Raiding C3's for fun and profit---NOT! (Kebir Blue)

the new game news talks about raiding c3's. it states correctly that raiding c3's is quite expensive and should be done with caution. however, it also states that many large empires got their start from taking c3's and building them up. from one who did that, let me say that it was done with those c3's having a lot more cash and weapons. as it is, purchasing an existing country with about 20mill pop and 5t in assets for 50gcs makes a lot more sense than taking a c3 which will cost a neeb about 1t in weapons and ammo and then investing about 35gc's for pop, 10gc's for weapons and then the time and cost to build a reliable and profitable country including hospitals, schools, roads, and corps.

raiding C3s IS profitable, by about 1T+ plus each, if you know how to do it. you can probably make close to 2T, if you want to be tedious... i know for a fact this works, but the amount of work to squeeze 1-2T from a C3, really isn't worth it... unless you have no other way to make worker exchanges.

basically, you approach taking over the C3 with loosing as little resources as possible, and doing as little damage as possible. the 2 methods i use...

1. dec, and use your drone/fighter units, or nfp to clear the air defence, *only* you will not use these weapons again... then use lrd to paint, while your painting, use a bombers/drones to clear the capital, and the cities, *only* do not attack any thing else with the bombers. as the targets are clear, use your lrd to destroy the targets. work mostly on the cap, and cities, but hitting the town and counties to refresh the map is good.

this is the best method, it will leave 20 fort garrisons, all the bases, and factories garrisons. if you set them all to undefended, it will compensate the cost of the war, by over 1T. the biggest factors, are the NDM, and the MI.

option 1, is the cheapest, over all the best, but not always practical, as you may not be able to attack a C3 on your border

2. Drop in SF units, 3-5 of them. While your waiting for them to land, clear the air, same as above. then use bombers *only* to clear garrisons. the bombers will kill the mib and dmb, at little or no losses. then use cruise missles to destroy the targets. do this on the capital, and the cities *only* it'll take about 500 missles per city, and 1000 missles for the capital. the amount of bombs needed, if the country is not on your border, will be almost nothing. once the sf land, start painting, and use your missles to destroy a town, and refresh the map.

this method is more expensive, but by not destroying the ground troops, (using bombers and not drone, to clear garrisons,) you'll get more military hardware out of it... this method, is also a little more straight forward, as you don't have to manage having a ground unit near the target you are working on...

i've used both these methods, extensively, over 6 months, unless they made a bran new change to the assests of a C3, they will make you about 1.5t per country... but ofcourse to make a significant impact on your overall empire, it would take weeks of work, doing nothing but raiding. so it is very impractical. but to some one with more time on their hands, than they know what to do with, it can make you some ok money.

Orbiter,
good points. i've also taken out c3's in the past month with the same results. it's usually when i get bored though.lol. and it does make sense to use them for trading workers.

i was manly commenting on w3c's statement that many empires were built on taking out c3's. that was the case months ago, but very difficult to do now. i was offering an alternative to the c3 approach. and looking at my figures now, i think i was on the short side of the issue. it would cost you more than 50gc's to get a country up to what you can buy one for on the open market.

Well there are changes to the assets of C3 countries because their ammo stores are worth less now. Of course, offensive ammo costs less too so it's not as expensive to take a C3 as it used to be (and it was quite cheap in the first place). I haven't run the numbers but it should definitely still be possible to make money from raiding C3s.

I used that method to start on all of the servers except for LU because I didn't want to buy cash for my countries with GC.

Personally I use drone missiles instead of cruise missiles if the country is within 2000 km. Which way is cheaper depends on relative ammo prices but it takes about 3300 drone missiles to blow up a city. That's about 16.5B now, at 5M/missile. Cruise missiles OTOH are ~60M per missile so 500 of them is 30B. Not huge but it's there.

(you should still clear the cities with bombers only. Just use the drones to "attack target" or you'll waste missiles)

Parsifal is right though, it's much cheaper to buy a 20m pop starter country for 50 GC than to take a C3 and build it up. C3s usually have 6 to 7M pop so getting it up to 20M is 65 GC at 5 GC per million pop. You also don't get the 5T in assets by taking a C3. The only reason to take a C3 instead of buying a country is that if you take a country you get to pick where it's located and you can also configure the distribution of workers to your liking before adding pop. (Also 20M pop countries often come with a bunch of CEO corporations which you may or may not like).

Oh that reminds me I'm selling two 20M pop countries on KB for 50GC each :> Message me if interested!

well, all valid points...

another thought, is take your main country, and build it up to 30m, 40m is better, jack up the hi, and transfer the pop into the new C3s, last i checked you can "grow" about 2m pop a week this way... its slow, but cheaper...

i do all the above and have bought 2 countries far away but built 5 from scratch around my main i built from scratch and i prefer building from scratch cuz then i get all my workers to be young and ofcourse my proper worker ratios are awsome and i get to build all the corps so potential profit is 2x all mismanaged random ceo private corps, but i tend to get lazy and before i know it i dump 40m pop 1 day and the next 100 ceo corps move in lol.

another way to get pop out of the c3s is you take your low gov salary countries where llw are worth 2x the gov workers and trade from the c3 200k llw for like your own 100k senior doctors or watever the minimum u can get away with is, then trade back from your country like 50k llw for your 100k senior doctors back thus its like you just got 150k llw for free, done 4x a day per country of yours and per c3 you take then your looking at for 10 country empire then your looking like 3m a day? course thats just the llw to raise pop you can do this to get all the other workers you need as well ;) but it takes time to demolish all the c3 corps degarrison them and sell the weapons and xfer the cash and changing of settings to prevent new corps popping up and name so u can remember who your trading with and always initiating the trade from the right country for the best ratios etc

On White giant I set up a country where high tech and strategic corps have very high salaries and a few non-upgraded corps and government salary are low. I have a second country with a reverse set up. The government and low tech corps get high salaries and the strategic and high tech corps get dirt pay.

I can exchange 189 workers from the CCC for less than 10k senior techs. I can take 378 llw from 2 CCCs and also send 378 LLWs to my growing companies. This is the least tedious way I have found to get population. I can set up and execute all four trades with 5 log ins.

In the other country, senior techs get paid less than low level workers. It also works out that high level workers make less than medium workers.

In any country you can drop the government pay and get cheap nurses without any adverse effect on corporations. The military will deactivate frequently.

shaun,

There is a "block CEOs" box in "settings". If you don't want CEOs put an X in that box.

ya i know but then ill get a msg someone asking me to open up for them and then i forget to close it on one or more countries and there u go lol. hopefully if the game changes keep coming all the badly run corps will go bankrupt anyway on their own haha

would really love to haveu help me set up those kind of extreme ratios on the worker exchange though man, i dont get anything near that on LU and i got a lot of countries with falling populations where all the HLW and MLW die faster than they are made so im always short on a daily basis...

btw i got another problem
got thse 4 countries on KB i want to strip the max pop out of em to place on market to raise some gc since i am reducing my investment there as i dont got time for 2 worlds of 10 country empires really. but ive hit this wall

they got 33, 28, 27, 24m pop but to many corps i guess cuz i get this msg his country cannot offer population because worker groups might be depleted. so whats the reqs to get around this?