A quick guide: Your first 45 Billion In Arms in just 6 easy steps

[ComplexRegionalBaconSyndrome]

Step 1
Take a loan out
Step 2
Take another loan out as soon as 24 hours has passed.
Step 3
Repeat steps 1 and 2 untill there are no more loans to be taken out.

Step 4
Upgrade your Private Yacht
Step 4.1 Upgrade the Hull, Rudder and Engine only.

Step 5
Go to one of the EU states and buy the most expensive weapons, buy as many of them as you can. Make sure you fill your baby up with as mch as you can. You may need to travel to do this.

Step 6
Start wars as close as you can to the EU, like Estonia, Ukrain etc... Now sell, sell sell.
Repeat this process. Before you know it, You will have payed all your debts off and made a great deal of ching.

[Most Wanted]

And now we have to patch that out :)

At one point our number one tester managed to win the game by just using loans. Take one loan, then pay it off with another, then us increased credit for bigger loan, etc etc.

We have to walk a fine line of balance vs access. The game has to be accessible enough without becoming a cake-walk. In this case we should tweak our economy a little to dissuade people from simplifying it so much.

Thank you for keeping us on our toes!

[Sternrake]

Strange? I took out a single loan for the shortest possible term of 3 days. All other loans were then blocked for '1 day' - said 1 day blockage rolling over with each of the 3 days the first loan remained unpaid. I had the money to pay the first loan off early but could find no such option. By the time I hit the 3 day mark, I did not relly need to borrow any more money.

All seemed about right to me, but no scamming the money-lenders!

[ComplexRegionalBaconSyndrome]

I would just keep it the way it is based on the difficult of the game setting. If I may, I would suggest adding a stock market option. If I remember right, there were games that used a live stock market model of the arms industry. The sensitivity was increased.

Something missing from the game, would be countries selling arms and not the gun runners. It's nice competing against other runners, but it's the countries that sell weapons, being a middle man in the end is smaller.

Consider adding random events like disease and political elections- as well as other kinds of problems. Knowing the budget of each country would be great. Just because they have a demand, or desire for arms, does not mean they can afford it. Defective arms do pop up. Bullets should have a price. Making sure you sell the and equip the right kind of bullets for the right arms would be important.

Something further that can be added, are things such as bullet factories, parts factories. Embargo's and Sanctions. Brass and matariels for weapons come from some place. If there is a war, prices go up.

The United Nations get them. NATO and other organizations that could make things interesting.

One last thing....

I know this is not the place, but I figure you will be reading.

Add South Africa to the seller of arms. They sell a range of weapons, tanks UAV's and other things. They sell a 20mm rifle as example, and one of the worlds best attack helicopters the Rooi Valk.

[ComplexRegionalBaconSyndrome]

Originally posted by Galactus:

Strange? I took out a single loan for the shortest possible term of 3 days. All other loans were then blocked for '1 day' - said 1 day blockage rolling over with each of the 3 days the first loan remained unpaid. I had the money to pay the first loan off early but could find no such option. By the time I hit the 3 day mark, I did not relly need to borrow any more money.

All seemed about right to me, but no scamming the money-lenders!

Take out a loan for 20 or 30 days. Even if you end up paying more. Try sell arms during the 24 hour pause. Just tweak the guide, look where wars are, something in the EU may be lucky event, but it does happen.

[Sternrake]

Well, what I was saying was that it did not seem possible for me to take out multiple loans at the same time. I think I read somewhere [tutorial?] that you could only get one loan at a time. That seems right to me, and it seems to break your steps 1, 2 and 3 in your OP.

I do agree with step 4. Trying to dig yourself out of a hole with 5 tons of cargo capacity is a royal pita.

A suggestion: Make it so that loan sharks are not automatically available. You must 'discover' them as you travel from nation to nation. There should be a random determination made as to whether a shark will be available. ARIES could give you a heads up...

I think a similar rule for paying the bribes to get information about a client nation's demand for various types of arms would be good. i.e. You must visit a nation before you can pay the bribe for the arms demand. . Perhap you should have to repay this bribe every time you leave a nation and revisit it later? Circumstances do change.

[darthkiririn]

Does this guide hold true with the most recent version 16.0.7? I ask because I re-balanced all the vehicle parts that you can upgrade and construct vehicles with so that you can't create vastly overpowered vehicles at almost no cost. The loans were meant to give a starting boost to help the player in a way that you found, but it was too easy with the previous vehicle part designs.

The loan system was also meant to be a possible mini game to see how high you could pyramid your loan debt; it doesn't count for achievements or leaderboards if your money is just from a loan though (except for the Most Wealth Loaned leaderboard). It was originally capable of going indefinitely, so I had to change its design to make loans still be useful for game play and pryamidable for a mini game.

[Skjold]

Zeke, i think you need to look at prices of some weapons as well (unless they are working as intended). Alot of weapons that were added recently cost ~1.5 million for a batch, which is around 10x the normal price of the older weapons. So in other words, you will find weapons that has a base value of 4.5 million per ton. Like Germany's old WW2 MP40's as an example.

This together with the current loan system (that i rarely use, so don't know personally) has probably created this situation.