Ive got a basic idea of the game and can crank up to about 6000 acres by just exploring and building.

I have tried two strategies but i seem to hit the ceiling around 6000 acres and 2.5m nw. Part of the ceiling i think is that i run with a small clan an we get farmed.

But how do these other guys make big jumps?

And gain big acres without attacking?

1. I first strat was a commuy indy. I understand build industrial, and sell the excess to buy tech, oil and food right?

But i seem to hit a ceiling when my food requirements are HUGE, and oil needed to keep grabbing for land is HUGE too. And tech is so expensive it seems its really slow to gain any real advantage with tech. Can someone please give a basic outline of what i am doing wrong here? Do i go 5% spies and rest jets and forget defence?

2. Second strategy is demo farmer. This has been easier then the one above. Again i am all explore. About 180 construction sites. I think its about 60 buuldings per tern. i have 5% indy for spies. The rest are farms. Now this strat i first built labs and teched agriculture out to about 170% or 30,000 points. Then dropped them and built farms, Which again has worked great up until about 6000 acres and gaining about 35,000 bushles per turn. I am selling these, and buying military? But the gains are just not very big and others seem to cruise right past me?

What am i doing wrong? I really want to know how to develop a 20+ mil country. I don't want top 10 but i want a decent country size.

Anhy help is MUCH appreciated.

If the trouble is being able to protect yourself, going Commie/Indy might be easier. Make sure you sell often so that your expenses aren't too high and invest in tech that will make your country produce more.

In general, going farmer is easier, but if you don't have good tag protection then you will always hit a ceiling regardless of what you play. In some sense, when you are farmed so hard, people will only be able to get 50-100 acres off of you per hit. So you can focus on offense and make sure that if they hit you, you hit them back for 1k+ acres. Then people will be more wary of hitting you, so you can then focus on getting bigger countries.

also get bpt higher (80 as farmer and higher as indy) also as farmer invest to busi et resi and military tech so you have posivite income.

not that easy to achieve 20m nw in small tag unless gets pacted totally.

i disagree with marshall.

bpt depends on land goal.

this rough estimate should be sufficient.

50 bpt- 10k land
60 bpt- 15k land
70 bpt- 20k+ land

anything over that unless you are a techer IMO is a waste. remember, each turn you spend building, you are STILL producing income (whether its food, cash or military).

tech start is good, but going with farmer id get agr over 200 before switching. if you run indy you can do an indy start and tech to 150 pct (assuming you start teching at around 3k land).

tournament is setup where you can still easily win a B/C game without making a single attack. other servers are a little harder, but express you should easily make a top 10. primary and alliance as a bit tricky. i cannot comment on alliance as i dont play but primary, you wont do well without lging.

the trick is to have about a 45/45 jet/turret ratio, some spies and some tanks. if you are hitting a ceiling, that means you did not spend enough time during your "tech phase". a farmer needs to have agri over 200 at all times, prefrebly in the 210-215 pct range, and 220 when stockpiling. during that time, you will also be buying bus/res to offset expenses.

you should not be hitting a ceiling all explore until over 20k acres, and you will not explore over 20k acres in any game other than maybe primary..

for more advanced strategy, you can do something like this.

for tech start get your bpt 40. build around 1k indies. batch explore to 2500-3000A or so. build about 2500 labs (leave around 500 indies)

start teching. for farmer, agr over 200. bus/res to 120. weap to 120.

for indy. bus/res to 120, weap to 120, indy to 150.

switch.

then bpt to its goal. and start exploring and/or attacking.

i have never reached a ceiling, even with an all explore country. good luck.

If you're beginning, go w/ Commie/Indy.

The key is to not be landfat and attract hits. Even if your defense holds, you are still wasting turrets defending.

Go 35% jets/ 60% turrets / 5% spy.

Also raise your tax rate to 50%. This will keep your population down (which is a good thing for a Commie/Indy) - i.e., less food and you don't need the money since you're primarily selling.

Also don't overbuy tech. You only need industrial tech, everything else is a luxury that you should only get once you got the hang of the game and you got plenty of spare cash. Don't sell your jets too cheap - at least 125.

That's about it. Just don't get landfat so you don't get hit and you can keep growing.

P.S. I used to be the top netgainer w/ MD back in 2000. A long time ago... and just recently returned.

Dont raise tax to 50%. Might have worked before, now it doesnt work at all since more income will come from taxes than wasted on food.

I used to be stuck at 4000-500 land actually. The key is to get only jets and turrets with a very bare minimum of tanks/troops and always start out the day by buying jets for landgrabs. After some landgrabs, build up and spend the money getting turrets.

I will admit that indy is a very tough strat. Gotta sell max military daily, and to be safe sell at two different prices (one priced to definitely sell, one priced as a goal).

the key is to do a tech start.


most servers will make that easier to grow. reason being. you can get by with less land because you have tech.

because you have less land, you are less attactive to grab unless someone spys you..

tech is expensive early so you dont have to sell as much to take your turns, = less fluctuation of nw = less chance of selling, getting attacked before you log back on again (always the dreaded situation for a commie, is selling and getting hit while youre vulnerable before getting a chance to run your turns).

some say its better explore and build and buy miltary (and bushels if not farmer) and techs with excessive cash than do techstart.

@marshal: JJ is obviously referring to the advantages of a tech start if you do not have tag protection. Your comment isn't really helpful or enlightening in this case.

a tech start is a safe play because it will help prevent the many pitfalls and places where a newb screws up. most critically getting too fat too early, and also not being able to produce enough to keep up and slowly dropping in ranks and then being farmed by the top players.

its an idiot proof way for beginner netgaining.

being a techie or commy is an easy strat if you want to gain a huge networth

Okay so when you say tech agri to 200 do you mean 200k of agri tech points? Should I worry about business and military costs? as I noticed cash per turn can drop to negative per turn... And as I am selling food to buy military that's a big part of the expense.

Also my ceiling was that I was at 2.5mil nw, nd I wassnt gaining much networth. I'd make around 30k bushels per turn, then either explore at like 10 acres per turn and build more farms. I'd sell bushels And either buy military or tech.

My question was more About how do the countries around me jump from 2.5mil nw up to 10mil or 20 mil? And go from my 6k acres to 20k? When I can't see them making any grabs??

I prefer to build farms up to 2500, then destroy 2000 nd build labs and tech agri, sell bushels Nd build labs up to 4k labs, max out agri, bus, res, warfare, sdi, and then destroyabs and convert to farms... Then expire to 6 k and at that point I'm at about 2.6mil nw.. Do I just keep exploring, build farms then sell on market for military ?

batch explore aka you save up to max turns in hand (120 + 6 from login and maybe 8 or 12 bonuspoints used for 4 or 6 extra turns) and then spend all turns in hand to explore.

don't switch between techer and farmer, it just costs you money.

busi and resi tech help you to keep your income positive.

you can just keep exploring (batch exploring 2-3 times peer week) and building up and selling bushels and buying what you need or start grabbing land (which is risky since you might lose more on retal or get missiled or artillery barraged) and buying what you need.

Yeah, the proper way to explore is to save up a ton of turns and then explore 40+ turns all at once. That way you get to keep a high acre/explore for all 40 turns. If you explore in, say, 5 turn increments instead, your acres/explore will drop a few acres each increment, and you'll end up with less acres overall.

As far as army goes, I think the best way for a noob to start out is to explore to 3k acres with 180 construction sites, maintaining at least 10-20 turrets per acre all along the way. After that, aim for a 1:1 ratio of Jets:Turrets. And then try to keep your Troop and Tank numbers equal to 10% of your Jet number. That will give you enough offense to give you some experience attacking at least once per day, but not so much that it encourages topfeeders.

Maintaining a small Troop+Tank count will help give you insurance against griefers, which can be very difficult to deal with when you're a noob. As you get more pro at locating and avoiding griefers, you can decrease your Troops+Tanks in favor of more Jets+Turrets.

Make sure to get 2 defensive allies of about equal size to you after you hit 3k acres. If you outgrow your allies by more than 50% then it's probably a good idea to drop them and try to find somebody new. Don't bother with offensive allies until you get more experienced with the game, if you don't use them properly its easy to get exploited.

ThAnks for all the posts. I still feel as if my question wAsnt quiet answered.

I can get to 6k acres easy, mostly farms, small amount of res , ent and indi, and some oil fields so I don't have to buy so much, with max agri, some bus, res and warfare tech.

My question was what do I do then? I see all other guys around making huge jumps to 3, 4 and 5 mil. It doesn't help that were farmed a bit, well A fluff load, but how do I make the jump with bigger gains? So I just keep exploring building farms, buying military snd agri tech?

Landgrabbjng isn't really an ioti

An option, as well get farmed and farmed killed for just one grab... But exploring at 8acres per turn hardly seems worth it?

you don't need resis and ents as farmer, 200-500 indies for spies (500 if you want high spal), oil rigs not worth it either unless you run farmer oiler.

yea you can grow just by exploring and buying what you need (especially defense), if you want to grab and not to get retalled then hit targets which are just in your range but gains aren't high (maybe ~100 acres per hit).

let's say you have 126 turns (120 saved and 6 from login bonus) in hand then you get ~1000 acres when you sped all turns to exploring at once.

as i said, what you do depends on your govt. the point is. if you got to 6k land, and you mixed a bunca buildings have mostly farms, but very LITTLE agricultural tech, you should just start over. playing a country with no technology is like driving a regular car and pumping diesel in it and expecting it to preform at normal rate. wont happen.

technology is essential and impossible to do well without it, simply because you will need SO much more land just to maintain teh same production and in this game if you get that that much land you will be exploited.

i would expand on this thought and say build around 200 oil rigs. just incase you want to attack and the market becomes volitale. if you dont plan on attacking, obviously you wont need ANY oil rigs

on your restart. try my teching setup. you can do it with ANY government.. but say you pick farmer. switch govt to demo. and try this.

turn 1. tax rate 70
cs
turn 2, tax rate 36
cs
turns 3-20
18 cs

then build 50 farms.
explore.
build 20 more cs

build 210 farms.
explore when necessary
sell bushels on PM when necessary.


build 200 industrial complexes 150 more farms.


get bpt to around 40-50 (140-180cs)

at this point explore to 2500 land or so. while building research labs. you should be able to finiance your building selling food.

at 2500 acres you will have roughly.

140 cs
300 farms
200 industrial complexes
1800-2000 research labs

you will be researching around 600 per turn.

research agri up to 215.
get some weapons. up to 120.
and bus/res up to 120

then take out the research labs, convert those buildings into farms.

you should be fully done with ALL of this around 500 turns.

then you can choose to explore+build farms or landgrab+build farms. sell food at least once a day on public market. buy tech if agricultural starts to go under 200 as your land builds.

easy top 10.

I will try that

Yeah me too.

LOL now ya tell me this I had 8k land the folks around me had 5k land or less and i got raped and went from 2.2M NW to about 1.6M NW and i batch explored for 100 turns after I retallied then built about 350 farms another 100 indys to rebuild milatary then bought my techs back to 200%+ took me 3 days but I got to 3M NW after wards then I landgrabed the last 2hrs and got to 3.5M nw

well if you have 8k land and everyone else had 5k land, you better be head and shoulders above them in networth. if your the same nw as everyone around you and u have 8k to their 5k, youre going to get landgrabbed. period.

I wouldn't say landgrabbed. If you sit on a lot more land than everyone on your list you will not get landgrabbed, you will get raped.

This is a recent example. This country was sitting on 25000 acres when others around it were at 15000 to 18000 acres. Notice any punishment?

http://www.eestats.com/primary/country/227

0.0

actually crest, that country was sitting on 23k and and the owner went on vacation, and didnt have time to adequately play and keep his country up to date and near the top.

and on top of that, tech prices have been in the toilet, and that owner had pretty much given up when he saw sub 2k tech prices the 2nd week.

I understand, but it really doesn't matter. The discussion here was about sitting on too much land on a scores list, not about whether said owner was on vacation.

In a fast paced game like Express, if you sit on too much land and went to sleep (vacation), you almost have to expect the same.

BTW, said vacationing owner was grabbing very adequately during said vacation and should have realized the end result. And the fireworks started at 24.5k acres.

If the owner of that country is teching and didn't have the time to adequately play his country then my advice would have been to not take turns except to sell tech then buy def in order to deter possible attacks.

I know it's not optimal, but neither is being hit 7 times in 60 hours, and twice by a single country alone.

That way, after returning from holiday the owner of that country would have had 86(10) turns which would have been wisely used in teching weapons and military strat for about 30 before making retals that hurt his attackers. Wouldn't help that oil has gone up quite a bit in the past few days, but then i think the owner of that country bought quite a bit of oil when it was dirt cheap.

owner ran out of cheap oil. had to buy 500k @ 200.

owner does not have exp playing a demo techer, so this was a bit of a learning curve.

and tech prices sucked mighty balls, so regardless of how that country went, it wasnt going to end up favorable.

The owner was indeed unfortunate in choosing to tech this set.

I recommend a bit of reselling with jets, turrets and tanks as the market is, at times (certainly when i'm on) quite shallow

Im returning to the game after about a 10 year absence...Never tried the Demo Farmer with Tech start, going to give it a shot and see what happens.

im just gonna play casher for the next 10 resets. bound to get at least one with favorable conditions.

Going to try the demo strat next set I think. Too late to delete and re start.

i think cahser strat with a republic is the easiest...just construct 50/50 residential and enterprise zones massively and use the money to first stack on military, then food and oil

If you're hitting a wall regarding expenses and food consumption as an indy, you need to sell more often. At a certain point, industrialists must sell two or three times per day. Log in, sell as much as you can, log out. Repeat every time your goods sell.

I disagree somewhat with those who say you should only have the tech for your main strategy. Weapons tech is, IMO, critical for any strategy. It allows you to keep the same amount of defensive power with far less units, thereby allowing you to reduce expenses. The added bonus is that lazy attackers will sometimes fail to take your tech into account, and bounce.

And of course, especially if you're doing an all explore, maxing the tech for your strategy comes before getting more land. Same production on half the land means you're less attractive as a land grab target.

Just wanted to say "Chaos". Unless you are him, you were not the top netgainer in MD :P. Maybe one of them?

You really got to try the rainbow strat. Have the same amount of all Buildings. works Great...

ah

theo casher
rep farmer

Play to the market of your respective server. I can only speak for Primary and it's Commie Indy and Rep cashers that dominate here.

rep casher is pretty solid, just be careful with your acreage to try to minimize hits.