how many land I need in tournament in order to get a 20+m network. I keep stuck at around 10m

Land is not the sole determining factor, xcool. More land certainly tends to be good, more land EARLY is very good.

What you almost certainly need to do in order to break through this 10mil networth barrier is to learn how to stockpile and learn how to destock.

Quite a lot of people don't do this in tourney because the set is relatively short and it is easy to get into the flow of grabbing/exploring and developing the land and cycling endlessly on like that. Which, I predict, is what you are doing.

But that is wrong and limits the networth achievable. Even if you got to 40k acres you probably wouldn't improve your 10mill figure by an awful lot.

So what do you do? The answer starts with fixing a land goal before you have taken a single turn. Then build the right number of csites for that goal. Now get to the goal as soon as ever you can. And now stop the acquire land/develop land cycle. Instead you spend your turns hitting the cash button if you are a casher, farmer or Commie and hitting the tech button if you are a techer. You hope to spend a third or more of the set doing this. You will acquire a lot of cash/bushels/military/tech doing this and you will sell, sell, sell. With the money you will build up a 2 billion pile of cash but you will also buy bushels and stockpile them on the public market.

Towards the end of the set you sell all your stockpiled bushels and use the 2 billion cash and the money from the bushels to buy a whole lot of military. From your private market as much as you can and from the public market with the rest.

It turns out that there are rather more, and more difficult, skills involved in this stocking and destocking process than are involved in simply building a country and grabbing/exploring for land.

So, with your question, you are moving from beginner to improver.

Not too many are good at this. Certainly not me. If you see any posts by a guy called Oldman read them three times and then put them somewhere where you can go back and read them again.

Good luck. Don't expect it to be easy. But the very first step - setting a sensible land goal is fairly easy. In tourney go for 20k acres. You will need to do some research on how many csites that means you need. If you can't be bothered that means stocking and destocking is not for you. In that case see if you can get from 10mill networth to ten and a half mill.

What is the proper ratio of cs to land acres? If my land goal is 20k acres what is my cs?

I just hit 28.8M NW with 15k acres, and left probably 1M on the table with unspent turns. I had 50 bpt. I was a rep casher. I stocked 25M bushels and $2B cash. I techstarted.

Good luck!

Is the buying from private thing solely to stop the money being injected back into the competition? Surely the cost difference is such it's worth buying public a lot, if not most, of the time?

Tech start phase kind of confuses me! I have a rep casher tech starting in primary atm! Teching only 700 pts per turn! I'm just curious what is the most efficient way for a republic to tech early on? 700 pts per turn seems like forever to get to 100k research etc.

1 Peace Sells (#8) 15,512 $28,830,664 RG Must be you?

Correct. I teched with about 3900 or so acres, had no indies just CS and labs, teched to 120kish bus and res, and 80k mil before converting.

Craterus, if you have good mil tech, then it is frequently cheaper to buy troops and tanks from the private market. Also, sometimes you need units RIGHT NOW and the public market is empty.

What did you have as residence and enterprise while teching? Did you do farms to pay for food or purchase market? I guess it depends if food is cheap or not right?

No it does not matter what the price of bushels is (within reason). Labs (residences and enterprise zones also for that matter) improve their efficiency as the proportion of your land covered by them increases.

So the answer to your question is no residences and no enterprise zones at all and, ideally no farms either. All labs plus just your csites and a few hundred Indies to make spies with.

The formula for csites is sqrt(acres to be built/4*govt bonus). So you first need to work out how many acres you hope/intend to build then apply the formula. The thing is to get the csites built right at the start.

There is, as in all things on Earth, a trade off involved. Building all the csites you need right at the start is the most long term efficient approach. But it slows down your startup. Which can mean you miss out on early opportunities (for landgrabbing, say, or in the market). Falling behind can be OK for a casher but tends to be very bad for a techer.

So you may find yourself compromising a bit.

Thanks! That information helps alot!

To fund my startup, I built some farms and sold the bushels on the private market. For this particular start, I built 10 farms when I had 5 bpt, 40 when I had 10 bpt, 30 when I had 15 bpt, 20 when I had 20 bpt, and 125 when I had 25 bpt, for a total of 225 farms. I didn't build any more buildings until I got to 50 bpt, then I built labs to 3900 acres. I didn't tear down my farms until I had the rest of the land built with labs.

t:ime

How do you go about funding the huge redline you'll be running after you buy all the military with the stockpile of cash you have? Since you're not producing cash that is?

MRW - if you time it right, you don't fund any turns. :) You destock at the very end.

A big casher will make so much money from cashing they are likely to be able profitably to use all their turns despite expenses going through the roof. But a farmer or a techer or an industrialist will stop taking turns after they jump.

Countries are not always entirely inactive at that point. There may well still be trading going on - buying miltary off the private market and selling it on the public market at a profit.

The process of first stocking and then de-stocking at the end requires a lot of experience and skill to do well. Much more, in fact, than just the skill required to run a good economy and to select targets well for grabbing. The best players tend to be good at those things as well but it is their skill at stocking and destocking which singles them out (on the Alliance and Primary servers). For reasons which are not entirely clear to me this is less noticeable on Express and tourney.

Tourney caters more to folks who run a tight country because it is less turns and there are less days. Primary doesnt have a ton more turns but the way it is spread out means more market interaction going on over the course of the set. There is a lot more reading the tea leaves and timing things perfectly. Tourney (and express) are more like a mad dash to the finish.

Look above to my post about how much i stocked last set. That is decent stock for a full tourney set as evidenced by my finish. In Alliance or Primary that is laughably pathetic. I stocked way more than that in war prep by midset last alliance reset in bushels, tech and oil, and constantly had over $1b onhand for the duration of the reset. Obviously in an environment where you can stock more, destocking skill is more important.