Strategy

• Check out this strategy page with all sorts of specific numbers and formulas (a little dated though):
  • Tanks are 4x tougher than troops, but cost only 3.5x more in upkeep and 2.25x more food. You should probably keep some troops anyways because they can do/defend against guerilla attacks.
  • Spies cost 5.3x more in upkeep and consume 3.75x more food. Either have just enough to defend or tons to be on the offensive with espionage, probably not worth being in the middle somewhere.
  • Military technology: minimum is 87%. Also your military costs depend on your % of bases rather than amount of bases (linear), and 100% bases = 50% cost. I would guess that has changed however.
  • For enterprise it is also linear with respect to % of land. But for residences each one can house 3 times more people than an acre of land. The way research labs work is unknown, may be quadratic or exponential. For reference with 3000 land and 33% I can get 380 points per turn.
• Readiness: do your attacks at the beginning of your turns since readiness is recovered 2% per turn spent.
• Sanctions: if you can get a much smaller player to attack you (say by doing spy ops) then in the future you will *not* get sanctioned attacking them. This is how you wipeout those tiny guys. Sanctions are not in version 3.
• Food: food spoils at about 1% per day
• Money: money is taxed 2% per turn if you have over 100M, so spend some right away
• Easy Targets: you want targets that have low networth, high land. Low networth means they won't hit you back. One way is to use the search utility and do searches on random numbers - you're bound to find some non-GDI players who are much smaller than you. Another way is to use news search and look for planned assaults. Once you've found some much smaller targets you can do planned assaults with a fraction of your jets to get easy land.
• Development Strategy:
  • Very early game: do lots of exploring (mostly whenever you dont have enough money for buildings) but not too much right away since land costs money. You need *money* for buildings, and you need to get your buildings filled up right away. I suggest democracy right away. Switch later - for example if you've got tons of complexes switch to communism when you are ready. But communism doesn't make enough money to build fast enough.
  • Food: if you are in democracy or republic you may find yourself running short of food a lot. Therefore in these it is recommended you minimize your population while maximizing income - so always use maximum tax rate. Additionally you may want to minimize troops as they consume the most food. Jets and Turrets are best value for food, Tanks are ok. Since you are likely playing a defensive strategy of research or reselling you probably want mostly turrets.
  • One of the fastest ways to get tough is to concentrate entirely on residence/business/industrial buildings. It also works to switch over to this once you are finished with research (by destroying/rebuilding the appropriate buildings).
  • For making money and doing research democracy is one of the best
  • Researching/reselling research is a good way to quickly grow in the early/mid game
  • Military reselling works well in the early game due to the high prices you can charge. You should go to democracy and concentrate on military research. You need to concentrate very hard on it for it to be worth it, and you should log in at least twice a day to keep replenishing the market.
• Technologies:
  • For 1-2000 land it takes about 10-15000 research before you are maxed in that tech.
  • It appears the best military tech you can get is 87%. May be specific to game 2.
  • Best Industrial is 150%, best business/residential is 200%, best SDI is 100%, best medical is 67%, best weapons is 10%
  • Your technology gets worse as you grow in land, so it may be a good idea to quickly pump up your land in the early game and then get your research done (rather than doing your research when you are small and unnoticed).
  • Military Bases give you very little reduction in military costs, you probably need 1000 before you get something noticeable. Not worth doing early on when you are small. However, since the best you can get from military tech is 87% you need bases to get further, you probably save 1$ per troop every 100 buildings so if you have enough land this can work very well (but otherwise is a waste of buildings!). The big problem is if you are making lots of money the purchase menu can actually run out really fast! In this case consider not reselling as much.