A bit new to the game. I use to play years ago but was young and didn't have any strategy. I played my first round on the express server just now and learned a lot. That's just a bit of background information before i get into the point of my post.

I saw someone with 500 construction sites today and i thought to myself, that seems ridiculous. So, i decided to do a few maths. Forgive me if this information exists somewhere else and is more complete because my mathing is a little rough. I don't account for the 5 buildings per turn you get without any construction sites for instance. But it doesn't affect my point to much

Say for instance you generally end the game with say 10,000 acres. The amount of turns required to build up those acres can be broken down like this. 10,000 acres divided by X buildings per turn equals turns - 4X. or 10,000/x = t - 4x. Doing some basic calculus, where dt/dx equals 0 you get x^2 = 2500 or x = 50. So 50 buildings per turn equals 200(180) construction sites tops. feel free to check my math if you know how cuz it's been a long time since i took calculus and i could be wrong.

With 500 construction sites you spent 580 turns on building buildings. with 180 construction sites you spent 400 turns. Even if your goal is 20,000 acres, you still only need 70 bpt or 280(260) construction sites. That's 660 turns for 500 and 565 turns for 280. your saving almost 180 and 100 turns. Factoring in that to get 20,000 acres you gotta do some waring, completely changes that though. But I'm pretty sure it makes it fewer construction sites, not more.

Well that's my quota for taking a game to seriously for the week. I'm off to waste my time somewhere else.

tl;dr

A way to get a general idea of how many construction sites you need would be to take the number of acres you normally end a round with. divide that by 4. then square root that. then multiply by 4 and subtract 20. 180 seems like a good number of construction sites to me.

Everything you said is corret.

The only additional factors you may not have considered is rebuilding into Military Bases at the end of the set.

Which would effectively mean your building up to 10k acres, then ur destroying and rebuilding 10k acres. (therefore effectively your building a total of 20k acres). But even then if your a farmer to build 500 CS as the start is wasted, you can build enough CS to get to 10k acres with optimal turns. And then beef up your CS count just before switching with max gain per turn instead of doing it at 2k acres and gaining fluff all stock

But another factor you left out which has the opposite effect to the above paragraph is your not getting 500 CS in the first 500 turns. Your prob at 2k acres when you get CS from say 200 CS to 500 CS. So that gain is only realised on the 8k thats left to be built


Anyway everything you said is correct, just saying if you want you can look more involved into it and start making it more complex.

/end my pointless post.

i'd call one eighty well short of how many cs's you should have.. assuming you're going past ten thousand acres, which i can only imagine one would want to do?

Not really.

I often go 220 CS

It depends on which server you're playing (more turns = more acres) and, as Drinks pointed out, whether you intend to rebuild MBs at the end of the set.

Old formula

IDEAL BPT =sqrt(AcresToBuildOtherThanCS*GvtCS/4)
GvtCS
Normal 1
Theo 1.4
Dict 0.7

I however use this chart
Ideal BPT
Acres ----------CS
0 -- 400 ------------ 20
401 -- 900 --------- 40
901 -- 1600 -------- 60
1601 -- 2600 ------ 80
2601 -- 3600 ------ 100
3601 -- 5000 ------ 120
5000 -- 6400 ------ 140
6400 -- 8200 ------ 160
8201 -- 10000 ---- 180
10000 -- 12400 --- 200
12401 -- 14600 --- 220
14601 -- 17000 --- 240
17001 – 20000 --- 260
20001---23000 --- 280

Not perfect but close enough to get an idea of where you want to be.

More than likely the country with 500 CS was planning a switch to jump with at the end of the set.

express it too short of a set 500 CS is wasting a ton of turns unless you start grabbing early and grab consistently all set. otherwise the additional 300 turns spent is a waste.

Another thing to consider is if you get grabbed on your way to your land goal, you are building that land twice. OTOH if you capture buildings that are of the right type, that saves you from having to build some acres.

500 sounds insane unless your getting like 50k acres or something and then still

anoniem (probably) used to build 1000 cs's at start on some server (old Earth not EE).

i will always defer to drinks!

take his advice, he's quite the talented player.

where do you play for alliance, drinks, and do you play express or any solo servers?

drinks is prolly in na.