[lastr0ce]

IF you're in a bill lock, what exactly CAN't you what you else could?

Can you ground attack? air attack? nuke? buy infra? all that sort of stuff.

[cookieking]

Pretty much, can't attack in any form, or buy anything.

[rozalia]

cookieking, on Sep 29 2007, 03:26 PM, said:

Pretty much, can't attack in any form, or buy anything.

You can attack if your enemy is at below 5% odds though. I myself have done that.

[Smallfrog]

las trace, on Sep 29 2007, 03:25 PM, said:

IF you're in a bill lock, what exactly CAN't you what you else could?

Can you ground attack? air attack? nuke? buy infra? all that sort of stuff.

You can't buy anything, and you my not be able to launch attacks. (i know you can't nuke in bill lock.)

[Danish]

Is there any way to get out of the bill lock without receiving aid?

[shopt]

If you can reduce your bills to a payable level (by selling infra or dismissing military), then you can get out of bill lock without aid.

[Smallfrog]

shopt, on Sep 30 2007, 10:19 AM, said:

If you can reduce your bills to a payable level (by selling infra or dismissing military), then you can get out of bill lock without aid.

Also, if you can lower Defcom and threat level do so. (got me out of lock)

Its pretty much impossible to escape nuke lock though.

[lastr0ce]

Smallfrog, on Sep 30 2007, 12:14 PM, said:

Also, if you can lower Defcom and threat level do so. (got me out of lock)

Its pretty much impossible to escape nuke lock though.

You mean just the change of defcom put you out of billock?

This post has been edited by las trace: 30 September 2007 - 04:46 AM

[Shiva]

Bill-lock is a situation in which a nations finds that it's daily bills exceed daily income. This can either be temporary, as in the case of being the recipient of a nuclear missile, from which the nation will recover by itself in one to two weeks, or permanent.

The permanent bill-lock condition is generally suffered by large nations that have lost a significant percentage of their infrastructure due to war (the numbers vary, but around 60-80%) but have retained their wonders, improvements and military arsenals. The bills for these items can be in excess of half a million, per day. Nations with severely reduced infrastructure, particularly in the 1,000-1,150 region may not make enough per day in taxes to pay these bills in addition to their normal infrastructure bill.

As you can't pay bills, you can't (after 3 days) buy any infrastructure, therefore you can't increase your income to a level where you can pay your bills, hence "bill-locked".

The only way out of this situation is either through receiving sufficient aid to pay bills and boost infrastructure levels past the break-even point, or to sell-off improvements, nuclear weapons, cruise missiles etc. until your bills are reduced to such a level that you are able to pay them.

[Maximo Severance]

True bill-lock usually happens when you keep someone in anarchy for 20 consecutive days so forcing them to collect at a massively reduced rate of income to stay active. As people have mentioned above, nuclear anarchy is most effective at reducing income to the minimal amount.

Badly prepared players with very little money on hand may be temporarily bill-locked even on the first day of a war but if they manage to escape into peace mode, or resolve wars with diplomacy, before being forced into collecting while in anarchy/nuclear anarchy they will not have to sell any improvements/wonders/infra and will not need any aid to escape bill-lock. Temporary bill-lock is quite common, especially among badly prepared and newer players, and is a very effective weapon in stopping your enemy from retaliating against you. Sometimes however a nation will sacrifice things to continue fighting instead of passively riding out a temporary bill-lock.

The easiest people to truly bill-lock are those who have not collected for a long while and have very little money on hand. For instance if a player has not collected for 10 days going into a war they only need to be kept in anarchy for another 10 days to put them into an extremely painful situation.