I was looking over the statistics of past resets. I'm noticing a trend where clans often have a bunch of countries with very low networth, but then there is one country that has a very higher networth. I guess the same can be said of even bigger clans than 16 people.

How do people do that?

Do they basically spend the entire reset using 15 countries to send Financial Assistance to one main country and then near the end of the set they spend all of the resources to buy troops to increase networth?

Also, from time to time I see people, often in really small clans with less than 16 countries, have one really strong country also, but that the other countries were basically 'neglected'. They don't even try to self-farm them. They would have no spy count, billions in $ just doing nothing. Is that just account inactivity or what kind of strategy is that?

Two ways, one which you already mentioned, i.e.:

1. Do they basically spend the entire reset using 15 countries to send Financial Assistance to one main country and then near the end of the set they spend all of the resources to buy troops to increase networth?

2. The main country stocks up on something specific (tech or food), selling it very high at the end and use the other 15 to buy it from the market. Also uses the other 15 to do market transfers so the 1 main country can buy cheap and sell it at a higher price.

Thats about it.

It is possible to have pretty good countries overall though, i.e. no need to end up with just 1 country very high then the rest at 10-100m. For me I got that 3.2 Billion country last set while my other 15 ended up at around 270-280m each.

But how much can you send to make such a dramatic difference? Also, isn't there a 'decay' factor involved if one country is stocking a lot of money or food? Is decay an acceptable loss because you make more than you decay anyway?

Countries can only send 10% of assets per day. And they must be within range of networth to be sending and receiving financial aid. So you need to send 10% every single day? But some of the disparity in networth is so huge, it is indicating a huge amount of disparity between food and cash of the main country versus the rest. Are you able to send that much by the end of set merely by sending 10% a day in food & cash?

Regarding the market buying strategy, what if there are existing goods on the market that is very low priced? If you want to 'transfer' money to yourself selling super expensive goods, then you will need to 'clear' the market first right? Are you able to guarantee you can always 'clear' a market? That takes a lot of money. By the time you cleared the market to expose your ridiculously priced orders, you just ran out of cash to 'transfer' money to the main country.

Also, even if your ridiculously priced orders are exposed, how do you ensure you're buying for yourself? If someone else also listed them at the same price, you might be helping the other guy!

Market transfers. You put it at a random high price and pray no one is blocking you.

There is no decay for goods on the market. That is why it is called stocking.

Your assumptions are correct in theory, put in practice it isn't as hard as you seem to think since there arnt that many players left. Markets arnt that deep, and when you are transferring 20-40 bill cash per buyout, existing regularly priced tech is just a drop in the bucket.

You just have to pick your transfer tech wisely. Obviously techs like indy and spy will be thinner than bus or res. Use your brain and hope for a little luck.

You would be surprised at getting 10% in cash and food fro 15 countries adds up when you send the max nearly every day. The big aka. main country stocks food bushels and puts in the market at a really high price to avoid the decay factor and then towards the end of set luquidates the bushels into cash.

In order to ensure you are buying from yourself, a non-standard price of said good is adviseable and when that good is on the market the "amount for sale" in the selling country will match the "available" in the buy screen on the market.

Yeah, tech market seems easy to buy out. Market doesn't seem very deep as you say.

But for things like military units, or bushells, it seems you need a lot more $$ to buy out the market? I should do an experiment to see much I can go.

Is using bushell the only way to 'stock'? I guess you can't use the market trick for cash and the cash decay is unavoidable above $2B?

Yeah I thought about that. Make a funny number for the price.

But still, to clear the market to make your order show up might require a lot of capital. I guess it depends how lucky you are at a given time depending on how much stock is on the market.

Yes, clearing the market does require a fair amount of capital. There are some goods that usually are easier to clear than market than others.

Bushels are the most conventional way to stock and safest. You can sell an unlimited amount on the private market for a resonable amount. Some others stock oil, but there is no guranteed buyer. Though with the advent of
"burning oil" to generate extra private market units in the past few sets, there is more demand for oil late in the set than a year ago. Oil also has the benefit of not being subjext to decay. All about risk/reward.

Thanks.

Another question, when you stock bushels or goods by listing them on the market for a high price, is the preferable method one of transferring cash by having other countries buy it?

Or is the better method to "recall" your goods from the market and sell food on the private market? Also, when you recall the goods, they ALL come back right?

So for people, they must have trillions of bushells of food suddenly back in the country?

all goods on sale come back, recalling techs requires 3 turns more.

bushels and money decay/corrupt only if uses turns.

selling at priv vs public depends public price and priv price, if priv is 35 then you need 38 public price to get profit vs selling at priv as non-demo.

So with your stocking strat, basically you spend 3 turns every few days to relist the stock back in the market after they come back? When you list, you use one turn. So does that decay a bit of the food that comes back?

Yeah I know about that from the 6% commission. Was wondering if the strategy was to recall all the food at the end and sell everything in the private market, since public market has a time to take effect.

some players put stocks on sale on small (couple million) batches to minimize decay when bushels come back and those are put back on sale.

recalling bushels doesn't decay stocked bushels, only those bushels which were in hand before recall.

de- and re-stocking times vary a bit between players but usually stocks aren't sold 15 mins before set ends since then it can be impossible to spend all that money (unless has really big country or ALOT oil or small stock).

To answer your question, if goods/tech arent sold after 48 hours after coming onto the market, they are autmotically returned to you, with no turns spent. If you want to recall goods, you must recall ALL your goods OR ALL your tech and use 3 turns. If you want to recall BOTH ALL goods AND ALL tech, it will take 6 turns since goods (military, food, oil) are independent of tech.

Yeah I know about that part of the rules. I was just wondering how you guys manage the increasing stock of goods. I mean, presumably you guys do this every single day since the start of the match and the stocks of food is growing as your country grows and you give yourself financial aid. So the amount of food you deal with could be in the billions or trillions by the end of match.

Everyday food will return back to you and you must re-list them. That's one turn used, and potentially there is some decay everytime you do that too?

that decay isn't that big that it'd matter and like i said it can be minimized by putting stocks up on smaller quantities like 5m now and 10m hr or 2 later etc.

I thnk the most food I have manged to accumulate 8-9 billion. Others have maybe tripled that. So no trillions of food. For the last 5 weeks or so of the set, it is about accumulating food/cash. Stocking it on the market ane returning it back to the market when it autmotically comes back to you.

When you start to spend that cash is all dependent on how stock you have, the land size of your country (more land = faster refresh reate for cheap private market units), the amount of oil you have, your guess on how deep the market is, and a couple of other minor factors. An exact answer is impossible to come up with.

FYI, I am not an elite netter, have a few top 10s including a 3rd place, but there are others far better at this than me.

i only build one strong and don't do all 16 because my strat is very ineffective for netting. I put one up there because i prepare for war for the first month regardless of whats going on only time i deviated from that strategy we got FS'd by imp 3 years ago. and it screwed me.