Here is a step by step walk through of your first 100 turns. It may not be the best way to play, but it works and will get you off to a great start!
First thing, go to the build menu and build 15 indy sites. That will take 3 turns. I do this to get some production going early. You will notice you have started making spies. All military is produced through industrial sites. During our first 100 turns, you will build only industrial sites, construction sites, 10 oil rigs, and enough farms to keep your food in the green.
Ok, so now lets build some construction sites. Start with 5 for now. Construction sites are different then normal buildings. You can only ever build 1 per turn. But the more construction sites you have, you more of the other buildings you can build each and every turn. We will be building a lot of these CS’s throughout the game.
Ok, so now lets build some more industrial sites. When we build anything we will only do it certain way. If you look right now you will see a message on your screen saying how many buildings you can build per turn. When you build you should always do it in multiples of that number. So if it says 7, then you should only build 7 or 14, or 21, etc, etc. It will also tell you the max number of buildings you can build in total. That number will depend on your available land and the amount of money you have available. So build some more industrial sites. Build as many as you can, but make sure it is a multiple of your buildings per turn. When you are done this, then build 5 more CS. If during these turns, your food production dropped below 0 (in the red) then spend a turn building farms, but just enough to keep it in the green, and of course only a multiple of your buildings per turn.
Ok now stop. You are low on cash, or maybe don’t even have enough to build anymore. On the right there is a link called "purchases" this link will take you to you "Private" market. It is called this because you are the only one who has access to it, unlike the public market (the "market" link) where you buy and sell with other players.
There are three important things you need to know about the private market.
-First off, unlike the public market, your stuff will sell immediately, and you will get the cash right then.
-Second, you wont get very much cash. Prices are low when you are selling here, and very high when you are buying.
-Third, for the strategy we will be teaching you, the only thing you will ever do here is sell spies, which you will do now.
Sell them all. Now you have money to keep building, so do so. Our goal right now is to have 20 construction sites by turn 50, and the rest industrial sites, with a few farms. You may be out of turns by now, but that is ok, just log off (after you get your freebies) and don’t log on again until tomorrow so you get your 6 free turns.
The next day…
You are gonna need some more land to build on, so click on the ‘explore’ link and explore for a few turns, then start building again. When you get low on money, sell spies again. You may have to sell spies every turn to make enough to build with, but that’s ok, we don’t need them yet. At turn 60, stop. You have 20+ CS, and a bunch of ind sites. And you shouldn’t have more than 20 free acres. Now its time to get ready for our big break out of protection. We don’t want to sell spies forever; it is a waste of money. But we will need money to keep building. So go to country managament, and change your production to 80% turrets, and 20% spies. This will give us enough spies to fund our building up to turn 100, and also let us build up some turrets which we will need for defense later, and also to sell later when the time comes.
Now keep building. Only exlplore 4 turns at a time when you need land, and always build it all up. By turn 90 we should have 30-40 construction sites, and the rest industrial sites, with enough farms to keep our food in the green, and 10 –20 oilrigs, which will produce oil we will need later. Watch your turns carefully right now. We are only going to play up to 98. If you click on "status" you can see how may turns you have played so far. When you reach 98, stop. Once you play your 100th turn, you are no longer in protection. We want to make sure that when we leave protection, we get as big of a start as possible. You should be sitting with 20 thousand or more turrets right now, and even some spare cash after building. You may have turns left, but we will save them for the next day.
So that’s it! We are done the first 100 (actually 98) turns. It is the most boring part of the whole game, but is important in getting you a head start against all the other countries playing. By using this strategy, or something like it, for your first 100 turns, you give yourself an advantage over others who don’t. Of course the way I showed you here is not the absolute best way. It is however the easiest and least time consuming. If you want to be really anal, sell your spies at the end of EVERY turn. You can try out different methods of this start in the Free for All where you can make many countries. But like I said, you only get 1 country in 1A, so play it smart.
It is now time to move out of Protection, and into THE REAL WORLD!
Click here to continue past the first 98 turns