Catch all / information / Seeking advice

Rather than continually add new threads to the board and pushing others down I created this thread.

I hope to continue to get input from the experienced members that read. I also hope other members also have input, just because you are new doesn't mean you haven't discovered something that could help someone else.

Some of my posts will be directly asking for advice and some will be things I think I have learned and some will be things I have done. Feel free to do the same (also doesn't have to be us newbs posting any of this either

Common Market: Trying out the common market as it appears that the sales feature is broken. Selling things with a 200% 'mark-up' does not yield a 200% mark-up. I set one up and building contracts from there.

War: First war followed the instructions and won. Captured the country and renamed it First Expsnsion.
Second war not so good. I picked that county to go to war with because it had a defense index of 16%. After failed attacks and dragging the war on thinking the country would spend all it's money ,the economy would tank and it would not be able to support the new troops. The defense is now 88%!! Going to let this war time out.

Next Steps: recalling all my troops. Disbanding my units that were not made with at least 300 quality and selling. This should boost my economy and give me money to work with.

Thought from anyone one the above accepted

Population growth I can't get the numbers to work

I think the formula should be

(Births per year - deaths per year)/12 + migration - war dead

My calculations come up short of the actual growth in the ticker

Did I miss a source of pop growth?

The war index is indeed not a guarantee that a war will be won easily.
In general, you need a strong economy and quite a large army to win wars.
The first war is made easy to help new players to learn how to fight.

Population growth depends on the number of people in each age group.
The numbers are different in countries and are based on the history of the country.

Left alone, without interventions and buying/selling of population, the age groups would stabilize.

The numbers of babies born each month is the result of a computation, taking into account the numbers of women in the ages 18 to 40 and the chance they might get children.
It is different in each age group.

Death rates are computed per age group, depending on standard percentages and also depending on the healthcare levels in the country.

If a country might have many people in the 24-30 age group, it could result in a higher birth rate.
There is also migration involved and as said before, the healthcare index is important.

So the numbers reported in the population tab for births and deaths per year are incorrect?

When I do the above calculation I usually get within the level of migration for error-ish.

Migration is listed at the top right of the screen, is that not the number of people coming into the country? (my slave was a negative number when I took it over and that made sense)

I aborted my war.

Took too much $ loss.

Monthly carrying cost of the army was more than 1/2 my income.

Disbanded most of my units and sold off everything that was a reasonable price. Will sell the rest of the off weapons when the price goes up again.

Kept all the ammo.

Will wait until my econ gets better or I have more cash saved. Then try again.

I'm a gluten for punishment.

Things I learned and some I think

1) Never build the maximum amount of elementary, high schools, universities or hospitals. When first starting out you can cause a shortage of people in a profession and cause some to close and you loose some.

2) Don't bring training below 3 for any profession as you can cause massive shortages later when they start retiring. Three would be way too low for some professions.

3) Check trade overview as often as possible in the beginning as it shows you what you have on order (including what the computer ordered for your country) You can find it Trade(at to of page)=>trade overview

4) If you are not planning on going to war deactivate or sell your weapons. Deactivating saves some money and people. Selling gets you money, saves more people and you don't have to pay maintenance and they don't use ammo monthly.

5) Even if you don't need to improve your transport build at least 100 miles of road every month or more depending on how often you log in. Saves your transport level from deteriorating. Same with railroads and water treatment determine an amount for them. Saves having to buy massive amounts at one time to repair your rating

6) Make sure you train enough people in the correct professions to keep your corporations at 100% hiring (including the ones you don't own) you can loose a lot of potential earnings if you don't

7) Set your lowest earning company's salary lower than the others so if you do go short people (accidentally building too many companies etc) then that company will loose the workers and not one that makes you a lot of money.

8) Stay away from building any companies for offensive weapon companies I think they are all money loosers to start (someone correct me here if there is a good one)

9) From the corporations page I like to check the 'Cash & Debt' page monthly and make small adjustments as necessary. Keep in mind some corporations don't build anything salable every month, like production plants, airports etc their profits will fluctuate wildly.

10) When making adjustments make small ones and given them time to take effect. To companies or country.

11) Loans are not a bad thing if you have the income to cover them when needed in an enterprise.

12) Upgrading companies is the key to making them profitable. Upgrading them early can be painful but pays in the long run.

13) Exception to above I found I was running out of higher tech and executives because I hat too many companies upgrading and not enough training. So I had to turn off auto upgrades. My education wasn't good enough to keep-up

Feel free to add, discuss or even disagree (though say why) with any of the above points.

Most Offensive/Defensive corps can make plenty of cash.
Just look at what's deep red and those are the products that're in shortage.

Periodically, either a nation, enterprise, or the Market Fairy will arrive and cause a product to go green for awhile. This is normal and will usually clear in a few days.

Most of your other points are perfectly sound.

Keep an eye on the ammunition market for when items go into green and buy ammo @330 quality that you will need later. Don't worry so much about weapons until you have mega-tons of ammo.

In your CEO build the max mining corps and then build ammo. A CEO can get higher quality than a country so you'll want to IPO your ammo corps to just under 25% ownership to obtain over 330 quality. Contract all to your countries after you top out the quality.

Personally, military goods are the only things I ever (and always) contract to my countries.

Looking for advise on a topic

Low Level Workers

I can't generate enough LLW to build enough companies fast. I have a vague recollection of having a slave country built to make LLW but this time I don't seem to be able to take extra countries.

I also think having less than 120 education points leads to more workers LLW, MLW and HLW. If someone could confirm, deny or explain. That would be great.

The best method for creating LLW that I have found is to have a fairly high education index (200 to 250). You put 40 or 50 education priority points onto either low level managers or teachers. Then you go to Department->Labor->Change profession of some workers. Then each game month you can convert up to 200,000 LLMs or teachers into however many LLW that you need.

While this isn't the most convenient way to get workers, at least you can get what you want in hypothetically the numbers you want without the game just guessing at what you need or something.

Unfortunate that that is the best method.

I think you are right. As you mentioned this method does have the advantage of giving you the type of worker you require at the time.