This will be a guide to how to play any low gdp/c non democratic regions. It should work for North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey, Syria etc. It may also work for other countries, but I have not tested if it works.

This guide is still work in progress. I will update this guide from time to time.

Since we have very low GDP, most of our income will come from production. It is therefore beneficial not to increase inflation and keep GDP low to keep production cost low. Here are a few important numbers for us. The effects and causes are based on my observation. If something is mistaken please correct me in the comments.

1. GDP/c
Affects your tax income and domestic approval.

It is mostly related to your total expenses (including social programs, production, and defense. Excluding import/exports. Not sure if related to research).

2. Inflation
Affects how much your cost rises.

It increases from the money you put into your economy (construction, military, social programs etc) and decreases from the money you take out of your economy (taxation, domestic purchases).

3. Unemployment
Affects inflation, production and domestic approval.

It increases over time and decreases from any money you put into your economy (construction, research, military, social programs etc.).

4. Population
Increasing population from conquest or growth does not increase unemployment directly. It affects taxation and how quickly your unemployment drops from construction.

5. Domestic approval
As a non-democratic nation this does not affect us too much. However, it affects immigration and a tiny bit of production.

Now we can talk about the economy strategy.

Tax:
We wish to tax as much as possible to lower inflation and generate some money, so we need to max all taxes. We can have zero property tax because our people basically have no property for us to tax, and lowering this can give us a bit of domestic approval.

Social spending:
A bit of everything so we can have a good enough domestic approval to have constant immigration. Education and social assistance can be set very low because they are so expensive. Environment and cultural subsidy can be a bit higher because they are very cheap.

Construction:
We will definitely run into low unemployment at the beginning so we will ignore this number for a while. Spend all your money and build anything that makes money. For power plants, coal power are most cost-effective. Other power plants are just too expensive. For example, fusion power plant makes 4x power after cold fusion tech, but costs 40x to build.

After a while you will saturate the world market on everything that you are producing for profit, and we need to prepare ahead for that phase. A good indicator of you saturating the world market is becoming the export leader. After that, you can stop increasing production for that type of resource.

Somehow imperialism is still acceptable in 2030. Other countries will not be too upset about you colonizing another country as long as you support their government and you are not colonizing their ally. You should colonize other countries to make the life of their people better, and make a lot of money. To prepare for this, you need a huge military to persuade other countries to actually care about their people.

Your starting military production buildings are certainly not enough. You should build as many production buildings as you can as long as you do not use up all your reserve personnel. When you start running out of reserve personnel, switch to produce a higher quality unit, and stop building more production.

Missiles are however, not limited by your reserve personnel. So if you start running out of manpower and you have more money to spend, build more missile production.

We will talk about different types of units, which may help you decide what to build.

I. Land unit

1. Infantry

Your most cost efficient unit especially for city and forest fights. Build enough of them to fill in the front. Foot infantry (such as elite force, exoskeleton) are only useful for defense, for naval invasion, or for places with absolutely no supply. Otherwise mechanized infantry are much better.

2. Tank
Does more damage than your infantry in open fights. They are also more efficient in manpower. However they are not more tanky compared to infantry.

3. Anti-Tank
Basically Tank (and some foot infantry) but supposed to kill hard targets better. If you have a good design you can build that instead of your regular tank.

4. Recon
There are recon satellites and spies so I do not find recon units very useful. I let my cheap infantry be the recon if necessary because they fight better, can take more damage, and are more expendable.

5. Artillery
Artillery guns and MLRS are quite different. Artillery have shorter range but good dps. You can sit a large group of artillery guns behind frontline and let them support your frontline effectively. MLRS have long range but low firerate. Use a large group of MLRS to attack enemy from safety or to support naval landing from far away. They can also be used to pick off enemy AA behind their frontline.

6. Air defense
Absolutely important. Some good AA pieces near the frontline and enemy planes can no longer support their attack or defense effectively. Approximately 20 are necessary to have good chance of killing enemy planes.

7. Transport
The trucks are necessary to push quickly. They pass supplies from one unit to another, so they are still useless in Siberia etc where even the trucks run out of supplies.
I have not used much Bridging. Most of my tanks and Infantry are amphibious.

To have an effective land army, you need enough infantry, tanks, or anti-tank to fill up the frontline. Then you need artillery and AA support behind the frontline to support your frontline.

II. Air units
Try to get friendly with the US and buy their F-35 design. Use it for everything. It wins air fights and can support ground units.
Snipe enemy AA with your artillery, and you F-35 can be so effective in supporting your ground units.

III. Naval units
The purpose of naval units is to help your naval invasion. Therefore, the navy unit you want to build should have good spotting and some submarine attack. Your land based MLRS can take care of enemy surface vessels if you have some escort or patrol ships or even patrol planes spotting for them. Spotting actually becomes important now because spies can't swim.

(WIP)

Now you have gained some colonies, it is time to exploit the colonies.

We want our colonies to print money for us, and we sell our colony stuff. Therefore, we let our colony GDP grow. You may need build some factories for them and send them some cash to begin the process, but after they pass certain gdp/c their gdp will just continue growing. When they have high enough gdp, let them lower domestic price for goods and lower sales tax so you can sell them a lot of your production.

(WIP)