| Vicious | Friday, August 13, 2010 - 04:13 am 
Kids, for your amusement, as well as mine, I'm introducing this occasional series of lectures on Simcountry economics.
Lesson 1: Use protection
You know how sometimes you have a terrible day at work? You're flipping burgers over the hot grill at McDonald's. Pesky customers are yelling at you to hurry. Finally, you can't take it anymore.
You get on the public announcement system and curse all the customers. You tell them to take their french fries and shove them where the sun doesn't shine. You grab a few burgers and leave the place by sliding out the drive-through window.
Then you get home and get some relief: you declare war on a Simcountry president. He suffers the consequences of not having war protection.
Let's face it: we all love the pleasure of shooting our missiles once in awhile.
But surely you don't want someone to shoot at your pristine country, and leave it in a nasty condition. That nastyness could cause you discomfort and a social stigma.
It's better that you use protection. Kids, protection is an effective means of prevention.
Conventional defense sucks and costs money anyway.
A war protection booster costs roughly 115 billion per game month. I'm so allergic to clicking that I haven't logged into my only country for almost two real months. Yet it still averages 150 billion in profits per game month.
Countries can earn enough to pay for war protection, with little effort.
Besides, by using war protection, you can save on military costs. And your workers can be employed almost exclusively by your country corps, not by the military.
That combination of military savings and profitable use of almost all labor should compensate for the cost of protection boosters.
Incidentally, if a country can't earn enough for war protection, maybe it's not worth defending anyway.
But you need military to have a defense index high enough to level up. It's best to improve your civilian indexes first. When only the defense index needs improving, then you can move weapons from your CEO to your country.
After you level up, then you can move weapons back to your CEO. You can repeat this process each time you're leveling up. Just have enough medium level managers available to work as officers.
You can reach level 4 within your first two weeks playing in "full mode." It's not important to move weapons back and forth to your CEO for that.
The key for a country to earn at least 115 billion per game month is to have high sales CEO corps.
CEO corps pay country resources fees to their host countries. The higher the cash amount of products sold by a CEO corp, the higher its country resources payments are.
Therefore, your country profits most from CEO corps in the industries that have the highest sales.
Some industries with very high product sales are factory maintenance units (FMU), ammunition components, aircraft fuel, and sometimes gasoline. Once highly upgraded, those CEO corps should pay at least 2 billion per month each in country resources fees.
Why settle for less?
I usually have almost all FMU CEO corps in my country. They have a lot of highly paid engineers. Those engineers, like all workers, pay about 40% of their salaries as income tax to the country. That provides the highest income tax revenue.
You will need to add population to earn at least 115 billion per month. It's best to add population slowly, each time employment reaches at least 85%.
Finally, you really don't need a big empire of war protected countries. Less is more in this game. A tiny empire allows you to concentrate more, develop more skills, and have very profitable countries.
To conclude, war protection is your friend in our dangerous game. |
