Why be efficient?
Earth:2025 is a very competitive game which relies on mathematical formulas. Gameplay revolves around 'turns', which you receive in a limited and consistent amount. A turn is necessary to carry out most major game functions, including any function that enables your country to grow in military, networth, or land. Since you only get turns in a limited fashion, you'd best be careful what you do with them. In order to succeed at the game, you must learn to be more efficient than your competitors.
A few easy ways to be efficient:
1) Never run out of food or cash (unless you produce more than you need)
2) Never build less than the maximum amount of buildings you can build each turn
3) Never attack unless necessary
4) Never attack unless you are going to be successful, and there will be a
definite gain
5) Do not explore for land when a successful attack can yield more acreage per
turn than exploration
6) Build construction sites at the beginning of the game
A few notes on Construction Sites:
Construction sites (CS) are a good way to make your country more efficient, since any good country will need to expand and build. CS enable you to build more buildings per turn; having more CS will thereby reduce the number of turns required to build a set number of buildings.
For example:
-Monarchy A has 0 CS and is building 100 bbuildings. Since they have a basic bpt
of 5 this will take 20 turns.
-Monarchy B has 40 CS and is building 100 buildings. Since they have a bpt of 15
(5+40/4) this will take 5 turns (round up)
As you can see, monarchy B is much more efficient, since it builds the same amount of buildings as monarchy A in 25% of the time (5 turns instead of 20).
An unexperienced player may wonder why having construction sites are so important, since it takes a full turn to build each one. Therefore, building 380 construction sites (to give you a bpt of 100 unless you are a theocracy or dictator) would require 380 turns of building only construction sites! This seems like a huge waste of turns to the untrained player, but those who have a low bpt (ie. 50) after three weeks knows then how important having a high bpt is.
For example:
-Monarchy A has a bpt of 50 and over the ccourse of a week grabs 5000 acres which
he intends to build on. This will require 100 turns.
-Monarchy B has a bpt of 100 and over the course of a week grabs 5000 acres.
This will take 50 turns.
The difference is 50 turns, but again, you might think 'Well monarchy B also spend 200 more turns than monarchy A making CS's to get his BPT that high' and you are right...according to that math monarchy B would need to grab and build on 20,000 acres for his bpt to pay off. Right?
Wrong. That assumption is based on turns having equal weight during the course of the game. Later in the game, when your country is growing (hopefully), you'll want to have more turns to produce goods at a much higher rate than before. A techer, for example, might only be able to research 500 points/turn early in the game but in the 3rd week should be researching around 2000 points/turn. Therefore he can research the same in 1 turn as he could do with 4 before. Cashers might only make 200k cash a turn in the early part of the game, but near the end might make 10 million a turn or more! Therefore, turns later in the game are relatively more valuable than turns early in the game.
Now, back to monarchy A and B... Did I mention they were techers? Well they are. And with that 5000 acres built on, they can research say 1500 points/turn (for example purposes). Monarchy A spent 100 turns building while monarchy B was finished in half the time. That means that B could have spent those 50 turns researching at 1500 points/turn (50*1500=75,000 points!). Monarchy B certainly has a huge lead on A now.
The moral of the story:
Build more CS at the start. The less you build with a low BPT the more efficient you are, because you will spend less turns in the mid- and end-game constructing, when your turns are very valuable and should not be wasted on buildings!