This guide is a rewrite of a post I made to the SP2 message boards in 2006. I’ve been a fan of this game for a long time. I still crack it out from time to time. I am excited to see it come to Steam, and the improvements/modifications I think are a huge plus to the game. Most of this guide is written from the perspective of how I like to play... as a third world country with the intent of conquering the world. It works. I’ve conquered the world as Palestine, Belize, Monaco, Congo, Haiti and (just for giggles) also aggressively conquered the world as the Holy See. If you don’t like playing like I do then that’s fine as well. The economics all work the same for a large country too so read on!

2006 forward for posterity

I've been lurking on these boards for a while. I have to say, I love this game. I've never played a simulator that was so close to real life. Now, it isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is pretty damn good.

One thing that bugs me is some of the misconceptions on the economy of this game. There are some tips and advice given that I've tried (even though they don't seem reasonable) that just blows my economy down the tube. I searched high and low for a good, solid explanation on the economy and couldn't find it here so I figured it out on my own with help from the forums. I'm here to discuss what I've found. Keep in mind that some of this is my own opinion... when it is I preface it with "I think" etc. In this discussion I won’t even get into political structure. You can assume that the whole thing is from the prospective of a multi-party democracy.

Before we dive in too much into the GUI or walkthrough it’s important that we cover some of the concepts of the game. You’ll need to understand these to understand WTF I’m telling you to do below.

Bear with me.

If you need a TL:DR it’s at the bottom.

The first and most important thing to understand about SP2 is that it is primarily an economic and political simulator. Yes, you can start a game as Russia and immediately start a global thermonuclear war that lasts a few months, but to really get the depth of this game you must understand the economy and politics.

The second thing you need to understand is that everything in the game is interconnected with
something else. There are a series of massive Risk vs Reward systems in this game. The depth
and complexity is a thing of beauty. It brings a tear to my eye. Be warned that any decision
you make will have downstream effects.

Lastly it’s worth noting that changes in this game take a few months to take effect. Do not
expect to play the game paused and see your changes right away. I stress this because... well... I
can be impatient as hell. If I was reading a guide for the first time I’d need to know this.
Remember when deciding on your game plan that you will be limiting future choices. If you
decide to go military right away you simply will not have good relations anywhere, tourism will
suck, and your long-term economic growth will be severely stunted. You better win big if it’s
going to be worth it. On the flip side, if you choose to be economic and allow everything to
grow naturally you will be sacrificing quicker growth you could get by growing it manually, but it
would be easier. Also remember that in multiplayer everyone has an itchy trigger finger and all
player-controlled states should be considered aggressive at the start.

The devil is in the details. In this game that means the budget. You need to learn to manage it
since most of your tools exist in and around your budget. Changes made here have the greatest
degree of downstream effects. I cover individual numbers in the menu section below, but there
are some larger concepts that are important.

Your first great choice is to pick either more growth or more income. The more money you
invest in growth the faster your economy will take off. This can be done indirectly by raising
spending on infrastructure or environment (to name a couple), or directly by increasing
production within a sector manually. Either way you will be taking money from your coffers to
put into growing your economy. Long term this is great since you will get more money in your
coffers, but it costs you in short term cash. You have the ability to be specific and direct in your
choices of where to tax and where to grow. You should make those decisions based on where
you can gouge for cash and where you need to allow growth.

Within the budget I feel the single most important thing to take care of 99.9% of the time is
Debt. Running in the red is just plain dumb in this simulator. Pay attention to this and NEVER
say in the red for long. You pay a nasty 10% interest on all debts. Pay them off... operate in
the green. As far as I’m concerned all of my spending can go down the toilet if I have to choose
between paying a debt or hurting my budget. Avoiding that 10% is free money, and debt is the
only way the game can end economically. Remember, paying for 10m dollar upgrade when you
have 10m in your coffers... costs you 10m. Paying 10m dollars when you have 0 in your coffers
costs you the full 10m plus another million for every year you don’t pay it back... and some! If
the bankers are throwing out terms like interest compounded weekly in a formula like this:



Then it’s time to be patient. Unless you have a crisis or need to be in debt (the 0.1%) then don’t
do it. The only thing it costs you is patience.

The other senseless budget drain in the simulator is corruption. The difference is that
correcting corruption costs cold, hard cash. Corruption grows when your population is poor,
the unemployment is high, you have a lot of foreign aid, and human development aid. I don’t
like corruption. Corruption raises instability (political and economic), costs you each month,
makes people and puppies cry, lowers your chances of receiving foreign aid, and can cost
you en election even when you have greater than 50% support (rigged elections!). On the
flipside... spending in “government” which is required to combat it is also very expensive. So
is raising your Human Development Level (HDL) which is another way to combat corruption.
My recommendation is to spend at least enough to keep it going down, but max it if you can.
When corruption gets low you will find it MORE expensive to spend on government than
allowing a little corruption, but don’t be fooled. The other downstream benefits are very high
and besides... who wants to make puppies cry?

The production of resources within a sector is the engine of this economy. Here is where you
need to understand the workings of the simulator. Within the resource area there is some key
info. Production, Consumption, Trade, and balance.

The way it works is that first... your people have a need for each resource. This is
“consumption”. How much they need each resource rises as they become wealthier.
Resources higher up on the list are the first stepping stone in the economic machine. They
are required in order to grow. Who cares if you have great healthcare and a new car if your
children are starving? Also, remember when I said everything is connected? Yeah – about
that. A couple of examples... Dairy and meat production requires grains to feed the animals. If
you don’t have enough grains then dairy and meat production gets stunted. Likewise vehicle
manufacture requires steel production. I’m not going to get into every connection, but be
aware that they are there and they go from top down.

Every country starts with a value in the production column and the consumption column. If you
produce more than you consume you have a surplus. (Grats!) Otherwise you have a need. In
some countries you’ll see a big, fat, ugly 0 in the production column. That sucks, because there
is no way to kick start it other than to aggressively negotiate the acquisition of a region/territory
that produces it.... and they may be disinclined to acquiesce to your request.

When you are able to produce everything that you consume you become “resource
independent”. This is awesome. Becoming completely resource independent is always my first
primary goal and I work rigorously towards it.

When you do not produce everything you need to consume another process kicks in. First...
the merchants and international wholesalers in your country go out into the world market and
begin trying to buy what you need. The jump right onto the trading floor and attempt to win
that trade on the commodity market! The bad news is this. Who gets to buy and trade what
is highly affected by politics and economics. First... rich countries get priority. However, some
treaties can override this. With no treaties in place anywhere countries like the US, Russia,
Japan, Germany, and China will gobble up the entire surplus in the world. If you are not playing
a powerhouse you may see that you have cash on hand, but are not purchasing anything in
the TRADE column. That’s why. You either have to instantly become the wealthiest country
(impossibru), negotiate some trade agreements and force existing ones to be canceled (also
impossibru), or become resource independent. Because at the start of the game there are
ALREADY treaties in place (like NAFTA) treaties alone don’t always help.

The last concept in production is easily the most misunderstood. That is the Balance column.
Ignore the colors here! Red is bad. Green is also bad. Yeah... I know... WTF. Let me splain -
no... there is too much... let me sum up. If all is good and your resource production is growing
you will grow to meet your consumption need. If you have not yet met your need then you will
see a red number in the trade column. This is good (yes... red in TRADE is good) because you are meeting your need by purchasing from other countries. If you have a surplus you should see
a green number in trade (yes... green in TRADE is also good). That means you are selling your
extra to other countries. Good that covers everything. So... what happens if you have positive
or negative in the “balance” column? Well... red in the balance column is bad. It means you
are not able to produce enough OR buy enough. That sucks. Puppies are crying, people are
starving, and Paris can’t get her manicure. However, if you see GREEN in that column it means
you are producing more than your people need, and worse... you are producing more than
ANYONES people need. Your corn is rotting in the barn. What happens then is a nightmare.
Your f****ing business people have no spine. If you go a few months with too much surplus
the laws of supply and demand cause them to tuck-tail and run. You LOSE production capacity.
Yes. If you make more than your people need and can’t sell it you will lose it slowly over a few
months.

Something always happens in about year 40 of this simulation that is unrealistic that people
don’t understand and it is caused by the above concept of Balance. Every country in the world
is pushing their growth to meet the needs of their people. Once every country meets their
internal needs then that resource goes into a global market surplus. There is no room to sell
to anyone anymore. By year 40 this covers almost every resource. By that point you better
be independent and well on your way to conquering the world. The only exception to this is
resources that are not available everywhere like oil, gems, etc. In those resources by year 40
there is always an aggressive market cornering game going on. One I like to win.

Once a market is saturated and there is a global market surplus... then the only way to increase
your %market share of a scarce resource is to intentionally spend a great deal of money to
increase your output. What will happen is that the global surplus is then recalculated and the
trades rebalanced. At that point IF you are friendlier than most, have better trade treaties than
most, and are wealthy... you can cause someone (or everyone) ELSE to lose more production
than you do. For example: Let’s say that by 2050 only three countries produce gems. They
each produce 10,000 units and there is a global demand of 30,000 so all demand is met. If one
of those countries isn’t well liked and is a warmonger... and they increase resource production
up to 11,000 within a few months it will return back to 10,000 and they lose all investment.
However if that country is well-liked and has good agreements in place (where the other two
don’t) and increase to 11,000 then after a few months the balance will be something like 10,500
to 9,750 and 9,750. It’s expensive, but it works. It works even better if you anticipate this and
gobble up as much of the global demand as you can before there is a global surplus. (this is
what the OPEC members do behind each other’s backs)

The other important thing within resource production is taxes. Also related to that is public or
private management. Each resource can be taxed individually or all resources can be taxed the
same. The tax value that affects all resources is called the Global Tax Mod (GTM). There used
to be a bug that setting that too much gave you WAY too much money and in multiplayer games
we always limited it to something reasonable like 30%. The new Steam version also has that
cap. GTM is important to understand in that it is additive. For example... if you tax the services
sector by 5%, and also have a 5% GTM you are actually taxing services by 10%. Because of this
I like to use the GTM as a short-term increase when I need cash so that I don’t have to go down
and change every darn one of my resources’ taxes.

Note that if you tax a resource it affects the growth rate of that resource. A 10% - 20%
tax appears to be somewhat neutral. Lower causes increased growth. Higher stunts growth
or causes recession in that resource’s production. My rule of thumb is to set anything I am
in a deficit on to between 0% - 5%, anything I am even at about 15%, and anything I have a large surplus on to 20% - 30%. If the surplus is SO large that it constitutes a large percent of
my GDP I seriously consider privatization.

Relations with other countries go a long way to making this game workable. Keeping good
relations keeps you safe. Your friends will back you when you are under attack and aren’t the
aggressor. Likewise if you want to go after someone you want to try to isolate them and/or go
after someone that is already isolated. You take a greater hit to your relationships based on
how liked your target is. (Espionage can help move this along). Nations you are friendly with
will assist you, trade with you, and may offer aid or allow you to purchase military straight from
them.

Most of these benefits of being friends come in the form of treaties. Each treaty has a
friendliness requirement that must be met before any other requirements are even checked.
For example if you are asking another nation for foreign aid the first thing they do is see if you
have 30-40 friendliness. If you don’t they don’t even begin to check your corruption level,
economic stability, debt, etc. You have to pass the first gate. A girl has to have her standards.
Also keep in mind that every treaty you enter into has a cost/benefit to it. I will list a couple of
my favorites and when/where to use them, but leave the rest for you to investigate:

Foreign Aid Treaty
I love to play 2nd or 3rd world countries so I use this a lot. It’s easier
to get aid when you are stable, friendly, have low corruption, and ARE IN DEBT. This IS
the 0.1% of the time when you temporarily send yourself into debt if you aren’t there.
The easy way to do this is to go on a begging spree. Ask for economic aid. Ask every
nation in the world to join a single treaty where you are the recipient of foreign aid. It
will fail, but you will get a note telling you who said OK and who declined. Note those
that said OK and make a new one with just them. BAM! You want to get at least 9. Only
9 economic aids will assist you at a time, but you want a couple more in case someone
backs out. What those do is for each one you have active the country pays for 10% of
the cost of your trades. This is in cold hard cash that you can spend how you like. If you
can't get enough right away then keep your Foreign Aid budget item high, fix corruption,
and wait a little while. Go into debt and try again.

HDL Treaty
I like to ask the US to help me with this one. If you get to about 30
friendliness you can enter into this treaty. It causes the richer/higher HDL country to
subsidize the HDL of the poorer country. It really helps HDL even without education
and/or healthcare spending.

If you are an impatient warmonger and barrel straight into war you will find yourself under
heavy attack from the entirety of the United Nations faster than you can put up a white flag.
This is very likely true to life. (At least I like to think so. Putin may prove me wrong) However...
if you are a patient warmonger and watch for opportunities you can be very aggressive and keep
most relations stable.

A good example is to watch what happens to Syria at the beginning of every game. They go
after SOMEONE. Even in the early 2000’s people knew that the Asaads were a rough group.
When they declare war on Israel, Serbia, Albania... whoever it is this time. Just join the war on
the defenders side. Then negotiate a military rite of passage with nearby nations (easy if you
just stood up for them) and start moving in.

Note that in the Steam version of the game you have to have a capital ship nearby to move/
invade across oceans. This is a limiting factor that didn’t exist when the game came out, but
honestly it’s realistic and I like it.

On that note - how do we even GET capital ships? Capital ships are Destroyers or Aircraft Carriers. Your best option is to build one... even a terribad one. They can be built with level 1 in all Naval research... even if they stink in the military department, they will move your troops. Even as Venzuela it only takes 9-12 months to do the research, design, and build to be able to transport troops so its not too bad.

The military market is a great place for a research-poor nation to buy a boatload of second-
gen used gear with money squeezed out of every orifice of their population in order to acquire
more population areas to be used in aforementioned orifice squeezing. It’s a vicious cycle.
Eventually people stop selling to you, or your demand for military gear outpaces the world’s
willingness to part with their gear. Note that any military buildup by any nation in the world
will cause neighboring nations to build up, and any nation hostile to that nation as well.

Note that trained units are FAR more valuable than untrained units. I always train my vehicles
at least two levels, and infantry by one. They cost more, but are much better. Also, keep in
mind that when it comes to cost that PARKED units cost less than active ones.

Plain and simple. Good spies are good. If you are going to go hostile at any point you want to keep your spy defenses above 80%. Once you piss everyone off (like with an annexation announcement) you will be bombarded with spy attempts. Also... when someone else acts up (cough... Syria... cough) you can send in your elite spies and STEAL production from them and add it to your own. Seriously... it pays off to have good spies. You will lose a few, but it’s worth it. I could go into the dirty details of how spying works, and the difficulties, and such. Not going to give away all my secrets though. I may be up against you in Multiplayer!

Now that I’ve covered some of the really big concepts (in some detail) I’ll go through some of the menus and options you have that are really your levers for controlling the simulator.

In the game you can hover over ANY item and hit F1 to get a break down of the details of that item in the simulator. I have learned more about what affects what this way than any other way. Remember to do it!!!

• Economic Model - Shows what percent of your GDP is controlled by the state.
  
• Economic Health - This is a number that the simulator derives to show you how good your economy is.
  
  NOTES:
  I know that playing with the interest level has the greatest short-term effect on it... other than that... unemployment, poverty line, inflation, infrastructure, human development, and per capita income also seem to effect it. The only things I have seen that this number does for you are:
  1) makes getting economic aid easier if its higher
  2) creates political stability if its higher and
  3) makes unit production proceed faster if its higher.
  The manual and tooltips say that it has an overall beneficial effect to your economy as a whole. I
  pay little attention to it after the first couple of years.
  
  
• Budget - These are simple. They show you the income, expenses, balance, and available cash.
  
• Resources - This shows how well your population is having its needs met.
  
  NOTES:
  Anything below 100 means that your economy is being stunted in growth. Resource needs must be met to have a strong economy. Anything over 100 on this number means that your country is a net exporter.

• GDP - This "Gross Domestic Product" and represents the total amount of money your country makes.
  
• Per capita - This represents how much money each and every person in your country makes. Take your GDP and divide by population. It is an indicator of how wealthy your people are.
  
• Personal Income Tax - This is the percentage that you are taking your people.
  
  NOTES:
  If your GDP is 100 and you have a 50% tax, you get 50 dollars a year. (Paid roughly every
  2 weeks). The higher you set this, the more cash you get. The lower you set this the happier your
  people are and the faster they are lifted from poverty. A low number here will gradually move
  the "working poor" into "middle class". Most countries have this at around 40-60. I usually have
  it at either 70-85 or as close to 0 as I can.
  
  
• Unemployment rate - The number of unemployed.
  
  NOTES:
  This is best kept around 4%. Anything you do to "hurt" the business class will raise this as more business go out of business. This includes taxing them. High unemployment creates a lot of instability and corruption. All that said, as long as I am keeping everything else in order I rarely ever look at this. I let it fluctuate on its own and it finds its own happy little way to about
  
  
• Below the poverty line - This is the percentage of your people that are the "working poor".
  
  NOTES: Everyone else is "middle class" and some of those are also "business class". If you have a very high population you can assume you'll have working poor for quite some time. However, if you are able to get that many people out of poverty you'll be an economic powerhouse. You want a few people in this class as possible, but the cost for pulling them out is very substantial. I usually leave them there till I get things going strong. Then make a lengthy effort to pull them out. This is done via high Education, good personal income and healthcare.
  
  
• Inflation/Interest level
  
  NOTES:
  This is one of the economic indicators that I watch the closest. I know a lot of people have said they ignore it and I think this is a terrible mistake. Inflation can kill you. When inflation is too low (deflation) you will take a constant drain to your income because your GDP is dwindling. When inflation is too high you will take a constant drain to your income because your costs are raising. I break my neck to keep this number at around 2% - 3%, which is where it is dead even. Occasionally I let it float to 3-4 (but only when I have become resource independent and have a self-growing business class) A low inflation means that the economy is stagnating while a high inflation means that the economy is booming. This doesn't mean that it *causes* your economy to boom. Control inflation... its better in the long run. The only means you have to control inflation is to adjust the interest level. Raising the interest level will make money harder to borrow and make the economy slow down (and lowers inflation). Lowering the interest rate will make money easier and speed up economic development (and raises inflation). I watch this number like a hawk. I advise you to do the same.

• Total income - Self explanatory
  
• Personal income - the total yearly cash you are getting from taxing your people
  
• Trade - the total yearly cash you are getting from taxing businesses
  
• Tourism - the total free cash you are getting from tourism. I say free because it "costs" you nothing in the cost vs benefit scheme.
  
• Foreign aid - the total free cash you are getting from idiot countries that bought your sob story. If you started as a 3rd world country this should be high.
  
• Expenses
  
  • Infrastructure
    Total cash spent on roads, bridges, etc. High spending makes people happy, causes all resources to grow better independently, and makes your military move faster. Low spending has the exact opposite effect. I keep this maxed as much as possible.
    
  • Propaganda
    Keep it aaaaaalll the way to the left. All it does is makes your people happy with your government and REALLY pisses off the world. There is no need to spend here.
    
  • Environment
    High spending makes random events good events (instead of hurricanes you get resource discoveries, etc), makes your people very happy, and increases independent resource production of all of your Food and Agriculture resources. I keep this as high as possible.
    
  • Health care
    Raises your Human Development Level (HDL), makes your people happy, and lowers the death rate. I have found that I can maintain or even grow HDL even with this set VERY low. I rarely care about death rate and I use the money I save (which is substantial) to make people happier in other ways. All that said, when I have surplus cash I keep the spending here high enough to keep my people happy or to keep it even. Otherwise it is the first expense to be lowered. The exception is when I am trying to grow my population. Then it is critical to keep it high.
    
  • Education
    More spending here help keep people happy, raises the HDL significantly, and causes independent grown in the services sector... which is easily the most expensive. I keep education very high in the early game till my HDL reaches 100. I also keep it raised enough to keep my service sector growing. However, along with healthcare this is one massive budget sink. It is frequently second on my chopping block behind health care when I need cash. Just don’t neglect HDL growth for years on end. You need the HDL and independent growth of your service sector.
    
  • Telecom
    According the manual and tool tips it raises HDL and gives you better intelligence on foreign troops. Personally I feel it has an overall net effect on resource production too... much like infrastructure. I could be wrong. However, I am sure enough in myself that I keep this maxed.
    
  • Government
    Lowers corruption. See corruption section above. I keep this high enough to keep corruption headed down.
    
  • Foreign Aid
    This in my opinion is #1. Keep it up unless you are about to go to massive war with lots of countries and are assuming the whole world is going to be at -99 with you in relations. You NEED friends and you need relations. As a 3rd world country it is even more important. Foreign relations are critical. I always keep this all the way up.
    
  • Research
    I either have it all the way one way or the other. I do not spend on military research until my economy is kicking. Then I crank it all the way up and ignore it for a few years. The more you spend here the faster you learn new technology.
    
  • Tourism
    If I am not in "war" mode I have this maxed. The spending you put in here to increase tourism is returned to you 100 fold if you are a pacifist. If you are not a pacifist (as I am not) you will still see a substantial return. Tourism takes a dive when your relations are bad and especially when your political stability is low. If those things are high (and you intend for them to stay high) then dump all the money you can here. Be warned... going on a war spree can vastly under cut your tourism dollars for a long time. Not that this has ever stopped me.
• Fixed expenses
  
  • Security
    The cash you spend on your intelligence. I always have my intelligence coverage at 80 percent at least so this is usually high for me.
    
  • Diplomacy
    This one I've not figured out... it is how much your treaties are costing you, but I never see a dollar sign on those buggers. (Probably because I never GIVE foreign aid?)
    
  • Trade
    How much you are spending on trade. I hate to see numbers here.
    
  • Unit upkeep
    How much you spend on units. Well trained units cost more (but are WAY worth it) and units not "parked" cost a lot more too.
    
  • Debt
    This one is one of the most important things to pay attention to. Read section on DEBT above.
    
  • Corruption
    This is how much money is lost to corruption. Read Corruption above.

Production of resources by sector. This is explained in Resource production section above.

• Production
  How much in millions of dollars that your country is producing. If this is at 0 then it is a resource that your country can’t produce... and this sucks.
  
  
• Consumption
  How much your country consumes. A strong economy will consume a ton more.
  
  
• Trade
  Either positive or negative. Positive means that you are actively selling this commodity in this amount. Negative means you are actually buying this commodity in this amount. This is not necessarily a bad thing... because your needs are being met in this way. It just costs you more than self-production.
  
  
• Balance
  Anything but 0 here is bad. Read the Resource Production section above for an explanation.

This value will increase the taxes on all resources by this amount in addition to their individual tax values.

• Management
  Whether something is private or public. In most cases a free market is desirable. This means that the business class takes over. These greedy *******s will create companies to fill the needs that are unmet. This is good. It means that a sector will grow quickly on its own to meet any need... local or international.
  
  
• Status
  Legal or illegal. Well... let’s cut to the chase... we're talking about drugs here. If you legalize them you will make a good deal of cash if you flood the world market with increased production. However, the diplomatic heat is very high for doing so. Your choice... I usually keep it illegal but secretly fund grown to keep my population's demand met so that I don’t import this valuable commodity. (Yeah, I know... Machiavelli would be proud!)
  
  
• Sector tax
  Ok... this is how much you are taxing this sector. If this sector is producing 100,000 and you have the tax at 10% you will get 1000 a year.
  
  
• % of GDP
  How much of your GDP is this resource.
  
  
• Market Share
  How much of the global market you control.
  
  
• Increase Production
  This is where you can spend cold-hard-cash (or credit) to increase your country's production of a certain good. Note that the increases are in percentages... so if you have nothin’... 10 percent of nothin’ is, let me do the math here. Nothin’ and a Nothin’... um... carry the Nothin’...

Well, now that I've discussed each area in some detail let me go into a simple end-to-end economic strategy that works for me. First, let’s talk about starting as a non-1st world nation with some "potential". I like countries like Venezuela, Botswana, and Libya. Take them and straighten them out. Here's what you do: (at any time you need happiness to win an election... raise healthcare and education for a couple months... then lower it after the election)

1) Stabilize inflation. If it is very high temporarily set the interest to like 30-40. Get it down then find the rate that stabilizes it.

Watch it as you continue on to the next steps.

2) Set all spending to neutral except for research and propaganda... set those to nothing. We need to get out of debt man!

3) Set taxes to 80%. Forget about the pain it'll cause your people, you need the cash more now for their benefit. Guillotine anyone who objects. (Note, this is not actually in the game... but I think it every time I set this and get the pop up that tells me my people are rebelling. Viva la Bourgeoisie!)

4) Set all sector taxes to about 10% - 15%... except for ones you are exporting... set those to 30%. Early in the game very few sectors have market availability and you can get away with murder. For Venezuela's oil and Botswana's diamonds you make a killing. I sometimes even set it higher. On any resource that you CAN NOT produce... set the tax to 0. Import what you can. If you’re feelin frisky... privatize your high %GDP resource. I have taken Venezuela and privatized its oil. I now personally get all proceeds.



5) Give the system a months or two to stabilize... changes to resource taxes take long to show up. If you are still running a deficit then lower healthcare and education in that order. Don’t take education very much below "neutral" but health care can go all the way down for a time. If you still struggle (or want a higher surplus) then take environment and telecom down to a big below neutral. Don’t take either below that because they reduce your growth. However, for the next step the cash you make for lowering them will be spent on economic growth anyways... so stunting "growth" isn't so bad.... you just don’t want a recession in that area.

5) If you are a 3rd world nation... go on a begging spree. Do it as I spell out above in Foreign Aid Treaty. If you can't get enough now (which I rarely can) wait until you are done with the first couple of resources in step 7 and try again. Usually by that time I am getting offers of aid. BEFORE you get too far into step 7 you will want to get 9 treaties or more. They are free money. Remember these things will help:

• Inflation at 2-3%
  
• VERY low corruption
  
• Political stability
  
• Debt (in the red)
  
• High diplomatic relations.

So, if you can’t beg it out of them now... continue on and as soon as you finish "vegetables" in step 7 intentionally go into deficit spending down to the value of your surplus. Then go beg again. By that time your relations are higher, your corruption is lower, your stability is higher, and inflation should be in check.

Also as a part of step 5 try to get an HDL treaty with a superpower. If you can’t get it yet... wait till your relations are 30+ and try again.

6) Sit and wait. Pay off your debt. Monitor inflation.

7) Now that your debt is paid off... start with cereals and move down the list. As soon as you have the cash, increase production until you are meeting your own demand. It will take a lot of cash and a few increases to meet demand most of the time. By the time you get to meats you'll start to see your countries per capita income grow rapidly. You'll also notice that by the time you finish the sector you are on you have to "touch up" the sectors you've already finished because they are growing. You shouldn't have to touch the services sector... they grow on their own when the HDL is high. Watch inflation during this... as growth kicks up you'll have to make adjustments.

8) Once you are meeting demand it is time to conquer someone. You can do this sooner if a good opportunity presents itself and you have the capital ship ready. You've been spending a lot of money on foreign relations and you can likely conquer one nation without TOO much flack... especially if you pick one that is un-liked. Find a country that produces any and all resources that you have a "0" production in. Since you don’t have any research - build up a little cash and go on a shopping spree.

Buy every tank and attack helicopter available and focus on quality artillery and anti-air and infantry vehicles. Get at least half of the soon-to-be-annexed country’s infantry. Train all of the vehicles to max... train the infantry to second degree. During this time you may go into deficit... this is acceptable as long as you can come out of it after you... Invade, conquer, annex.

Note: With the new steam version you may have to research enough to build your own capital ship before you can invade overseas.

9) Repeat step 7 for the new population and resources.

10) Now that you are strong and stable... raise research spending to max and leave it there. If your HDL isn't at 100 (and it should be close) get it there. Possibly try to corner a market or if you have a lucrative market without Market Availability... fill that need before other nations do. Start to lower your taxes to 50% for your income tax... and go lower on your business taxes if you can. Stimulate growth. Raise taxes when you need cash for something. Have fun... conquer the world. Giggle while you do. Its more devious that way.

Yeah. If you really need a TLDR for this game you probably need to put it down and walk away. This game is complicated. You will only come to love it if you love the complication of the simulation. You can either learn this from many hundreds of hours of play via school of hard knocks (which by the way was fun), or take the time to read this and get the AH HA moments the easier way.