King Irwin

There's an ironic post. Perhaps you should read his post too! He already has fish too! And to the original poster...don't reroll. Those resources aren't great, but you can succeed just fine with any resources. Rerolling seems like a cowardly way to play in my opinion. As for your question, wheat is always a good option. I would play with the resource calculator that the game provides though...it can be quite helpful in determining what resource(s) would fit nicely into your set.

I'm at 97% now. And yes, $1M is definitely worth it to improve this efficiency.

It's not so much a factor of how much infra you have as how much money you make per day. I can't remember exactly when I started, but for me it would have been much earlier than for nations today since I was only selling at 150 tech for $3M (and I do recommend that you essentially starting buying from others as soon as you stop selling, right after a quick purchase perhaps). Basically it comes down to how much profit you are making per day. If you have 5 tech deals that never run late, at 100/$3M prices, you probably net about $240k per day in profit. Once this becomes pretty much insignificant compared to your tax collections, you need to start buying up tech.

The reason I was wondering how large it is is that to calculate your chances of stumbling on something greater than 50% in the first place, you would need to know the size. For example, if the hotspot is half the moon, it may only take 1 guess. But if it's only 1% of the surface area, then your chances of hitting it are only 1% each time you move, so it will take many blind attempts before someone gets greater than 50% and you are able to hone in on it, as Slayer mentioned.

That's not really true. You know where they are, you just can't see their efficiency.

I'm not sure how either of you are making these claims. Do we know how large the hotspot is? It seems to me that you could randomly move all your wonders around, and still not ever find it. Coordinating with others just means that several people are blindly moving them around. It seems hard to predict how many moves it would take before someone stumbles into it. Am I missing something here?

I can tell you that the hotspot is not where I currently am. I don't have time to post a screenshot right now, but you can look at my nation if you wish. Is there an easy way to determine coordinates? And do we know anything about how large this hotspot is?

If anyone wants to cooperate together on finding this, I'm all for it. I just bought the Moon Base today.

If your alliancemates won't do a tech deal with you, check out the Black Market (http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?showforum=62). You will certainly find a buyer there. I imagine there was some miscommunication between you and your potential buyers though, as that doesn't make any sense (resource trade != tech deal).

I think the donation was the 200 he was referring to in the first place

WRC isn't an option at your size, right? I can't recall the requirements, but if you can get this, do so. Otherwise, I'd go for the University, then Internet (w/ your tech level, Uni is better), then National War Memorial. (Space Program should be one of the last economic wonders). You should have gotten the University and Internet already (before Great Monument).

If you are really just interested in economic wonders, I suggest the DRA...assuming you will take advantage of the extra slot for tech deals. If you do, this is by far the most important. If you won't take advantage of the aid slot anyway, then go with Internet (unless you have at least 2500 tech or so...then go for University instead).

My records weren't that great at that point, but I know that I purchased 240 infra at the 5k jump and that was more than enough to be profitable. Like everyone else mentioned, the calculators should be accurate...at least at this level. The only time I wouldn't trust them is at the 1k and 2k levels, because it doesn't account for the ability to be new economic improvements. This is a non-issue by 5k though.

My guess is yes...but don't quote me on this. There are some very useful infra jump calculators floating around, and I would suggest checking one out (not sure of the link at the moment). If I recall though, 200 was usually enough to be profitable.

This is true, and I'm not sure what Hendrix was talking about (it's the same number of slots either way). enderlander is certainly also right though, in that it is more beneficial for sellers to do 1x1 deals. With 1x1 deals, they get $3M up front. Same amount of profit, but they essentially get the ~$1.5M of tech costs as an interest-free loan for 10-20 days (in addition to the ~$1.5M of pure profit that you get either way). Invested properly, this can be substantial in promoting the young nation's growth. I'm not sure if we're really getting a steady stream of newcomers though. I'd be curious to see what percentage of the "new" players of late are truly new to the game (vs. rerolls). Those that have been around would certainly know the going rates. And note that the "standard" price has increased before, as discussed earlier in this thread.

^This I stopped buying donations about 6 months ago b/c the market price had risen to such ridiculous levels. The last I calculated for my nation, $18M (with no tech) is a slightly less profitable deal than using the same slots for tech acquisition. If the donater wanted tech, $6M+100 tech would be slightly profitable (vs. tech deals), and maybe even $9M+100tech. However, at this stage, I don't really even want the 200 infra, so I'd be unwilling to give up any of my tech for a donation now.

For a maroon trade circle, check out www.maroonity.com. I'm not sure if anyone is still keeping that up to date, but at one point, there was attempts to bring together several maroon circles.

Yeah, unfortunately this happened right about the time I went from being a seller to a buyer Almost all my deals as a seller were for 150, and very soon after starting to buy, I had to settle for $3M/100. I am starting to struggle with filling my slots at this price though, so it won't be long before I start to offer more, I imagine.

I think it's a given that admin won't just decide one morning when he wakes up, "Hey, I'm going to reset CN today". There will obviously be fair warning if it were to happen, and I don't think you could argue against the final days/weeks being exciting. But that doesn't address the recurring theme here that many of us old foggies will have very little incentive to start from scratch again. It's one thing in TE where you've only had a couple months of growth, and you started off knowing it was short-term. Here, I've been building for years now, and like it was mentioned earlier, many of us are compelled to stick around simply because of the investment we have already poured into the game (yes, at times, it gets exciting and I'm glad I've stuck around...at other times, it just gets in the way of real-life hobbies/jobs/relationships/etc. and it kinda feels like an addiction!) Actually, let's dig into that... Consider the following analogy and bear with me for a minute: this game is like smoking. It can be relaxing, give you a buzz, feel like part of your routine, etc. But imagine that God suddenly decreed that all cigarette addictions will be removed...physical, psychological, whatever...nobody will be addicted anymore. But cigarettes will still be available. How many old smokers do you think would start smoking again? (this is obviously a pretty pessimistic attitude about the game, but I'm just trying to make a point) As for the alliances, I agreed with you for a minute about having limited alliance size. However, after thinking about it, how could you police that? All that would happen is that a big alliance would "split" into several smaller alliances, but they would just all band together in a supertreaty, and still all report to the same top government, etc. Nothing would change except the AA tag on their front screen.

Oooh...sounds all secretive Yeah, my efficiency has roughly been around 150 for a long time (was a bit less as a tech seller back in the day, I believe). I feel like I've put more emphasis on growth than most nations, but there are definitely a few things I could have done to grow faster, so I'd suspect that this is way above average but definitely not on par with the highest levels. For some reason, I can't actually get into CN from this machine today (but I can get on the forums...wierd), so I'll have to check out steeldor's nation later.

Yeah, take it from an "idot with the 8 bonus set" It is certainly inferior. I am phillip's camp of thinking that it's not worth the effort of resource swapping. However, if you are willing to put in the legwork and do things right, you WILL grow much faster...I'm just not willing to put in that effort. In fact, that is the sole reason I switched from a hodgepodge of trades for my 5BR set (and constantly replacing cancelled trades) to a stable circle with the inferior 8BR. Like phillip said, the 3BR (fast food, beer, construction + fish and uranium, maybe...I actually can't recall exactly what's in some of these sets, so correct me if I'm wrong, folks) is widely considered the best for almost everyone if you don't swap. If you don't have those resources, the 5BR set is almost as good (steel, construction, autos, beer, asphalt + fish and uranium?). Ideally, you could work out swapping such that it falls in line with your improvement swapping. Maximize all of the bill reduction resources during your sledding period. Then switch out temporarily for income/pop boosters to collect. Buy infra in large batches as needed and get a temporary trade for that just before your income trade as well (and swap in factories for this). To do this, you need a lot of patient and active trading partners though, but like I said, if you can make it work, it would be a huge advantage.

No. Yes.

I've got about $33M income - $17M bills = $16M net. I'm far too lazy to resource swap like dealmaster, as that seems like a huge headache to set up. In fact, I have already settled on a suboptimal resource set for the sake of stability. I forget the numbers, but I think a better set (without swapping) could net maybe $2-3M more. My nation is just over 2 years old, and I'm well within the top 100 nations (but nowhere near the strength of the very top). Compared to most, I have not suffered substantial war damage.

No one has mentioned another aspect of the CIA either - the fact that wars are typically not fought one on one. The offensive capabilities of a CIA are very limited in usefulness if some of your allies also have it. If 3 of you are fighting the same opponent, for example, all of you having a CIA is overkill since you won't all be able to launch spy attacks anyway. Defensively, if you have your enemy outnumbered, it is just more likely that he won't actually launch that many spy attacks against you. On the other hand, if you are outnumbered, the benefits of a CIA are not greater than if you were only fighting one enemy. Many of the other wonders scale appropriately as they defend against each attacker. For a ruler like the OP here who is counting on his alliance backing him, a CIA is pretty low priority, IMO. By the way, I'm glad you updated your sig, ender land. It had taken me a while to figure out you and alden were one and the same.

I don't expect that the population will ever drastically increase here. There is always going to be attrition as members get bored or don't have the time anymore, so the question is how do we replace them? The way it currently is, it's not terribly appealing for new nations, because they are over 3 years behind, so it would take many years for them to ever stand a chance of growing to the ranks of the top players. However, a drastic measure like a system reset and major advertising as mentioned earlier would likely bring in a lot of fresh members, but at the expense of a lot of core older members. Many people that spent 2-3 years building their nations and alliances would not want to start over, and would find that a convenient time to quit. I agree with previous posters that the more the merrier, but I don't think substantial growth is likely. I just hope it doesn't decline much more than the 27-30k range it has been in.