Cyber Nations Guide

[Tezkat]

In an effort to help grow our little Cyber Nations alliance, I've collected the game info and tips from the Cyber Nations thread into a convenient reference format. This thread is intended as a quick reference guide only. Please use the main thread for discussion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Basic Nation Preferences
Government Positions
Resources
Growing Your Nation
Technology and Trade

[Tezkat]

NATION PREFERENCES

Just a few quick preferences you can set on the Edit My Nation screen...


NATION TEAM

Set to Purple.


ALLIANCE AFFILIATION

We're the Defensive Mutually-Friendly Alliance.


GOVERNMENT TYPE

Your population gets to pick what type of government they'd like to have. They'll say something like "Your people approve of this form of government but the majority of your people would prefer something else." and then give you a hint. They change their minds about once a month. If your government type matches their choice, you get +1 Happiness (i.e. more income). In the case of any non-obvious types, check out the wiki. It isn't always (or even normally) the best option to go with what your people want. Unless your peoples' prefered government is Capitalist, Republic, or Revolutionary Government, pick Monarchy.


TAX RATE

Set your tax rate to 28% and leave it there for the rest of the game (or at least until you have $40 million to blow on a Social Security wonder). You'll fly past the point of optimal tax rates under 28% the moment you receive your first aid package. I don't care if you're a hardcore libertarian small government freak who's bothered by your citizens whining about their high taxes. It's only a game, and 28% tax rate is the best, mkay?


DEFCON

There are only two usable DEFCON levels in this game: DEFCON 1 - Maximum Readiness and DEFCON 5 - Peacetime Readiness. If you're fighting anyone, or our alliance is on alert for a war, set it to 1. At any other time, you want it at 5. If you're changing your DEFCON level, it's best to collect taxes while at 5.


THREAT LEVEL

Keep your threat level at Low. Changing it won't help you until you have millions to spend on spies.


NATIONAL RELIGION

As with government type, your people are very spiritually adventurous. Check the wiki to see what religion your people want to try, set it to match, and enjoy the +1 Happiness bonus.


WAR/PEACE PREFERENCE

You get five free days of Peace Mode when you first create your nation, but it isn't necessary to make use of them, and you'll take a huge economic hit if you forget to turn it off before your grace period expires. Anyone small enough to hit you will quickly discover the error of their ways.


DESCRIPTION

You can be as clever and creative as you like here. However, you should place the words "Pegasus Member" somewhere in your nation's description. Optionally, you can be more precise and add "PEACE Protectorate" or "Poseidon Protectorate" (or combine them, e.g. "Member of the Pegasus Protectorate Bloc"). That notifies potential raiders that we're members of a large alliance bloc with people in high places watching over us. (i.e. It keeps the bad guys from beating you up... unless they really mean it. )

If you still have "Elysium Protectorate" in your description, please update it. Elysium no longer exists; they left Purple and merged into The Phoenix Federation a while ago.

[Tezkat]

GOVERNMENT POSITIONS

Several of the choices you make on the My Government Position screen will actually affect your nation's economy.


NUCLEAR WEAPONS

If you have access to Uranium as one of your resources, pick:

Our government will not sign the treaty because our nation believes in the use of nuclear technology to build power plants, however we do not promote the use of nuclear technology for weapons of mass destruction.

Supporting nuclear weapons will hurt your environment, even if you're too small to actually build them.


IMMIGRATION

Pick:

We have an open border policy, but in order for the immigrants to remain in the country they will have to become citizens first.

The other options will penalize your environment.


DRUG TRAFFICKING

Pick:

Our nation will open new rehabilitation centers and educate our citizens to the dangers of drugs, but we are not prepared to declare an all out war on drugs.

or

Our military has been positioned at all border crossings and is arresting all drug traffickers. Drugs are illegal in this nation.

The other options will penalize your environment.


None of the other policies have any in-game effect, so answer them however you please.

[Tezkat]

RESOURCES

Planning a good resource set is one of the most important things you can do for your nation. Not all resources are created equal. It's not necessarily a good idea to accept every trade that comes your way, either. Don't ever double up by getting the same resource twice from different people.


You'll need a Harbor in order to create a complete resource set. Don't worry about that, though. We'll give you more than enough money to buy one as one of your first improvements.


The core infrastructure cost reducing resources are all must haves: Aluminum, Lumber, Iron, and Marble. Not only do they individually reduce the cost of growing your nation, they also combine to give you Construction as a bonus resource to further reduce costs. Don't build a nation without these.


The population enhancers are the next best resources. Here they are (roughly in order from most to least effective):

Fish
Wheat
Cattle
Pigs
Sugar

Ideally, you want as many of these in your set as is practical. Population bonuses not only increase your income, they also allow you to get improvements faster.


The general strategy that top players follow involves getting the Construction resources, finding a bonus resource or two that fit in with their starting resources, and then fill in the rest with population enhancers.


Water and Wheat (in combination with the Aluminum and Lumber you got for Construction) give you Beer as a bonus resources. Since both of these are individually great resources, they're very commonly added to a resource set.


Cattle, Pigs, Spices, and Sugar give you Fast Food as a bonus resources. Since most of these are population buffs that you want to have anyway, this is a great combo.


Coal (in combination with Iron) gives you the infra cost reducing Steel as a bonus resource. Coal isn't bad on it's own, even though it gives you an environment penalty. Since you're supposed to have Iron anyway, this is a good bonus combo.

Adding Oil and Rubber to Construction will give you Asphalt, an infra upkeep reducing bonus resource. Asphalt isn't super effective at improving your net income until your nation gets fairly big. However, if you already have Steel, you get Automobiles for free, which is a sweet income booster. Incidentally, this is the resource set I use. It's nice, but it's very difficult to maintain, since you don't have much room to fiddle with the set, and losing one trading partner can bring your whole string of bonus resources crashing down.


Gold, Silver, Gems, and Coal give you Fine Jewelry as a bonus resource. It's not something I'd go out of my way to get, but if you started with some of the resources, it's a pretty good deal. Adding Fish, Furs, and Wine to Fine Jewelry will give you Affluent Population, the only bonus resource that boosts population. As with Automobiles, the Affluent Population combo is difficult to set up and maintain, but worthwhile if you can manage it.


Gold is nice for small nations. It reduces the cost of buying technology, thus increasing your profits when selling tech. Expect to make a lot of money doing that when you're small. Adding Lead and Oil will give you Microchips, which can further increase profit margins. Unfortunately, neither Lead nor Oil are, on their own, particularly good resources, and Microchips becomes much less useful as a bonus resource once you're large enough to be buying tech from other nations. Buying University improvements is a better way to go, in my opinion.


If you didn't start off with Uranium, don't go out of your way to get it. It's really only good for nukes, and you need to be really, really big before worrying about those.


FINDING TRADES

Sometimes, you get lucky, and someone will offer you just the right resources you need. Most of the time, however, you need to be an active participant.

Go to World Statistics - Advanced Trade Finder to look for trades. If at all possible, trade with other Purple nations. You get a +1 Happiness bonus for doing so. Unfortunately, Purple is now one of the smaller spheres, so you may not necessarily find what you need there. Getting the proper resources to maximize your set is usually more important than trading within your sphere.

Another option is to join a Trading Circle. The concept is fairly simple: Design an ideal resource set and find six nations (including yourself) that each have two of the required resources. Then every nation in the circle trades with every other nation, and everybody ends up with the same resources. The players involved tend to be dedicated to maintaining long term trades--always a good thing.

We maintain a forum for all members of Purple alliances at:

http://www.cnpurpleunity.net/

It's a good place for things like finding a trading circle.

[Tezkat]

GROWING YOUR NATION

First off, the most important key to growth: Infra, Infra, Infra!


INFRASTRUCTURE

Infrastructure is your nation's single most important investment.

Infrastructure = Citizens
Citzens = Money
Money = Growth (i.e. more Infrastructure, if you prefer the recursive version )

The bulk of your spending money should be going to infra.

There are points known as Infra Jumps where the costs of infrastructure (and/or infrastructure upkeep) increase signficantly, and they all occur on nice round numbers (20, 100, 200, 300, 500, 700, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, and 8000). Thus, always normalize your infrastructure to a number ending in 9.99 and then purchase only in batches of 10 (the maximum). At the 1k and higher jumps, it's usually necessary to save up enough cash at the x999.99 mark to buy a hundred or so infrastructure at once in order to avoid losing money from increased upkeep costs.


IMPROVEMENTS

Every 1000 citizens (100 infrastructure, give or take), you get to buy an Improvement that alters your income, expenses, trading capacity, etc.


The most important improvement is the Harbor. It should be one of the first improvements you buy, as it allows you to round out your resource set.

After getting the Harbor (or just before, if you have a whole lot of spending money on hand), the next order of business is to acquire 5 Factories. Factories significantly reduce the cost of buying infrastructure. (Infra = Growth, remember?) At the beginning, your own tax income will be insignificant compared to the cash raining down on you from larger alliance members, so your priority will be reducing purchasing costs.

Next up: 3 Schools and 2 Universities. Expect to be involved in a lot of tech trading. The Universities will help alot in that department, as they make technology much cheaper to buy.

Somewhere along the line, a Foreign Ministry would prove useful.


Once you've taken care of the basic powerleveling improvements, buy Banks and/or Stadiums. If you're tax income per citizen is below $24, buy Stadiums first, otherwise go with Banks. Then you can just go down the line of progressively weaker improvements. The order is usually pretty obvious. (+2 Happiness is better than +1 Happiness.) Don't buy a lesser improvement just because you're short a few bucks. Your improvement slots and long term growth are worth more than the small savings from buying a cheaper improvement. Just save up until you can afford the one you're supposed to buy.

Clinics and Hospitals usually fit in when you're closing in on 3k infra, after you run out of Schools to buy. Once you have a critical mass of citizens, they provide a nice growth spurt, as the population bonuses will allow you to buy several improvements in quick succession.

Intelligence Agencies are better than Churches, since they're cheaper and increase your spy capacity. Labour Camps go somewhere near the end, after the +1 Happiness improvements. Depending on your resource set, they may be cost effective slightly before that.

You can safely save the military improvements (Barracks, Missile Defense, and Satellites[/b]) until after you've bought all the economic improvements.

Guerilla Camps are something you buy only for wars and then destroy afterwards.

Don't buy Border Walls. Reducing citizen count is bad, mkay?


MILITARY

When you're starting out, you can get away without too many troops.

You need a solder efficiency rating equal to at least 20% of your civilian population. Less than that will make your citizens unhappy, reducing your income. With under 10% of your civilian population in troops, you'll have outright riots on your hands.

Aim for an efficiency rating below 60% of your population, as more than that will hurt your environment.


LAND

Land is, honestly, not very important. It's usually sufficient to buy just enough land to make the bright red "It's getting crowded..." warning go away.

For large nations, land helps with counterintelligence and padding your Nation Strength, but it's not a particularly cost-effective way to grow your nation. The population that comes with adding land is insignificant compared to what you would get for an equivalent amount of infrastructure.

As with infra, it's best to buy land in maximum sized blocks (in this case, 20 miles apiece). It's likewise helpful to normalize to x9.999 miles, since the price increases also occur on nice, round numbers.

[Tezkat]

TECHNOLOGY AND AID

The first 15 points of Technology have a significant effect on your economy and military capacity. After that... not as much. Not as quickly, anyway. Tech continues to provide income bonuses all the way up to 200, but it's not that cost-effective an income booster until you have a lot of infrastructure. It's also important for military applications, but more on that later.

As with infra, you ideally want to buy tech in blocks of 10 (but see below).


FOREIGN AID

First off, it's important to understand how the Foreign Aid system works. A nation can send or receive aid of up to $3 million and/or 50 tech every 10 days from another nation. Actually, it's 10 days inclusive, so in practice there's an 11 day delay before those nations can conduct another transaction. Nations start out with four aid slots per cycle (i.e. one transaction each with up to four nations every 11 days). A Foreign Ministry improvement will add an extra slot (for a total of 5), as will a Disaster Relieve Agency wonder (for a total of 6).

In order to both send and receive something from a given nation within the 10 day period, you need a middleman (or two). Much of the logistics of foreign aid revolves around trying to optimize the use of everyone's aid slots.


When you expect to receive a large amount of cash in foreign aid, it's usually a good idea to hold off on collecting your taxes until you have the cash in hand. When you have the aid money in hand, pay your bills, build up your nation, and then collect taxes at the new, higher rate. In effect, when you wait to collect taxes, the effect of the new infrastructure/improvements/technology becomes retroactive to the day you stopped collecting taxes (rather than the day you received the aid).


SELLING TECHNOLOGY

Technology is a great way to convince large, rich nations to send you lots of money.

See... The purchase cost to go from 0 to 50 tech is around $800k. With the right resources and improvements, it can actually be a fair bit lower. The purchase cost to go from 500 to 550 tech is more like $5 million. So big nations pay little nations to buy tech for us at a reduced rate (and keep the difference as profit). The standard going rate for Technology around here, which takes advantage of the maximum aid limits, is $3 million for 100 tech.


The process goes something like this:

The buyer (or a middleman) sends $3 million to the tech seller (you).

The tech seller raises his tech level to 50. Starting from 0, this costs anywhere from $500k to $850k, depending on resources and improvements.

The tech seller sends the first 50 tech to either the buyer or his middleman. Back at 0, he buys another 50 tech and sends it out to the next middleman. The remaining $1.3-2 million goes into infrastructure, etc.

Buying 50 tech in increments of 10 (starting at 0) costs about $850k with no cost reducing resources or improvements. Apparently, it's more efficient to go 0, 4.5, 14.5, 24.5, 34.5, 44.5, 50 (that way has a base cost around $815). Gold, Microchips, and Universities all reduce the cost of buying tech--as low as ~$500k for 50 tech with all of them. In any case, don't overbuy. It just reduces your profits.

Always collect taxes while you're at 50 tech instead of 0. You should maintain a base level of at least 15 tech (if not the full 50) between tech deals.


I proposed a slightly more complicated setup in the Cyber Nations thread that eliminates the need for dedicating aid slots to middlemen. We have yet to try it out, but the basic principle goes something like this:

There are three buyers (call them A, B, C) and one (or more) tech seller(s).

On the first cycle, A sends $3 million to each of the sellers.
The sellers each send 50 tech to B and 50 tech to C.

10 days later, B sends $3 million to each of the sellers.
The sellers each send 50 tech to A and 50 tech to C.

10 days after that, C sends $3 million to each of the sellers.
The sellers each send 50 tech to A and 50 tech to B.

This setup gets tech to everyone faster and more efficiently, but it does involve a lot of cat herding.


THE NEXT STEP

Selling tech is a great way to grow your nation well into the four-digit infra figures. Once you're big enough to retire from the business, just buy your way up to 150 or so tech. After that, buying your own tech starts to get really expensive, so you can look into doing a little tech trading from the other side. Maintaining at least 1 tech for every 10 infra is a good rule of the thumb.

Increasting technology continues to provide small Happiness bonuses all the way up to 200 tech. It also slightly reduces infrastructure upkeep costs (up to a maximum of 10% when your tech level is equal to 5% of your Nation Strength).

For larger nations, technology plays an important role in boosting the effectiveness of spies and military. Work on building your tech up to at least 500, the level which allows you to purchase the best air force units.

[Valynth]

It should also be noted that Tech has the ability to lower infrastructure upkeep costs.  Typically it isn't significant untill you have a lot of infrastructure, but it still has an impact.