produce.

Quoting:
Turret production on one acre: 1.35 * 1.86 * 1.55 = 3.892

So 4288 * 3.892 = 16688 Turrets

Selling 16688 turrets at *$121* with 10% commission gives 1817323 dollars. That can buy 34800 bushels at *$47* with 10% commission. So, I would have saved 15200 bushels this 1 turn.

That 15200 bushels is 786k dollars. Multiplying that by 54 turns in a day, that gives a savings of 42.4m dollars over a single day at 30m NW, with a food upkeep of 50k food.

$1.1b / 42.4m = 26 days

So the market can have a vast impact on this

Xinhuan The Great. Your advice has been very helpful to me so far. I have another question for you if you would be so kind to answer it.

So im doing 90% farms and the rest construction sites. Im keeping my agriculture tech at 224% and buying jets with the rest of my cash. but now Im spending less cash then I make.

I used my turns every 80(is that a good turn amount to use?) and when I finish I have about 14mil grains which once sold equals about 500mil cash which i think is pretty good.

Can you tell if i should start building cash producing buildings?

No. Since you are a farmer, you should stay farmer, so that your agriculture tech can benefit any new farms you build.

If you were to build ent/res buildings instead, and you have very little res/bus techs, then your new buildings would earn less per acre.

If you have extra cash, use it to raise your res/bus/weapons tech, and some military as well. Production tech (for your strategy type) is usually an upward spiral (the additional production gained more than covers the cost of the tech.)

If you still have extra cash, then buy military, or just store the cash in your country.

Im sorry whats production tech? also what good is building res,bus, or weapons tech if I dont build thoes buildings?

Weapons tech increases the effectiveness of your units (jets/turrets/etc) when they fight.

Your country's population still creates tax income every turn, so even though you don't have any ent/res buildings to increase their tax revenue, having some res/bus techs helps your income on the overall. 160%/160% is a good amount to have if you're not a casher (a casher is one that builds ent/res only for income).

production tech is agri tech for farmer since it increases bushels production and for indy its indy tech since it increases indy production and casher needs busi and resi techs (w/o those your income wouldn't be high).