Talk:Explore

Hint

Explore rates are wrong from 11 acres and down.

Copied from the Explore page, since it's more discussion-oriented. Note that its placement in the Explore page was early in the wiki, and is only attributed to some IP address, so I don't feel bad about moving it off the page entirely.

What I would like to do is get rid of the charts, and on here put the actual formula for explore rates in here. I'm going to leave it (for now) cause even though it may be wrong, it's still close enough to be helpful. ✭ General Earl (talk) 01:10, 8 January 2012 (MST)

This part needs editing

This seems self explanatory, but I have my doubts. As the game progresses and turrets drop in price, invading other nations becomes almost prohibitively expensive. If you consider that top players will lose up to 50,000 tanks and 1000000 troops/jets an attack, you can see that this is expensive. Lets do the math. Assuming that you are paying late game 130 for a troop and 150 for a jet, (lets average out to 140) and 500 for a tank, it works out to be about 25 million dollars in tanks and 14 million dollars in troops/jets to make an attack. One single attack costs 39 million in troops for 200 acres... That means that one acre is 195,000 dollars. If you add the price of oil to that, (volatile prices, so harder to say, as I write this oil in Express game is 225 a barrel * 1.2 million troops and 125000 tanks (my actual attack size) /25 = 55000 barrels of oil, at spot market price of 225 = 12375000, for a total price for ONE SINGLE ATTACK of about 51 million dollars. That means that 1 acre is going to set me back 250,000 dollars. Seeing as that much cash is worth about 12.84 networth an acre by invasion, and has a networth real value of 45 networth an acre, war truly is madness.

As I write this, I have about 6200 acres, and exploring gets me 15 acres a turn. My costs per turn right now are -54,000 dollars a turn (I am a techer, trying to keep costs low) and -1300 food a turn, so the total cost of me gaining 200 acres would be as follows:

54000*14turns + 1300Food * 14 turns * market price of about 40 dollars a bushel= 756,000 dollars expenses plus 728000 dollars for the food. At a total cost of about 1.484 million dollars for 200 acres, this means that exploring will cost me 7420 dollars an acre, or only 0.371 networth a turn to explore.

For completeness, lets work in opportunity cost here. I create 1661 technology a turn, selling for minimum of 4.1 million a turn at 2500 dollars per unit of tech. Instead of researching, I will need to explore for 14 turns, so the cost of me doing so is 58 million dollars. Add in 100 construction sites allowing me 30 buildings a turn, that would be 6 more turns * 4.1 million =27 million more dollars. Exploring is looking more like 85 million dollars for that 200 acres. So as you can see, this strategy is also VERY expensive for a techer.

However, desperate for land, and considering the benefit that a full turn load could get me 15 * 450 maximum turns (express server) = 6750 new acres (plus another 225 turns to build it all); I am seriously considering it. I would effectively double my tech production to 8 million dollars a turn for the remainder of the game. As of this writing that would be about 775 turns left before the reset. Subtract 675 turns, and I would have about 100 turns of production, or 800 million cash. If I subtract the 100 turns I have wasted on spy ops, cruise missile attacks, standard strikes and planned strikes, that would be almost 1.6 billion in cash. And I am not even a GREAT player.

I wrote this to think aloud, so excuse the non wiki style format. This page was blank before I put this here, so edit this as you see fit into a more standardized format. You get the idea though.

Final thoughts are: If you are competent, using this exploration strategy could be a winner, because if you followed it to the letter, you would only purchase turrets and build spies. If you tweak it for maximum effectiveness, create a golden formula, and maximise this as a strategy, you would be a very powerful nation indeed. Best of all? This COULD work for other styles of play, (oiler, farmer, etc.). I have pulled the chart below from the advanced strategies section, have a look.