MAKING MONEY: RESOURCES
There are four kinds of resources of varying
value: Iron, Oil, Wood and Gold. Iron is the poorest at $5 per turn. Oil and Wood both
produce $10 per turn (although Woods tend to be easier to get to and hence are generally
considered more worthwhile). Gold is worth $15 per turn (again, it can be difficult to get
to, but it's inherent value tends to outweigh that concern). Unlike taxes from cities
however, resources give an immediate output. With enough resources put together, you can
sometimes make a profit on the units you bought to capture them. Consider 8 gold mines in
two groups of 4. Buy 1 Transport, 2 Bulldozers of which you later sell one and a Truck for
a total investment of $95. You are collecting the resources along the way with your truck
and dump them of in a city at the end. You get back $120. A profit of $25! Admittedly,
this is a bit of an extreme case and you can thank your lucky stars if you do happen to
come across the sort of configuration that makes this possible. More likely is the
situation where you are expanding and have a transport with a bulldozer, truck and soldier
inside. Generally, you will be expanding through forest of desert and will be able to get
to at least 3 wood or oil resources with your bulldozer. This allows you to collect $30
worth of resources and pay for your truck and any roads your bulldozer laid down as you
travelled (essential for later collection of resources) straight away. This can be
invaluable in the early turns of the game as you can buy more units straight away and
capture additional cities and resources that turn. Given the case where one player expands
in an area with only cities and another expands through an area with an equal dollar value
of mixed resources and cities, the player who is getting the resources is going to
outstrip his opponent on expansion.
Having said all this about the good side of
resources, lets now take a look at the bad side. First of all, resources do not pay out
all by themselves! That's right, unlike wrecks that you can just pick up once and cities
that you only need to capture once, you need to return to resources again and again. And
even worse, if the enemy captures your resources before you can exploit them, he can take
your ore and use it himself! Suffice to say, if you give away resources full of ore
to your opponent at every turn, you are going to make him very happy (picture a string of
resources with $40-$60 worth of ore in them and what you could do with that cash. Now
picture your enemy doing that to you. Bad isn't it?). Two more bad things. You need a
bulldozer to start/capture a new mine. Bulldozers are relatively useless fighters.
However, any infantry unit can capture an undefended mine! Also, you need a specialist
unit, the truck to get the ore from the resources and transport it to a city where it can
be sold. If you haven't got any cities close by, or any trucks to transport the ore with,
you don't get anything! The last bad thing. A truck cannot transport two different kinds
of ore at once. If you have 2 gold mines and 2 woods mines close to each other, you have
to collect the ore from them in separate trips. You can't just travel through the whole
lot in one trip.
Now then, lets take a look at how to balance
out the good and the bad of resources and turn it into a profit machine designed to make
you rich! There are a number of rules that you should follow and tricks that you can use
to do this. At least some of these follow:
- Unless a resource is miles away from anything else, do not assign a truck to it
permanently. Each truck costs $24 and you are far better of teaming it up with a
Transport ($33) and using that team to collect ore from 4-12 resources each turn (of the
same kind as you can't collect it all in one go otherwise). This only costs you $57.
Consider the cost of assigning trucks to 8 resources (the average number). That is $24 x 8
= $192! So using a transport/truck combination will usually save you over $100. Now
multiply this by all the groups of resources you have and see what kind of figure you come
up with. In a lot of games you will wind up saving well over $1000. Spread over a couple
of turns, you could easily afford to buy all the technology up to the Hercules with that
amount!
 |
| This is the only Wood mine on the map Global. You
may (if you are foolish enough to play on such an incredibly slow map) choose to assign a
truck to this mine. I had to search hard to find an example of any place where it is
worthwhile assigning a truck. So don't do it! |
- Never buy units to go after a group of resources that you already captured and will
not make you a profit straight away. If you are just going to drop a Truck of, then
will the ore in that group of resources make you at least $25 that turn ($1 profit)? If
you are going to use a Transport/Truck combination to collect a group of resources will
you be able to collect and sell at least $60 of ore that turn ($3 profit). If the answer
is yes, then buy those units and get out there! Consider them as free this turn! The
result of this is that in forest and desert you will probably send out a new unit/s every
second turn (each resource would have $20 worth of resources in it. Multiply by several
resources and you have a clear profit!).
- Do buy units to go after resources that you have not yet captured , cannot
capture efficiently with the units you already have available and will give you a
worthwhile return. Generally, it will only be worthwhile during the expansion phase of the
game. In later phases, taking your enemies resources, cities and bases holds a much higher
priority!
Use the Transport/Truck combination. Did you know that you can
still collect resources with a truck that is inside a Transport (or Cargo or Hercules for
that matter)? What this means is that you can use the combined movement of the Transport
and the Truck to collect resources. This can be really cost effective as it means you have
a total of 14 movement points to work with (compared to 5 with just a Truck). Admittedly,
you could buy 2 trucks (with a bit of cash to spare) and have them going to the resources,
but it just isn't as efficient. Each Truck could only pick up 3 resources a turn (4 on
some very special maps). Compare this to a Transport/Truck combination that could pick up
all 6 of those resources and 2-6 more! You get a lot more of your resource cash right now
instead of having it languish in your resources for another turn.
|
With a Transport/Truck combo, you can collect
all but one of the resources shown here every turn (you miss a different one each turn so
that you pick up everything eventually). With two trucks on their own, you are lucky to
pick up the resources from all but one of these resources every other turn! A marked
difference, I'm sure you will agree! |
- Use even sneakier tricks!. For example, if a city is 2 squares away across
a desert, it would normally cost a Truck 4 movement points to reach it (3 for the square
of desert, 1 for the city square). However, what if you used the last movement point of
the Transport that the Truck is in to move into that square of desert? Now you can move
the truck into the city at a cost of only 1 movement point. Overall, it would have only
cost you 2 movement points instead of 4. With this saving, you may have been able to
collect the ore from an extra 2 resources and put a bunch more cash in your hand right
now. Cash that you may have desperately needed! There are other ways in which you can use
the Transport/Truck combination to scrimp and save on those extra movement points, but
I'll let you figure those out for yourself :)
- Iron mines suck, but are usually worth getting anyway! Even the sucky Iron mine
can eventually return a profit. If you don't have any better resources to capture with
your bulldozer, then don't be ashamed to capture them! It will probably take 3 turns
instead of 2 before it is worthwhile to collect the ore from them, but this just means
that you buy fewer Transport/Truck combinations to collect the ore :)
INDEX