Topic: Is pop too expensive at start?
The last 3 rounds where my fams had a really good start having an eco lead by 30 to 50% over other fams, were with inactive poppers.
My first reaction was to say, OMG if we had an active popper, round would be already finished...
But now I start to think that it was due to the fact that we had not supported a popper.
Start of the round is like the start of a race, if it's fast u should keep ur speed all the round, discourage opponents etc...
A popper needs early plts to make pop start, needs lot of iron but produces poor, needs lot of food when MFs instead of farms could be invested in CFs that have a really fast return on investment.
It often takes like 3-4 weeks for a popper to reach a CF banker income that eats 5-10% his food.
Even if the popper started with CFs and turns slowly to pop, he has many plts that a CF banker could have OB to 100% with return on investment very fast that will be useful to build resourcers, fleet for attackers, early portals etc.
A popper jump usually needs many days of a full fam savings, then a food jump...all that could have gone to pay fleet for attackers to make 100 early plts in the round, that CF bankers will use and payback the fleet jump many times more than what the popper jump would have given.
I don't say that CF banking makes more cash than a popper, numbers say the contrary. But same as when u play Starcraft blitz tactic > infra tactic.
I mean u build cheap buildings that produce fast, u make lot of early plts fighting other fams investing on long term investment. U finish expo phase with 500 more plts than others, whatever the income of their popper he can't beat 500 more CF planets and his fam can't beat the spread the fast fam took.
At this point I think that one of the CF bankers that stayed CF/RCs can turn pop and in less than 10 days can produce the same as other bigger poppers.
I had Torqez once in my fam where our popper sucked, that decided to turn pop mid round after a start CF/RC (if i remember well) and in few days he was making 30m gc with 250 plts.
He produced lot for cheap start of round, then once we were owning the map he started to make huge cash to prepare for big nap wars.
Would be nice to know what was his infra before turning pop and how he did it, even if i have my idea (I would say 200% CFs 300% RCs, huge eco% and cons%, add like 50 LQs everywhere, when pop is nearly full raze RCs, add like 70 LQs everywhere, when pop is nearly full raze all CFs FB Lqs, OB 100% LQs, when they come in OB 300% immediately with TOs, ur cons% is still amazing, u dont have to kill pop, ur empire size is low. If bank allows u immediatly go to 500 or 700%) and in 7-10 days u pass from 5m gc to 30m gc with good cons%, low empire size, no fleet and pop to kill then u just have to fund welfare and keep eco high.
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