The Techer/Reseller strategy:

Government: Theocracy

Buildings:

As a techer it is VERY important to specialize. That means don't keep any buildings that do not compliment the strategy. Basically, this should be your building layout:

Industrial: 5 - 10% of your total land

Construction sites: 3.5 - 5% of your total land

Reseach Labs: All remaining land.

Your industrial Complexes only have one function, and that is to produce spies. Therefore, you should make sure that your industrial production is set to 100% spies. 5% indy complexes will yeild about a 25:1 spy ratio. 10% will give you about a 50:1 ratio. As for construction sites, you should shoot for 5 or 6% just before you convert, and keep it up to 5% until you have about 6000 acres. Then you can start to let the number slide--It would be kind of ridiculous to have 6% of your land as CS's if you had 12000 acres (720 CS [about 240 builds per turn]).

Procedure:

As the name infers, a techer spends most of his day researching. There are some things that you MUST do each day, like attack the kill list, and sell your goods on the market place



Here's how I would spend an average 46 turn day:

Attack the kill list - 6 turns

Purchase offensive military

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Landgrab - 2 turns

build on new land - 10 turns

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research - 26 turns

buy defensive military

Sell military - 1 turn

Sell tech - 1 turn

Landgrabbing each day is not necessary (or recommended) if you follow my attack strategy, which I have detailed below. If you do not landgrab on a given day, allocate those turns to research.

Note: Our turns are VERY valuable. Each turn spent teching is worth a LOT of money. An average 5000 acres country should be able to produce about 2000 tech points per turn. In the long run, that works out to about 4.5-5.5M dollars per turn. Teching is where about half of our money comes from.

Selling goods: (My secret to success)

Here's why it's called the techer/*reseller* strat: Not only do you sell your tech each day (like a regular techer) but you also sell ALL the military you can each day. (This essentially doubles your netgaining potential) Since you are running a theocratic government, you get a -25% military cost bonus. (That is basically your profit margin when you sell military). You see, when you purchase items from your private market (PURCHASES on the Earth 2025 menu), they are cheaper than the items on the public market (MARKET on the Earth 2025 menu). You can lower your purchasing costs even further by maxing out your military tech. (This increases your profit margin, while decreasing the upkeep costs for your existing military forces).

Make sure that you sell you military AND THEN your tech, not the other way around. You tech helps to keep your costs down, and if you sell it first, then you have to spend a turn (selling your military) without the effects of the tech you just sent to the market. (The effects are not major, but I'm a stickler for efficiency.) J

Now, here's the other important trick I've cultivated:

Techers are very 'land-thin' (I have yet to come up with a better term) by nature. Thus, they are not often targets for landgrabs. Resellers are also land-thin by nature. When you combine the two strats, it is possible to achieve significant growth while sustaining a 2400:1 NW/land ratio. Compare that to any other strat, and I think you will be VERY impressed. (Please, save your applause for later.) Consequently, us techer/resellers are NOT attractive landgrab targets. So, here's the question that I ask you: If we aren't going to be attacked very much, why have a big defense?

Instead, concentrate on having an *extremely* offensively geared military. I'm talking about 80% jets, 20% turrets. That kind of thing. As I explained earlier, our turns are VERY valuable, so we want to spend the least number possible attacking other countries. With my system, you should only need to make ONE landgrab every three days or so.

With my military ratio, you should be able to hit countries slightly LARGER than your own. This has two major advantages:

-Your military gets an attack strength bonus when attacking countries larger than you.

-Your attack gains are increased by about 6% when you attack someone bigger than you.

So, if you do an aggressive planned strike against someone larger than you, you will typically capture between 15 and 20% of his land!!! If you are a 7M NW country, you should have about 6k land. You should be able to find targets that have 11k land. Even if they retal you successfully (which they probably will) they will only get about half or two thirds of their land back. You will NEVER get the short end of the stick again! (Unlike bottom feeders, who sometimes get retalled for four times what they took.)

When should you attack?

Well, the private market, as you may have noticed, is limited. It is restocked a little bit each time you gain a turn. The amount it is restocked by is related to how much land you have. So, if you find that you are running low on units to purchase on your private market, it's time to go get some more land! (Sir Galvin suggested to me that I should try to collect 30k acres by the end of the reset. This would ensure a top 100 finish more most players.)