Q&A: Economy 101

[The Beatles]

Here, I will explain the basics of creating a successful economy. This will prevent your money from going into the red, and provide the money you need for thigns like building and replenishing your troops. In this first post, I will cover structures.

Markets, and Tents are the structures that make you your money. First of all, about 30-40% of your land needs to be Markets to keep up a successful economy. You should also have Tents, exactly half the number of Markets you have. For all this to work, your tax rate needs to be 29%, as Slynder discovered.

A high tax rate will prevent your health from reaching 100%. Thus, when you are at 92% health, temporarily reset your tax rate to 11%, do something for 8 turns to get 100% health, and then put your tax rate back to 29%. Without going into the complicated details of why this is so, or how it all works, suffice it to say that 29% will work, and you can take it on faith.

Your workers will eat much, so you need to build enough Foragers to keep them going.

If you have a lot of excess cash (around a billion), you may safely demolish markets and tents (but keeping them in the same ratio!) until you are losing a little, but not much. Your cash reserves will keep you floating, while free up land for other uses. If, however, your cash goes dangerously low, just demolish other structures and build more markets and tents. Before doing that, however, sell some food and/or troop to cover the expenses of building.

[Ruddertail]

You can still get workers coming at that high of a tax rate? I thought once it got that high they would only leave.

[Urran Voh]

But what about food? And from what I can tell, this won't work in a long, drawn out game full of wars and such. But on FaF, it just may keep you in the top 10-15.

I have never used many workers, unless I plan on building a City. But a City (RWL) is the same as 1,000 Tents and Camps.

[The Beatles]

This isn't a strat, it's just the economic backbone to whatever else you want to do. It also has provisions for cash excess/shortage.