Improvement swapping

Nation Economics

Entry posted by MrCyber December 6, 2008

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This fourth article will cover another very important aspect of the game that will benefit your economy greatly: Improvement Swapping

What is Improvement swapping?

Improvement swapping is exactly what it sounds like it is. Swapping of improvements to optimize your nation's economy for various situations/tasks.

There are 3 economic situations for which you want to improvement swap:

Paying bills
Tax collection
Purchasing infrastructure

I will discuss all 3 situations in this article.

Improvement swapping for paying bills

To make improvement swapping for paying bills work there are a few aspects that need to be in place:

Your nation needs to be above 1500 infrastructure.
This is an approximation. You can do this improvement sometimes with less infrastructure. This swap is profitable if the Infrastructure upkeep portion of your bills is larger then $250k/day.
You need to have enough cash on hand to pay your bills for 10 days + $1.5M.

If you make these requirement you can then execute this improvement swap. To do this use the following steps:

If you have 5 factories, destroy these, otherwise, destroy the 5 cheapest improvements you have to free up 5 improvement slots.
If you already have 5 free improvement slots, you don't have to destroy anything of course.
Buy 5 Labor Camp improvements.
Only pay your bills for 10 days.
After paying your bills on the 10th day, destroy the 5 Labor Camps
Continue at the next section: Improvement swapping for tax collection.

You can also do this for up to 19 days, just add 9 days to all the above.

Improvement swapping for tax collection

Improvement swapping for tax collection is fairly simple. Again, this is only something you should do when above approximately 1500 infrastructure.

To generate maximum tax income, you should NEVER have any of the following improvements during tax collection:

Labor Camps
Guerilla Camps

If you have less then 45 total available improvement slots (ie < 45k working citizens) also make sure you do not have any of these improvements while you collect taxes:

Factories
Any military improvements (Barracks, Satelites, Missile Defenses, etc)

If you have any of those improvements, destroy them and replace them with economic improvements until you have all of the economic improvements. Always buy economic improvements based on the most value they give to your nation. Your alliance should have a basic improvement purchase order list.

Note: Border Walls are a very special improvement. You only buy enough Border Walls to reduce your environment to 1 + Global Radiation Level (so if GRL = 1.08, you should buy Border Walls until your environment reaches 2.08). Border Walls are typically more effective then any +1 happiness improvement and typically less effective then any +2 happiness improvement. This can vary depending on your nation's specific resources and wonders, so do some research.

Improvement swapping for infrastructure purchase

To purchase infrastructure you should always have as many factory improvements as you can have, so sell the cheapest improvements you have (NEVER sell the Harbor or Foreign Ministry improvement) and buy up to 5 Factories before you purchase infrastructure. You should always have 5 factories whenever you're buying infrastructure if you have more then 7000 working citizens.

Sledding

Sledding is a method of combining several of these improvement swap techniques to optimize your nations economic performance. A typical 10 day sledding cycle looks like this:

Day 0
- Pay all your bills
- Collect taxes
- Sell 5 improvements if necessary and purchase 5 Labor Camps
[*]Day 1-4
- Pay your bills
[*]Day 5
- Optional: Switch your nation's government type to Capitalist (only if you plan on buying infrastructure on day 10)
[*]Day 6-9
- Pay your bills
[*]Day 10
- Pay your bills
- Destroy the 5 Labor camps
- Optional: Buy 5 factories (only if you're buying infrastructure)
- Optional: Buy infrastructure
- Optional: Destroy 5 factories
- Buy next 5 economic improvements
- Collect taxes
- Destroy 5 cheapest economic improvements
- Buy 5 Labor Camps
- Start again at Day 1

This brings me to the end of this article. I hope you will use these tips to improve your nations' economy and as always if you have any questions or comments, please post them.

En Taro Adun.