User:Shijeru/cybernations/idealtrade

The Table

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(Find the row/column with your starting resources, then compare the colour/number in that cell to the list of sets below. If you'd like an explanation of why these sorts of trade sets are usually best, scroll to the bottom.)

The Trade Sets

1) Ideal Set: aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif gems.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif pigs.gif spices.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif (If you have any two of the resources in the above group, then get this. It's the best trade set in the entire game. Consider yourself lucky to have gotten such nice resources.)

2) Almost Ideal Set: aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif pigs.gif spices.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif + Any Resource Besides rubber.gif (If you have one of the resources in the ideal set excluding gems, and have another resource that is non-ideal and is anything except rubber, then get this. In many cases it is nearly as good as the ideal set.)

3) Asphalt/Automobiles/Steel Set: aluminum.gif cattle.gif coal.gif fish.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif oil.gif rubber.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif (If you have one of the resources in the ideal set excluding gems, and your other resource is rubber, then get this. If your resources are two of rubber/oil/coal, also get this.)

The rest of the sets don't have clever names, and are just labelled by the starting resources that make them necessary. None of these sets are as good as the three above, unfortunately.

4) Coal and Gems, or Furs and Gems/Gold/Oil/Silver/Uranium/Wine, or Gems and Gold/Lead/Oil/Silver/Uranium/Wine, or Gold and Silver/Uranium/Wine, or Lead and Uranium/Wine, or Oil and Silver/Uranium/Wine, or Rubber and Uranium, or Silver and Uranium/Wine, or Uranium and Wine: aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif pigs.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif + Your Resources

5) Coal and Furs/Lead/Silver/Uranium/Wine, or Furs and Lead, or Gold and Oil, or Lead and Silver: aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif gems.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif + Your Resources

6) Furs and Rubber, or Gems and Rubber, or Gold and Rubber, or Lead and Rubber, or Rubber and Silver/Wine: aluminum.gif cattle.gif coal.gif fish.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif oil.gif water.gif wheat.gif + Your Resources

7) Gold and Lead, or Lead and Oil: aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif gold.gif iron.gif lead.gif lumber.gif marble.gif oil.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif

8) Coal and Gold: aluminum.gif cattle.gif coal.gif fish.gif gold.gif gems.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif silver.gif water.gif wheat.gif

NOTE #1: These sets are based around maximizing the number of citizens you gain per day. In most cases this will provide the fastest growth for your nation. If you send/receive large quantities of foreign aid (like if you're a bank), your ideal set might be different. If in doubt, ask a council member.

NOTE #2: These sets are based around following the suggested improvement order in the guides. If you're using a strange improvement order, these population maximizing trades might not be ideal.

NOTE #3: These sets will definitely be perfect for you if you have a large nation, however, at very low infra levels the bonus provided by construction is not as important, which means at these levels usually your ideal set will be different from the above. The trade sets in this post will definitely be ideal once your infra level gets above 300 to 400, but before that they might not be. However, in order to avoid having to switch your trades around as you get larger, these are provided as the trade sets you should aim for even though they might not always be "the best" if you have a very new nation.

NOTE #4: The sets are ordered, more or less, from best to worst. If you can form the first set, do so. If you can form the second but not the first, don't try for the third, etc.

How To Get Trade Agreements

QUOTE(the other guide) How do you search for trades? If you're looking for more than two resources and don't particularly care which combination they come in, use the advanced trade finder. The trade finder doesn't sort by activity, so make sure not to bother sending trade offers to nations that are more than a few days inactive ... they probably won't come back, especially if they're small. If you're looking for a specific combination of resources, you can search the all nations resources page. Change your search type to "team + resources" and then search for "black aluminum lumber", or whatever your resources are. You have a small number of outgoing trade offers, but the amount of trade offers you can receive is much greater. This means it's often a good idea to find a lot of people with the resources you need, and send them a mass PM asking them to send you a trade offer. It's often a good idea to tell them what benefits your resources would provide them. If they're small they likely don't know, and won't bother to check.

Explanations/Theory

QUOTE(threefingeredguy @ May 15 2007, 12:24 PM) * Why are certain resource sets better? It can't be for the bonuses because aluminum.gif gold.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif lead.gif rubber.gif oil.gif water.gif wheat.gif cattle.gif coal.gif will give you much cheap tech and infra, yet you haven't listed this. Perhaps you should explain why these resource sets are ideal.

QUOTE(Bossk @ May 15 2007, 01:37 PM) * First of all, cheap tech is irrelevant. After tech level 50 you will be raiding or buying from a tech seller. (Exception to this is if you're selling tech, in which case you always want lead.gif, gold.gif, and oil.gif.)

Second, cheap infra is not as important as maximizing the number of citizens you gain each day. Which won't always add up to the same thing as maximizing the amount of infra you can buy per day, since population increasing resources really help (even more so than infra cost decreasing resources, usually).

To use my nation as an example, I have set 2 in the table above, with my non-ideal resource being silver.gif.

I have a -28.99% infra cost reduction. But I have a +30.56% citizen modifier. So i have almost a third more citizens than I would with a non-population increasing set. To compare, if I used the set you've posted, I'd have a -35.20% infra cost reduction, and cheaper infra upkeep, but I'd have only a +13.39% citizen modifier.

My set gives me slightly higher happiness/income bonuses (very slightly), but that's offset by your cheaper infra. So you'd probably make more money per person than me, but I have more people (17.17% more), and therefore my set would usually beat yours, except in a few cases (like if I had a very small amount of infrastructure, and therefore a very small population, or in the case of me being so large that I hit my infrastructure/population "ceiling" ... but these sorts of situations aren't standard). The larger our nations got, the more of an edge my population bonuses would give me, so if anything, at larger sizes, the difference in the two sets would become even more pronounced, and fastfood.GIF would be even better.

So, to summarize:

While you might be able to buy more infra per dollar with an infra cost reducing tradeset, your infra will not give you as much extra income as my infra will, since I'll have more citizens, and therefore I'll have a higher income (and more improvements) and be able to buy more infra than you despite the fact my infra is more expensive.

There are a few times when you'll not want to use one of the sets above, such as if you're receiving/sending a large amount of foreign aid, and so are not relying on your own income or purchasing power as much as that of others, or if you're selling tech, as mentioned above. If you're banking or having someone pump you up with aid, let a council member know and they should be able to find your ideal set in that situation from your nation data.

For example, if I were sending out money and not buying any infra of my own, my ideal set would be (my starting resources are wheat/silver):

cattle.gif fish.gif gems.gif iron.gif pigs.gif silver.gif spices.gif sugar.gif uranium.gif water.gif wheat.gif wine.gif

If I was receiving large quantities of aid and only cared about my infra purchasing power, my ideal set would be:

aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif gems.gif iron.gif lumber.gif marble.gif silver.gif uranium.gif water.gif wheat.gif wine.gif

So it can vary quite a bit. If I went from one of these situations back to a period where I was trying to grow using my own income, I'd want to go back to my "almost ideal" set 2.

Now, what if you were planning on tech selling? You'd definitely need lead.gif, gold.gif, and oil.gif (for microchips), but what about your other resources? As it turns out, this would be the ideal set in that case:

aluminum.gif cattle.gif fish.gif gold.gif iron.gif lead.gif lumber.gif marble.gif oil.gif sugar.gif water.gif wheat.gif

Which is just the regular ideal set, but with pigs/gems/spices substituted for gold/lead/oil. If your starting resources are two of gold/lead/oil (which basically suck in terms of their growth potential), this can be a way to make the best of it. With the money you make from tech selling this will help your growth quite a bit while you're a small nation, as well as helping other members of your alliance with access to tech. So even if you have "bad" starting resources, there are ways in which you can put your nation to use besides maximizing your population growth.