What is the best way to recover from GSes? In other words, what is the fastest way to regain lost population?

If your pop is very low, your taxrate wont have an effect and you will regain 40 pop even at 0 taxrate.

If its higher, not sure of the exact number but likely ~1500 the lower your tax rate is the higher the regained pop.

Regain is also dependant on maximum population so in theory, exploring/building Residentials would increase your regain (by increasing max pop) but the effect is negligible due to the regain cap.

max(40,round(0.03*(1-taxrate)*currentpop)

where taxrate is between 0 and 0.7.
You cant regain more than that (but less is possible).

Once you have enough pop the cap will no longer be important to you and then maxpop kicks in.

If you want the exact math on that point... well... pm me or something.

Thanks for the clarification on the calculation, much appreciated. I dont need the exact math.

It really sucks to recover from GSes when you're a casher. I would go as far as saying you cant recover from mass gs as a casher if you have no stock left and your income is in the negative. I had to give up a fat country in express and start from scratch once.

That's not true at all. I had a dictator casher that walled 1300 something hits in a war a few years ago (a few different failed attempts to kill me days apart). A casher should always have business & residential techs to sell off for cash if needed, but as soon as their economy gets back on its feet, bus/res techs are more important than military (to a point, but if your bus/res is under say 150 or 160 as a casher, then you should be rebuying tech). You can also sell off military to generate cash if needed.

If you are a casher with no military and no tech, then you didn't have much of a country to begin with, or you did a very nice job stonewalling during a losing war effort.

Starting from scratch is a horrible option, as you lose all your construction sites and all your tech. Not to mention that your population doesn't start out any higher either. The only reason to start from scratch is if you are on an individual server fighting a group of players working as a team to screw you over who won't leave you alone. If you are on a team/alliance server, starting over would be a very selfish and harmful move.

The tax income when you have such low population that you get 40 population per turn regardless of tax rate is so small that you should set your tax rate to 0% at that point anyways. And you want to leave it at 0% until you get reasonably close to your maximum population with a 35% tax rate, probably to at least 2/3rds of that population

Do you ever give bad advice?

unless I am mistaken tax rate affects max pop so setting your tax rate to 0 would not help you regain pop any faster. It seems to me that setting your tax rate higher would be a better option as it would allow you to gain more income without affecting your pop negatively and then lower it back to normal when you were getting close to max pop (basically when pop growth starts shrinking per turn).

if setting tax to 0 or not helps depends how low pop has dropped.

Setting your tax rate to 0% does help. The population growth rate equation factors in your tax rate. Assuming that you are not anywhere near your maximum population, your population will increase by 3% of its current amount per turn with a 0% tax rate, but only by 1.95% of its current amount per turn with a 35% tax rate. If your population is under 1333, then your population will grow at 40 per turn regardless of your tax rate, but your tax income with so few civilians is so small that its not worth using the 35% tax rate just incase you forget to change it to 0% once you reach 1333 population.

Marshal - tax rate to 0% should always be done if you are under half of your potential maximum population with a 35% tax rate.

The equation is on the wiki site:
http://wiki.earthempires.com/...ulation#Population_Growth

Setting your tax rate to 0% can cause your country to be PCI killed. There is a potential downside.

Ah, good to know. How low can one let their PCI go before a 0% tax rate is unwise? Other than a low PCI, is there any reason to not use a 0% tax rate to recover from GS/BR/CM attacks?

[quote poster=Rockman; 7828; 154581]

yep unless pop has dropped too low like you said.