Get ready for my dissertation. Preface: in my server 1 game, I'm currently ranked number 1, and in the tourney I'm around number 10. Yes, I buy food, as long as I have no trouble buying it at 2, 3, or 4 dollars. In the tourney, the price just skyrocketed, so I spent several turns building farms and agricultural technology; now I'm self-sufficient, but back when food was cheap, it was a better investment to build industry and research. Just think of all those hundreds of turns that I was churning out more military and more research per turn, while food was nice and cheap.

Here's my strategy. While still under new-player protection, DO NOT explore yourself into the top 10. Those nations have alot of land, hence their high networth, but most of them have not been building military, so once out of protection they are easy targets. I suppose there must be a successful strategy out there that employs this, but I don't know what it is.

You can sell your 100 military troops to Solaria under the private market (Purchase). Even though you don't get much in payment, at least you won't have to spend your early turns feeding them. Besides, you're under protection, so they're useless anyway.

From the beginning, you have to decide on your form of govt. There's alot of theories out there. Some pick communism because of the high industrial output. I've never tried it, so I don't know if I could make up for the finanacial strain. Republic is a good overall nation, but there is no strong strength (along with no major weaknesses). Democracy is a great money-maker. However, they have a military strength that's worse than Anarchy, so they become targets. If you start off with demo, I suggest not attacking at all. Just explore, and make sure you're as small as possible compared to your neighbors; build up alot of defense (100% turrets, then a mixture of turrets, tanks, troops, and spies). I don't know how to play tyranny, so no advice there. Sorry.

My personal favorite is dictatorship. You get good military bonuses, and people generally leave you (and tyrannies) alone. That is if you don't go overboard with unprovoked attacks.

Once you've decided on your form of govt (this is before you've taken a single turn), build 100% turrets in country management and switch your form of govt. You'll be in anarchy, and the population will be fleeing, so this is not a good time to increase your tax rate. Build construction sites until your population has recovered some stability. I highly recommend construction sites. For every four you build, you can build one extra building per turn of the other types (residence, enterprise, etc). It may look like a steep investment, but it's worth it especially in the beginning of the game. I must spend around a total of 60 turns building construction sites while under new player protection.

Along the way, build enterprise, residence, and a few farms to boost your population. And start building industrial complexes. Alot of them. Also along the way, slowly increase your tax rate, eventually up to 35%. You can always decrease it later if you think it would result in a higher total revenue (i.e., if you'd gain enough people to pay the lower taxes).

One detail to mention, that I don't employ, is to sell your turrets to Solaria as you build them so that you don't have to pay maintenance on them. I chose to keep them since their maintenance is so low.

When you reach turn 99, I suggest that you wait there and collect a bunch of turns. Check in every 18 hours to get your freebie turns. Don't worry abou t how much your ranking drops. You'll catch up easily.

When you're ready, pick a non-peak time to build up your country fast. No reason, except that it's awfully frustrating to wait one minute for every little turn. At this point, it's good to build at least 20 building per turn, and the more the merrier. Continue exploring and building. No need to fight with anyone at this stage when exploring is lucrative enough. Some people like to land grab the top ten because it's easy pickings (of course, you'd need offensive military). Your choice. Personally, I don't like to get side tracked in unnecessary wars.

It's your choice, but I not accept alliances at this point of moving up fast. You pay a portion of your networth for each alliance, and if they end up being 200 ranks behind you, that's probably not a worthwhile investment.

Oh, as soon as you bust out of protection mode, you should switch your industrial production to include some troops, tanks, and spies. Stay heavy on the turrets, but build some of the others in case some immature player decides to practice specialized attacks on you (not likely, but it's good to be prepared).

Alot of people don't like spies because there's always something like a 10% failure rate, even if your target has zero spies. It's still worth it. I have an easy time spying on potential targets because my spy net is almost always stronger. Later when you do alot of research, your spies will be the only protection for your technologies, against opponents who try to steal tech or perform other acts of sabotage.

So, build alot of industry. Military hardware will boost your networth really high. Later, switch to building research labs, but keep your industry (or at least alot of it), because every turn you take researching technology, you'll still be producing that hardware.

As a dictatorship, I start looking for other high ranking democracies and offer research and defensive and/or offensive alliances. Demo's have a great tech bonus, so they will research alot (well, the good ones will), and a dictator's military strength is pretty good compensation.

If the game lasts long enough (like in server 1), I plan to switch to democracy. But that's nother can of worms.

After a week or two, you'll see that most of the top ranked players are dictatorships. Then democracies start to move up. Eventually, I think it'll become mostly demo's up there.

After all this typing, I hope someone out there will try my strategy. The reason I'm writing all of these instructions is that I'm not in this to become the best due to the ignorance and inexperience of other players. What kind of victory is that?

One more piece of advice. If you decide to rely on the market for cheap food, keep a close eye on your food deficit and your food supply. If you ever run out of food, you lose a portion of your army. Not a huge setback (I've made that mistake a few times), but it's obviously better to avoid that situation.

That's it for my dissertation on nation-building. Yes, I have alot of opinions on attacking, but this is more than long enough.

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And that's how it was. I just cut and paste and bring it to you lot :)

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