Advice

[Shadow]

I am adminning this round, and I'll be giving advice as I see trends. I'll use the mass mail system, and post the message here for people who sign up later. The first one (for those who didn't read the textwall):

most people either did not change their tax rate, or left it too low. I strongly suggest setting it to 30% to start out, this gives you the most cash and food from your workers.

Note that at this tax level your max health is about 90, but you can still heal up to 100% using the heal buff in the buff turns menu.

[Shadow]

tip of the day:

by virtue of having a fair amount of workers, the land farm actually generates a fair bit of cash and food as it uses turns scouting. Pillaging the land farm is a good way to get a little bit of cash if you find yourself stuck.

[Shadow]

tip of the day:

the more turns you spend on training or recruitment losses buff, the less effective the buff will be. It is better to use them for a small number of turns (<50) and then allow your worker population to recover using the workers buff in between!

[cloud]

I seem to not be making very much money. At first I tried the 20% method (20% tents/foragers/markets/huts). Then I took down some tents/foragers for more markets, and still made barely $1billion in an entire run on 6k land and I was losing food the entire time.

This seems like it's going to be a catch-22 problem, because without a ton of land you can't make any money and without money you can't buy enough troops to take land, so those that already know the code perfectly *cough*kilk*cough* are going to constantly be at an increasing advantage.

[Shadow]

when you are filling up your huts or have any barracks your economy gets depressed, so it could just be that you were filling up your huts at the time and it will improve now that they are full.

That being said, it is possible that cash output is too low compared to food output, so if everyone has cashflow problems we'll boost the numbers a bit.

[Kilkenne]

I'm not sure if I'm going to play much more of the round, seeing how much ahead of everyone else I am right away (my economy and buildings are in remarkably good shape, even though someone passed me in net now that they got a ton more land). We'll see what happens.

Also, if your economy falls in the tank and you're producing troops, you'll want to just set the values to 0 and let your workers recover. It's suboptimal ~technically~ but you can do a lot more damage to yourself by trying to swap land around.

[Sevah]

get a few huts a few tents and run like normal. If you're running for food change the settings to 100% food with 5% tax, spend a few turns to fill your 15% worth of tents then up your tax a bit
Should be one of the quicker ways to notice production. 5% encourages your workers rapidly, raising the taxes repairs the ratio.

All races need 20% leaders on 175ratio so 12k per 100k at prime ratio (not sure if race mod effects)

70% forages 15% tents 15% huts on 25% tax should be a good enough starter pack.

Also, on the betasite merc selling was terrible. Indiers should probably be fully dependant on the public market. If you aren't good at cashing you'll need to learn low tax gets workers and markets bring in per capita. Build markets to start with for base income, tax around 11%. 20% leaders to land, the rest barracks on either rats if you've got food or skiffs if you've got cash. No chance of straight indy surviving without market income unless it's agri or casher based.

[Shadow]

There actually isn't a huge difference in worker population between 5 and ~20% tax, so it is not the end of the world to keep tax up a little higher while population building. Going from 5% to 20% tax only decreases your max population by 4%.

[Peace Alliance]

Sevs touched on it. But keep in mind that it you are only getting the full buff for food or cash if you have set either to 100%. So if you want a full 30% buff on food, then you need to have your food set to 100%.

[Shadow]

That's not strictly speaking true, though it might just be a difference of definitions. If you get a 30% buff on 50% cash, you are still getting 30% more than you would without the buff at the same cash setting.

[Peace Alliance]

Well at 50% food you are getting half the bonus that you'd get at 100%. So you're getting more from that buff if you're at 100%.

[cloud]

That's understandable, but with 50% cash/ 50% food I was negative for food production and still making very little cash. Also I had 0 barracks and very minimal troops, with about 1000huts with full leaders.

[Kilkenne]

How much time had you allowed for your worker population to recover? Also, again, if your tax isn't 30% you won't make the most food that you can make, food production is tied to taxes so that people can't net food faster by setting tax to 6% and rolling up a ton of food.

[Shadow]

tip of the day:

because of the boost to defense, solo players can run away with the land if unchecked early on. Clans are going to be very important for keeping people in check.

I strongly suggest that people clan up, since this will allow you to specialize in one area of production instead of doing them all at once, and the output of the team as a whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

[cloud]

How much time had you allowed for your worker population to recover? Also, again, if your tax isn't 30% you won't make the most food that you can make, food production is tied to taxes so that people can't net food faster by setting tax to 6% and rolling up a ton of food.

It was at the end of my run so my workers were pretty high, also I had 30% tax rate. Has anyone done the math to see if leaders are even actually worth it. It seems like they only give about a 30% increase to food/cash production while buffing turns, but they also eat food/cash and cost workers. It seems like they might even use more resources than they can help produce.