Dec 6th 2010, 21:45:07
What I did last round:
Commie indy start to ~3k acres/70 bpt, mostly all-x.
Short tech phase at 3-4k acres: bus/res first, then military/weapons/mil strat, then industrial. Total ~175k points. I was only able to acquire 1 research ally for this phase but he was nice enough to stick with me for the entire round which was a significant help.
Converted back to indy at about the same time that tech prices plummeted. Started grabbing aggressively but selectively. GDI is a game-changer in that it allows you to maintain only turrets, jets, and spies as long as you never attack another country more than once. Huge efficiency boost there. Fatal mistakes that I've made in previous rounds are knowingly attacking a country more than once because I didn't think they would retal and accidentally attacking a country more than once (that was the set when jajajajajajaaa turned me into a parking lot lol). In order to maximize efficiency, I always sent all of my jets out before playing turns. After making 1-2 PSs, I would switch to turret production, build on the new land, and explore/build more.
I only sold enough to buy tech, play turns, and build on new land. I kept high amounts of military, business, residential, and weapons tech and near maxed industrial tech. I didn't stock anything except for turns until the very last hours when I sold 15+ million turrets to play my final turns and buy out troops and tanks on my private market. The high public market prices definitely helped me but I sold most of my turrets for 149-159 on the last day, not the crazy high prices they were going for all set. I think the low tech prices helped me at least as much as the high military prices. Most of my NW was from my own military production during the last 12 hours.
It seemed a little wrong to be able to grab so aggressively without any real fear of retaliation. A couple people DH'd on me but that was really all they could do since I kept up on playing my turns and had good tech and allies. (I never had significant stocks of money or food to steal and had a decent SPAL anyway.) Maybe most of them deserved it for building countries with insufficient defenses OR maybe they should have been able to pull out all of the stops and reduce my readiness in order to retaliate. I'm really torn. This strat definitely wouldn't have flown before the new GDI. I know because I tried it LOL