| odssstudents1 | Sunday, December 20, 2015 - 10:42 pm 
I've explained this to a few folks on chat, so in the interests of a) spreading knowledge far and wide, and b) not having to type it out again, here's a guide to how to get as much as possible out of a C3 once you've conquered it. This is somewhat long, and quite detailed in places, but it'll give you everything you need to know to absolutely suck a slave country dry and get as much as possible from the husk.
There's three basic things you can steal from a conquered country - goods, cash, and population. You'll want to steal them in basically that order. But before you do that, go into automation and turn everything off, and consider going to settings and giving the country an easier to remember name than the AI default.
**Goods**
Goods that the country has in its national stockpile are available to be stolen. It doesn't look that way at first, because your main has to pay fair market price for them, but you'll see below that this isn't a real concern. To do this, log into the conquered country, and go to Trade -> Trade with Countries and Enterprises Directly -> Create New Direct Sale Offer -> All Products. If you want to take the country's pile of a good, click on the Sell Directly button beside it, type in the amount that the country has, and then fill in the name of your main country. You only need to type it once, though - once you've filled in the name of your main once, you can just double-click the box, and it'll be at the top of the list that comes up. (If that doesn't work, cut and paste the name in. Nobody wants to type their country's name 30 times)
You'll see a list of a ton of products there. You can take all of them, if you want, but that takes a lot of clicking, and a lot of them are really not that valuable. My personal rule of thumb is to take everything that looks like the whole stack is worth at least a billion, but I'm very good at mental math, so that's easy for me to calculate. If you want to think less, here's the top 10 most valuable piles from the last country I took, in order:
- Production Plants, $15.4B
- Military Services, $9.6B
- Armoured Vehicle Missiles, $8.6B
- Electric Power, $7.1B
- Trucks, $6.3B
- Gasoline, $6.3B
- Military Supplies, $6.2B
- Clothes, $6.0B
- Cars, $5.7B
- Vacation, $4.9B
In total, I took about $130B of goods, but those 10 are $76B of that, or well over half. (For reference, this was a war fought at WL3 - these numbers may vary somewhat at other war levels)
Once you've sent all the orders over to your main, log into your main. You'll have a ton of messages - click on one, the link inside will take you to the contract offers screen. Accept all the offers. (Tip: When accepting, the column of "Accept" buttons sometimes jumps to the left, and you can accidentally click "Decline" if you're not watching, so pay attention). Do this in the first or second month, ideally. You'll see why in a minute. The only other tip to watch is that Production Plants are not naturally used by countries, so you'll want to sell those on the market with your main once in a while. No hurry on that, though - for now, just move them over, they don't go bad.
**Cash**
You can take cash from a country by going to Direct Trading -> Receive Game Money from Countries and Enterprises -> the Receive Game Money link beside the country you're trying to take cash from. When you first conquer a country, it will have a big pile of cash inside, ranging from 600B at WL1 to 5.9T at WL13. This is the most obvious pile of cash to take, but not the only one.
The second pile of cash is from the sale of goods to your main. Remember how I said it wasn't a problem that your main was paying full price for them? That's because you're just taking all the money your main paid and giving it back to your main. Yay free stuff!
The third pile of cash is from the dissolution of all the corps you destroyed in the war. This will happen in the second month, and is usually worth around $500-600B, which is a pretty huge chunk of change. Once this lump of cash hits, clear all cash out of the country. A slave for stealing stuff from will have a budget loss every month, so you will never again have as much cash to take as you do in the second month. Take the cash in the second month, then let it go negative. It'll give you warnings when you log into the country that the country is in debt, but just ignore them - it has no impact that you care about.
The only relevant tip here is that the numbers on the Direct Trading screen are rounded, but when you type an amount in to be stolen, that amount will not be rounded. Thus, it's possible to have it say the country has $123.45B, for you to type in that you want to take $123.45B, and to have it reject the request. Always just type in a number $0.01B smaller(e.g., $123.44B) to avoid this hassle - $10M isn't worth fussing. That said, because $10B is worth fussing over, if the country's cash is in the trillions, take the trillions out first, to leave a number in billions. It doesn't take long, and it makes sure you get the foregone cash down into the low millions.
**Population**
Cash is lovely, but population is probably the most important asset you can take - it's the hardest to get any other way, and the most valuable in the long run. A normal C3 has just over 11M pop left after the war's over, and you can in principle drive it down to 5M, which leaves you the option of stealing up to 6 million people. You can't quite get this low without keeping the country quite a while, but you can get close - I usually get mine down to about 5.5M before abandoning them. There's a few important tricks to getting as many people out of the country as possible.
First things first, the way you steal population is by going to Departments -> Labour -> Exchange Professionals With Others -> Exchange More Professionals -> type in the name of the other country(main if you're logged into slave, or slave if you're logged into main). A screen will come up with all profession types and two columns. You want the slave to give people to the main, and you don't need to give anything in return. If you're currently logged into a country with 20M+ pop, you can trade 400k per transaction, otherwise it's capped at 200k. In other words, if you have a main with over 20M pop, always initiate transfers from your main, not from your slave, so you can move twice as many people.
The country will still build corps even with the automation off, and every corp built will lock up the unemployed population so you can't steal them, so you want to minimize this as much as you can. The way you stop this is by making the country not have enough people to staff any corps. Since all corps require executives, your first two transfers should take all of the executives in the country(not just your first one - like how the money from destroyed corps doesn't arrive until the second month, neither do the newly-unemployed pops) out to your main. You can also do this with high-tech execs or other professions if you prefer - the exact occupation doesn't matter(as long as it's one used for corps), the important part is that the country needs to have few enough of them that you can clear out a whole occupation right away. Once the country doesn't have any execs, it won't be able to staff any corps, and you can steal people at leisure. You usually have one corp get started before you can do this, but just set its hiring level to 10%, and the impact is minimal.
This will let you get the country down to under 6M, but you can still do better. Hospitals and schools can be shut down, thus liberating all their staff for theft. However, in order to do this you need the country's index of the relevant sort(in particular, the index of individual school types, not the overall education index) to be at least 70. So once you've taken the cash out and the country is in debt, you will actually want to *build* schools and hospitals to get the index over 70. If you can, try to get the number to an even multiple of 10 or 100, for annoying technical reasons(see below). You can still build hospitals even if they don't have enough execs, but make sure you have enough doctors and nurses, or the hospitals will just auto-close.
Wait for the index to climb above 70, then go into health and education, and shut down the facilities. You can only destroy 10% at a time, but if you spam-click the "Close Now!" button, it'll do that 10% multiple times. So if you have 800 elementary schools, tell it to close down 80 of them(*not* 81, which is the max listed - you want an even divisor of then total), and click Close Now like 30 times before the page refreshes, then you'll often go straight to 0 in one go, which is way, way faster than only doing 10% at a time. Sometimes it'll only get partway there, but if you've just gone from 800 to 320, then close 32 at a time and spam it again.
The other thing to remember is your education priorities. Set the execs to 0, so that they don't accumulate enough to start another corp, and otherwise prioritize the things you want on your main. Might as well train them here too, right?
I'm pretty sure that's everything, but if anyone else has any other tips that I've forgotten or missed, please feel free to include them below. |
