This has bugged me since I first started playing earth in 1999 (though it's not super important). Why are the land measurements in acres? How much sense does it make that a country 10-20-30-40-50k acres large has them entirely filled with buildings and covered in heaps of military units? What sense does it make that a country operates 50-100x their population in military units? Are they robotic?

I don't think there would be a perfect solution to this (that doesn't destroy the current way the game is played) but I think one solution that is slightly less comical than what is currently in place would be to change the name of acres to "sectors" so that their exact size is a mystery. It's pretty hard for me to imagine a country building everything in one acre lots.

you grabbed 100 Sectors just doesn't have the same ring to it...

50 000 acres = 202.342821 square kilometers

my country was almost 1/3 the size of the city i live in last set! lol...


we could make them hectares, or km^2 or we could use myriad or hectad or tetrad or carucate or oxgang or ploughgate or pennyland or ounceland or any of various other traditional measurements...


But acres are simple enough... we could let people get bigger I suppose... and make building cost not related to area; but it's more competitive this way! :)

Lol it's not a gameplay issue (which is why it's easy enough to ignore). It's just always been hilarious to me that countries smaller than cities have piles and piles of military units on them. I always imagined giant turret walls boxing in a country.

There would be no perfect name change and making the usage of acres more logical would ruin the game. It's funny none the less, though.

Or, for argument's sake, how about this?

Inflate acres across the board by 10x or so. People start with, grab for, and explore for 10x as many acres.

Admins would be able to fine tune buildings' cost-vs-benefit a little more- Think "how many acres would a residential zone require?" It's definitely arguable that the admins get all the fine tuning necessary by adjusting the formulae etc behind the scenes, and any further tools to tune would just muddy the process.

It certainly would make it more realistic. Residential zones, farms, and military bases take up large swaths of acreage. A research lab or an enterprise zone wouldn't take as much.

make it that military units have to be civilians first, so the more civilians you have the more military units you can have. obviously populations should be bigger than they are now then

If is purely for the sake of realistic(er)countries we can make acres 1000 times more abundant and change acres to acres/1000 in all formulas =P

spawn if we goin for realism id like some random bear attacks killin off the slower population