What's the best way to build India without shenanigans?

[CoyoteTraveller]

Playing a game right now where I'm starting with India and planning to stick with it. I've discovered that I don't actually know how to spend my IPs for solid long-term investment. My first thoughts were "Economy" but I know that scales poorly for IP gain, and "obviously Knowledge" but doesn't that also lower birth rate? I keep seeing that India's pop growth rate is its biggest advantage; is there some deveopment meta like "boost Econ for the first X years to take advantage of pop growth, don't improve Knowledge until Y"?

The shenanigans I'm trying to avoid are the "unify China into India" kinds of things - I'm not aiming for a megablob, I'm aiming for a strong "spirit-of-the-game" India.

[corisai]

100% Economy until you "feel enough". Use agents to keep it under control but Eco would fix itself most of problems in time. It's also boosting pop growth so as long as you don't touch Knowledge - you're golden :)

Then 100% Mission Control until you're full. Then - you're already almost winning thanks to Mercury Dyson Sphere, right?

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

My first thoughts were "Economy" but I know that scales poorly for IP gain

No it's scaling wonderfully for big countries.

[ian.whitchurch]

If you're actively trying to not exploit, then I wouldn't exploit knowing where the birth rate thresholds are.

Just keep working on economy, and decide if you want to tech up the military, or if you'll be using another country as the beat-stick to fight Alien ground armies with.

At the same time, you'll need to think about how much investment you want to put into India's space program - are you going to be filling the country with ground stations for Mission Control, and using it to make the Boost that will get you to the Moon and beyond, or is that the job of other countries ?

[CoyoteTraveller]

Right now it's early 2024, and I've got India, Kazakhstan (of course), the Pacific States which I plan to turn into a boost engine eventually, and 4/6ths of the USA. Not sure yet if I'll transition from USA to China, but for now it's pretty helpful.

For India and the Pacific States, could you suggest how many years I leave it on Economy? Corisai said to stick with economy until I have "enough", but I have no idea what "enough" looks like.

I'm still getting used to the time scale of this game - this is going to be my second long game; the first one I played to 2040 but didn't know much about what I was doing.

Edit: What do you recommend I do for Funding? Should I spend any IP on that? Not sure if it's worthwhile on the USA since I might throw it away, but on India it seems like a waste of IP when I'm trying to turn it into an economic monster. I'm a little short on places to Spoil with holding onto what I've got.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

Edit: What do you recommend I do for Funding? Should I spend any IP on that?

Never spend IPs on Funding in large nations. They have better things to do, like run Economy or Military. Funding is for small nations, which will get tremendously better results from their GDP due to IPs scaling by GDP^1/3, whereas the scaling for Funding is that each Funding priority completed increases yearly funding gain by 4+(# of CPs in the nation).
This also means that you need much less CP cap to support the Funding gain from small nations, since the CP cost of each CP is the number of IPs the nation has before modifiers. A 6-CP nation costs 6 times as much per IP for you to maintain than a 1-CP nation but only gets twice as much Funding per IP.

[ian.whitchurch]

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

Right now it's early 2024, and I've got India, Kazakhstan (of course), the Pacific States which I plan to turn into a boost engine eventually, and 4/6ths of the USA. Not sure yet if I'll transition from USA to China, but for now it's pretty helpful.

For India and the Pacific States, could you suggest how many years I leave it on Economy? Corisai said to stick with economy until I have "enough", but I have no idea what "enough" looks like.

I'm still getting used to the time scale of this game - this is going to be my second long game; the first one I played to 2040 but didn't know much about what I was doing.

Edit: What do you recommend I do for Funding? Should I spend any IP on that? Not sure if it's worthwhile on the USA since I might throw it away, but on India it seems like a waste of IP when I'm trying to turn it into an economic monster. I'm a little short on places to Spoil with holding onto what I've got.

Boost is tremendously valuable, until you have a space economy, and then it becomes very much a secondary consideration.

Have a think about if you can create funds by buying orgs, or if you can do a 'hit and run' on a small country that you run spoils on and don't care about.

It might be worth hiring a Billionaire concillor, and firing them for someone more useful later.

I'm not a huge fan of funding because of the opportunity cost of what else you could do- Id personally rather buy MC or something, and struggle along without as much cash.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by ian.whitchurch:

I'm not a huge fan of funding because of the opportunity cost of what else you could do- Id personally rather buy MC or something, and struggle along without as much cash.

A single-region nation with a decent economy, like Singapore, won't take very long to max out on MC, but it's really never going to amount to anything more except for permanently being set to Boost, Funding, or Spoils. As for Spoils, I suspect that the GHG creation is based on the number of IPs spent, like Economy, rather than the amount gained from it, so since the amount gained per IP scales with CP count, Spoiling a small nation is probably much more destructive for the environment than Spoiling a large nation for the same amount of cash.

[corisai]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

environment

Doesn't matter as completely out of your control now.
a) You can't stop AI from using spoils.
b) You can easily fix warming by starting a nuclear winter.
c) It's insanely expensive to counter methane even with all late-game techs.

Either eat a penalty and ignore it or mod this propaganda nonsense away.

[Galroche]

Originally posted by corisai:

Either eat a penalty and ignore it or mod this propaganda nonsense away.

or let people play the way they want ? you are the only one doing propaganda here ...

[corisai]

Originally posted by Galroche:

or let people play the way they want ? you are the only one doing propaganda here ...

Huh? Then try to play the game - you can't stop methane from building up an enviromental penalty in a succesful game (read: no major countries were destroyed in wars).

That's why I'm suggesting to ignore it and just eat the penalty.

And yes, I think tech level of late-game (advanced batteries, advanced fission and compact fusion reactors) should take care of enviromental damage on it's own. But it doesn't.

P.S. It's possible to reduce it to zero but will require a lot of dedicated efforts from player.

[CoyoteTraveller]

I crunched a lot of numbers with the help of the wiki to figure out the tipping points of when to invest in what, and why. TLDR, if you want max population growth (and you do), pump economy until your GDP per capita goes a bit above 25.2k, then pump knowledge until your government hits 10, then go back to economy. (With welfare as needed ofc.)

Don't take these numbers as gospel, but I wanted to share the fruits of my labor, no matter how questionable they might be.

There's three important pop growth bonuses: The "big economy" bonus, the "trashfire country" bonus, and the "developed country" bonus. The developed country bonus is the biggest, but also harder to get. The economy bonus is just "gdp per capita = pop growth" but it's small enough that it won't affect our thinking.

For the trashfire bonus, you get a pop growth bonus based on the (edit) highest value of either your government or education. That's a little confusing, but there's at least something to be said for leaving Knowledge alone up-front. It's a pretty small bonus for India and its 6.9 starting government, and it's not worth tanking it into an anocracy for pop growth because its education isn't that much lower of a score, but it's something. This bonus is most pronounced for true trashfires like Chad.

You get a pop growth bonus if you cross a magic threshold into being a developed country, but that's pretty far away for India. India starts with government of 6.9, education of 5.6, and GDP per capita of 7k. You can hit "developed" at G=6.9, E=5.6, GDPpC=50k, or G=10, E=8.7, GDPpC=25.2k. It's easier to raise your government and education by 3.1 than it is to raise your GDPpC by an extra 24.8k - almost half as much IP investment, in fact. So if you're shooting for the "developed" pop bonus ASAP, you'll want to pump Knowledge at some point. The "trashfire country" bonus gives you an incentive to raise econ first, and then sprint for knowledge at the end.

There's another factor that makes your econ investment more interesting: You get a larger gdp boost, per point of economy, the higher your democracy and knowledge are. This is a much bigger share of the pie for smaller countries, but it's still worth looking at here.

India's starting gain is something like $11 per capita GDP per Economy, but if you pump Knowledge high enough to max out democracy, you'll be getting $12.2 per capita GDP per economy. That's just a 10% boost, and it'll take 1200 IP to get there.

If you spend those same 1200 IP on Economy from scratch, you'll raise your GDP from the starting 11 trillion to about 30 trillion, which is a +172% increase in GDP (but only a +39% increase in IP because of the cube-root IP factor). Still, it's a lot bigger than the efficiency boost you get from Knowledge.

There's probably an interesting inflection point, as your GDP goes up, where the per-IP boost from Knowledge is equivalent to the per-IP boost from Economy. But wherever that point is, it's way above the point where you want to transition purely for the sake of that "developed" pop growth bonus.

[corisai]

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

if you want max population growth (and you do), pump economy until your GDP per capita goes a bit above 25.2k, then pump knowledge until your government hits 10, then go back to economy. (With welfare as needed ofc.)

Everything here is incorrect :)

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

pump economy until your GDP per capita goes a bit above 25.2k

Breakpoint is +1% growth per 30k GDP per capita.

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

then pump knowledge until your government hits 10

You're killing pop growth by doing so.

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

The developed country bonus is the biggest, but also harder to get.

Wrong. It's the least of all bonuses and very easy to get - invest into Eco and sooner or later you will get it.

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

For the trashfire bonus, you get a pop growth bonus based on the lowest value of either your government or education.

Wrong - based on HIGHEST value. So 10 Edu, 2 Gov will produce no bonus at all (as it will use 10 Edu value).

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

There's another factor that makes your econ investment more interesting: You get a larger gdp boost, per point of economy, the higher your democracy and knowledge are.

Wrong, they're unrelated at all.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by corisai:

Originally posted by CoyoteTraveller:

There's another factor that makes your econ investment more interesting: You get a larger gdp boost, per point of economy, the higher your democracy and knowledge are.

Wrong, they're unrelated at all.

Incorrect. Higher Government score increases the gain from Economy. Education doesn't affect it. Cohesion values closer to 5 increases it.

[Asuzu]

When you kickstart space economy and colonize external planets, anything happening on Earth is pretty much irrelevant.

Research is carried by campuses, mining carries titan production, and defense fleets shoot down occasional assault carriers, making miltech obsolete because there is nothing to fight.

It doesn't matter how you build Earth countries as long as you built up your MC and your space economy is running smooth, because they are largely irrelevant in the global scale of things.

[CoyoteTraveller]

Wow, someone really needs to fix the wiki. This is all pulled from https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta/Nations#Priorities and by the sounds of your responses, the page must be practically made-up. Thanks for the responses though!

(whoops, I see I typo'd the trashfire country pop bonus on my third rewrite of the post)

[corisai]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Incorrect. Higher Government score increases the gain from Economy. Education doesn't affect it. Cohesion values closer to 5 increases it.

Yes, my failure - found it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/comments/xxk9sv/i_decompiled_the_game_and_looked_at_the_math/

And no - Education too affecting it :) But Government&Education effects are pretty neglible, while Cohesion is indeed a strong one.

Still, I'm correct that for maximizing pop growth - you DON'T WANT anything increasing your Gov / Edu at all