Quote:I'm going to offer a very BASIC outline of decent defense. This outline will take plenty of time to follow and will, as stated, only give a basic defense outline. There are many variations of defense and these should be considered. I'll divide the steps by the country's population so that this can be built as the country grows, but until you reach 30M population, you will generally be unable to support the entire defense outline. This applies only to unsecured countries.
Since I'm sure anyone reading this is familiar with the game interface, I'm not going to give any specific direction. Be sure to look around to find the pages. If you cannot find where or figure out how to do something, be sure to ask someone (you can ask me). This guide also assumes that you aren't in any immediate danger because it asks you to set up air defense last. If you desire, you can safely switch steps 2 and 3.
Step 1: 15M or less Population
* This defense will be expensive, I advise setting up your country economically before hand. By following the Church's advice on economics and intelligently monitoring and managing your corporations (or inviting CEOs), you should be able to support the full defense at 30M population with a Finance Index greater than 100.
* You will most likely be purchasing population at this point. I advise buying them for your main country before any slaves, until that reaches 30M. Keep your main largely demilitarized, but don't be afraid to keep a small offensive task force for taking C3s. Also, your main is a very good location for storing ammunition as this has no maintenance cost.
* It's best to not pay more than 4 GC for each million population. You have plenty of time to wait for this.
* Your main country will continue to have new people born every day. Rather than allowing this to occur, I advise sending the population to your slave country. This will stabilize your indexes and corporate situation meaning that you don't need to do much more than balance workers in the country exporting population.
* Feel free to skip ahead of this point and figure out how much ammunition you'll need. Personally, I wouldn't feel safe holding loads of ammo with no weapons in the slave so I advise that you store this ammo in your main, secured mode country. Be sure to purchase ammunition at 100 Quality.
* Buy Fortifications. There is no reason to have less than 100 Fortifications (100 happens to be the maximum) in your country. These will add .5 points to the war index each and are the only way to bring your war index to 100.
* Buy about 10-20 Radar Planes. These are necessary for your Air Defense to function properly. It has been reported that these cannot be destroyed so long as an active garrison (even with one weapon alive) is maintained at the defensive airbase. As you will be deploying invulnerable NDB here later, this means you just need these in your country stock and can forget about them.
* The army is supplied with Low Level Workers (LLW) for Soldiers and Medium Level Managers (MLM) for Officers. Be sure to set you education priorities higher for MLMs prior to the next steps. Appropriate levels may vary, but you should be decent at managing your workers by this point. Remember that if your country is short LLWs, then it will automatically de-educate other workers across the board to compensate for this. This can be a good thing as it is very even, but sometimes can be harmful.
Step 2: 15M-20M Population
* If you've reached this population level in your slave country, you should be easily maintaining a 150 Finance Index with 200 Education and 120 Health indexes. Most likely, this will take a few weeks or more. If not keep working on your economy, monitoring which corps aren't very profitable and which are. I advise paying attention to the "Profit & Loss - Last Year" section of the corporation pages to find which corps are doing best and which aren't doing so well. This is more accurate as monthly reports tend to fluctuate.
* Remember to keep corporation salaries at 300, this is the ideal level for an economy based on both state and private corporations that intends to hold many weapons. The government salaries will be at 226.
* At this point, you must pick a garrison blueprint. Keep in mind that these will not be the frontline of your defense. There are many variations of this, but I use (and highly recommend it!):
500 Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries (AAMB)
15000 Anti Aircraft Missiles (AAMB ammo)
500 Defensive Missile Batteries (DMB)
15000 Defensive Missiles (DMB ammo)
999 Missile Interceptor Batteries (MIB)
30000 Missile Interceptors (MIB ammo)
2 Nuclear Defense Batteries (NDB)
16 Nuclear Defense Missiles (NDB ammo)
The primary reason I use this is because the reasoning behind it is very appealing. It should be very effective in warding off missile attacks, whether ground or air. This means it is effective against NFP, CMS, GMF, LBCB, CMB, MRMB, and AD. Of the remainder of frequently-used weapons (HT, HA, and PB), Precision Bombers (PB) are the only one that is capable of doing any real damage. The only real alternative to this garrison that I see as appropriate would be:
999 AAMB
30000 AAMB ammo
500 DMB
15000 DMB ammo
500 MIB
15000 MIB ammo
2 NDB
16 NDB ammo
This is meant to more heavily counter the PB threat as PB are the most powerful weapon in the game. However, it is less effective at countering non-air units that would use missiles. If you know or expect something that I do not and have a better garrison configuration, use it. There is one other garrison configuration that I'll mention:
500 AAMB
15000 AAMB ammo
500 DMB
15000 DMB ammo
2 NDB
16 NDB ammo
This is obviously much more under-powered than the previous garrisons, but you can use this if you really don't have the money or desire to setup a proper defense. As garrisons aren't the frontline of your defense, this might be acceptable and sure as hell is cheaper.
* Earlier I suggested that you purchase ammunition at 100 Quality (Q), but I will not make the same suggestion for weapons. Instead, I suggest that you purchase weapons at the maximum fighting level of units (currently 160 Q).
* Fighting levels improve the military strength of your units. The fighting level of a unit is determined by the quality of the weapons (half of fighting level) and ammunition (the other half). The fighting level of units deteriorate by .5 points each month and must be maintained using Weapon Quality Upgrades (WQE) and Ammunition Quality Upgrades (AQE). These upgrades are used to maintain maximum fighting levels. When purchasing, be sure to buy WQE and AQE at 100 Q since the quality makes no difference here. Once you've set up your garrison be sure to have plenty of these to maintain them.
* Units with 160 Q weapons and 100 Q ammunition will have a fighting level of 130. It might stand to reason that you should use 160 Q ammunition, but the reason behind my suggestion is this: Ammunition is already expended monthly as part of maintenance costs for weapons. Usage 160 Q ammunition increases this cost by 60%, but usage of 100 Q ammunition in conjunction with AQE will maintain 160 fighting level on the ammunition side. For the types of ammunition you're using, relying on AQE to get a fighting level of 160 is much cheaper than using 160 Q ammunition. Now, you may be wondering why I'm not using the same logic for weapons. The reason is this: Weapons are not used monthly and can disappear from the unit in greater numbers (i.e. after an attack). You'll need the extra Q to quickly resurrect a destroyed garrison (at a decent fighting level) after an attack.
* Next, you'll want to determine the number of targets you'll need to defend with the configuration you've chosen earlier. This will be the number of "nukable" targets. Nukable targets are the Capital, all Cities, and all Military Bases and Airbases (Offensive/Defensive/Strategic). There will always be exactly 1 Capital. After around 13M population, there will be exactly 20 Cities. The number of military bases and airbases will be determined by yourself, but I generally advise keeping only 1 Defensive Base, 1 Defensive Airbase, 1 Offensive Base, 1 Offensive Airbase, and not bothering with Strategic bases (for now at least). This would make the total come out to 25. Therefore, the weapons and ammo I would need is equal to the garrison blueprint * 25. In addition, you will need to set up supply units for these garrisons. I advise setting up 25 'Small Supply Units' using 125 Defensive Jeeps each. As the fighting levels for these will never matter, but at 100 Q.
* If you used the first garrison outline (the most expensive one) and have 25 targets, I estimate the final cost to be around $10.7T for this step. Calculating this estimate, I have used 'base price' which is the level around which market price fluctuates... market price can be anywhere between 60%-180% of base price. I advise getting as many gold coins and sim-cash as possible through whatever means necessary. This guide cannot tell you exactly how or where to get it, but ideas are: leveling for GC rewards (easiest), busting out the visa (this involves having spare money), raiding inactive players (requires some skill and some risk), making loads of profit (more skill, no risk), or setting up a country on another world for the expressed purpose of leveling up for the GC rewards if you've gotten as many GC rewards on your home world as you can.
* Use Order Strategies. These will auto-purchase products at whatever quality you set your country to (which should be 100 Q). I strongly recommend this for ammunition, trucks, and upgrades since this will buy everything you need and maintain acceptable stocks of each material (provided you have set acceptable stocks). However, I recommend manually purchasing weapons since you will be ordering at 160 Q and these will take workers to maintain, which can lead to problems on auto-purchase (i.e. large MLM shortages). The advantage here is that you can purchase and deploy all the weapons needed to fill up garrisons and the country will auto-purchase all the ammunition needed. I advise setting this up to purchase enough ammunition for one garrison at a time, while keeping a minimum stock equal to amount of reserve ammunition I suggested earlier. As far as trucks go, I maintain 100,000 and have it set to order 20,000 at a time, but I like to have plenty of trucks ready. As far as upgrades, there isn't a clear cut amount to maintain or purchase at a time, but you can predict your monthly usage of WQE as equal to the number of weapons deployed divided by 2. The same is true for AQE, but you will be need slightly more than this as monthly usage of ammunition will be replaced by 100 Q ammunition.
* I advise taking this slowly. For each million population your country grows between 15M and 20M, get the materials and deploy about 5 garrisons. For every garrison you deploy, don't forget to set the weapon and ammunition quality levels to the maximum (160 Q).
Step 3: 20M-25M Population
* If you've reached this population level, I'll assume you've set up garrisons and your country is still enjoying a decent Finance Index, I don't think 120 is too much to ask here.
* At this point, you'll want to set up air defense. This will be your frontline defense. In order to enjoy the full benefit of air defense, you'll need to either be a member of a federation with 100% shared defenses (and with other countries nearby with air defense set up) or create one yourself. Remember that you'll only benefit from shared defenses with countries within 1000km (~4 countries of separation) of the country in question.
* If you only control one slave country and do not wish to join a federation with other players, you can also set up air defense in your main country. As the country is in secured mode, it will be safe from attack, but can still contribute air defense assistance.
* Do NOT build Air Force Defense Wings. There are only two air wings that you should use for air defense the Defense Helicopter Wing and the Defense Interceptor Wing. The configurations are as follows:
400 Interceptors
12000 Interceptor Missiles
and
400 Helicopters
12000 Helicopter Missiles
* You'll want to set up 50 Defense Interceptor Wings (DIW) and 30 Defense Helicopter Wings (DHW) at this point with 80 Small Supply Units of 125 Jeeps each. As before I advise taking it in one step at a time, for each million your population grows between 20M and 25M, set up 10 DIW, 6 DHW, and 16 Small Supply Units. Don't forget to set the weapon and ammunition quality levels to 160.
* The base price cost of this will be about $8.8T. Once again, market price will be anywhere between 60%-180% of base price.
* Hopefully, at this point you're still maintaining at least a 120 Finance Index. If not, get your affairs in order.
Step 4: 25M-30M Population.
* This step is essentially a repetition of the previous step. To reflect this I'll copy-paste: "You'll want to set up 50 Defense Interceptor Wings (DIW) and 30 Defense Helicopter Wings (DHW) at this point with 80 Small Supply Units of 125 Jeeps each. As before I advise taking it in one step at a time, for each million your population grows between 20M and 25M, set up 10 DIW, 6 DHW, and 16 Small Supply Units. Don't forget to set the weapon and ammunition quality levels to 160."
* This will be another $8.8T at base price.
* Also, at this point it would be useful to maintain some reserve defensive forces. For a minimum, I'll advise enough for 5 new Garrisons, 10 DIW, 6 DHW, and 20 Small Supply Units.
* This will be $3.9T at base price.
* One final thing, create a garrison blueprint of 1000 Jeeps. Buy 5000 Jeeps. Deploy this Garrison at 5% across all 100 of your Fortifications. This will make it so that invading land forces must destroy the garrison before moving past your forts. The price here is negligible
* The added strain on the Finance Index at this point means that I no longer expect 120 Finance Index, but as your country grows, always try to keep above 100. If you won't be adding serious offense, this won't be too difficult.
Step 5: 30M or more Population.
* This is where you can feel free to start adding offensive weapons. For now, I'm not going to tell you what to get and not get, but I will explain one thing: Offensive wins wars. Defense delays the inevitable. Anyone can get through a solid defense.
* Fortifications are valuable to the war index and, at this point, are basically undefended. If you would like, you can choose to defend them. I advise taking a look at the aforementioned Garrison configurations (not including NDB as Forts aren't nukable). At 40M population, the 500 AAMB + 500 DMB garrison becomes viable for all 100 Fortifications (setting up 10 per million between 30M and 40M). At 50M, the other two become viable (setting up 5 per million between 30M and 50M).
* However, I advise holding off on this as you will need offensive weapons to aid defense should an actual war occur (this is another story). My suggestion is that you start at 40M, use the 500 AAMB + 500 DMB Garrison, and set up 10 per million until 50M.
* Additionally, you might choose to improve Air Defense rather than deploying Garrisons to Fortifications. Repeating steps 2 and 3 between 40M and 50M will double up Air Defense quite nicely.
* As there is no decent method of hitting Defense Helicopter Wings without first destroying all Defense Interceptor Wings, I advise not setting up beyond the initial 60 DHW should you choose to double Air Defense. This will leave more room for Offensive weapons.
Final Summary
* Following steps 1-4 will lead to roughly 5% of the population employed in the military. This is determined by the fact that each step between 15M and 30M will lead to roughly 25,000 Officers and 50,000-75,000 Soldiers per million (8%-10% military employment). The 15M population of no military halves this effect. Keep this in mind, especially when determining how many weapons you can support beyond 30M, offensive weapons included.
* My observations based upon my own management have shown me that with 7% military employment it is possible to have a finance index of roughly 110. You should be able to manage steps 1-4 and still make a profit. This is why it is important to acquire economic skills. The backbone of any self-sustaining military is an economic mindset. Beyond simply maintaining good defense, practicing good economics allows you to carry greater firepower to defend each of your hard-earned dollars and steal each of your opponents.
* tl;dr
Buy:
15,000 AAMB
15,000 DMB
30,000 MIB
26,400 Helis
44,000 Ints
All with 30 ammo per weapon.
25 garrisons deployed.
100 Int wings deployed.
60 Heli wings deployed.
Max fighting levels maintained.
185 Small Supply Units of 125 Jeeps.
Plenty of trucks.
30M population should easily support this. If not, improve your economy and worker situation.
