Basically, Social Security is stealing money.

Tuss

Update; after a few "months", Gambre Tronc ranks 309th, way ahead "Funkyville" and "Kingdom of Erathia"... Or at least, the last time I checked...

Well, I'm not too popular with all my healthcare and social security cuts .

As from today, Gambre Tronc ranks 300th in the world... I'm now in the Top 300 Best Presidents!
I browsed a couple of other coutry, and I noticed that I mostly get my points from the Government index, tough it got down from the 90th to the 80th lately.

I'm experiencing a very strange thing right now. I finally balanced my budget (at 60% income taxes). This has cost me lots in ranking, exactly for the reason Eagle mentioned: my government index went to hell. Somehow, however, I am getting around $40 billion per year, and I don't know from where. There are no new loans (in fact, I already repayed $150 billion in loans this year), yet the money keeps coming... Strange...

Perhaps you got the gift certificates at the same time?

Well, I wish you to get your ranking up soon. I myself have a lot of trouble to keep my ranking high and to balance my budget... I did the "mistake" of cutting in education and transportation a lot at the beginning to the profit of my corporations, but now I feel like I lost more than I gained doing that... Oh well, it could be worse; at least it worked.

One last thing; how do you join a federation? I would be willing to join HOTU Defense League too, but I sent a message to the chairman and I got no response...

I'll let him know when he's online. However, you can only join a federation that's on the same continent as you, as there are no navies in the game (well, there are, but only as a bonus feature for a $5/month fee on the restricted world).

As for cutting transportation and education, you really shot yourself in the leg there. Supposedly, the way to go is to cut hospitals and social security instead. It'll cost you your ranking, but you'll balance your budget much better. I found that a little too late...

And as for the money, I don't know where it is from. You'll get a message when the money arrives and have to add it manually, which I didn't do, so the source must lie elsewhere.

Yes, I have a pretty hard time now rebuilding. However, it worked since I didn't cut too much... It gave me just enough time and money to build my corporations, which were in a pretty bad state when I took over the country.

I just realized how you got all your money at once since it just happened to me. If you gave loans to other companies, you receive the amount you gave all at once at the end of the loan, OR when they decide to pay back the loan (with 5% interest).

So far, it's the best way I've found to pay back my own loans. It's like investing money...

Oh... I didn't realize that... I guess that before I took the country over, the A.I. gave out some loans, and now I got them back. Thanks for the explanation, Eagle .

I've just registered with the adress belowa@web.de...

Can you please send me this 'Gift Certificate ', NetDanzr?

(But I can't promise you that I've got the patience to play this for longer...)

I can't do it! This game has no appeal to me any longer. It's too strange.

Tuss

Is that it? Nothing more to say?

I myself managed to build up a very good country so far, IMHO. I even managed to get taxes to 30% and still get a balanced budget!

It did hurt my score bad, but hey - I'm still in the 200ths and it's just like an investisment... Since, because of it, I got my first state run corporation above the 100 million value

What about you, NetDanzr?

When I took over my country, I've had a few 100+ billion companies, now they are at $20b or so . Anyway, I'm slowly getting out of debt, my main hurdle right now is the lack of High Tech Executives, but my situation is improving.

My CEO is doing much better, with a total market value of over $1 trillion by now, and growing.

That's what I thought. Since you seems to be much better at Ceoing than me, we could perhaps consider about merging together... Let me know if you want to buy some state companies in my country, we could work out a deal sometime...

Posting to get news about you NetDanzr. I know that CEO's now have a very hard time making any profits... Wanted to know if you were doing good.

In the same time I checked your country, and you seems to be doing fine now. You're not so far behind me, that should revive the competition

On another note, do you know when we will finanly get the 20B bonus? I guessed that we didn't got it yet because you didn't logged enough, since I log at least twice a day from almost the beginning. Either that or W3C are too lazy to do their job in the holydays...

Also, I didn't see you on the BB. If you didn't did so already (which I doubt), you should go there for quick advice. If you want a even better place tough, you can join us at http://groups.msn.com/simcountry, which is a MSN group thingy made by veterans players to help out other players and to enhance trade. Very usefull place.

Hi Eagle,

the reason I've been doing so well lately is that I could spike the prices really high. Most of my companies have quality in the 160-200 range, which means I'm making tonns of money. I have also caught up with my employment (high-level workers were the bottleneck), so currently I'm making net profit of around 100b per year. Right now, I'm having just enough money to repay my remaining debts, so within a year or so (after I build up my defensive forces), I will be able to lower the tax rate to 50% (no lower; I don't want any CEOs there for now), and start increasing healthcare. It's nice to have no hosiptals, but my people are starting to die before they reach the Senior Executive level.

As for my CEO, I can't complain. I found that trading with others is a waste of effort; if you set the purchase price to 20% over market price and keep the sale price around 20 percentage points below the quality of the product, there is almost nothing that could prevent you from being well-stacked or selling all your products. I'm hovering aroud the 130th place, with around $2 trillion in assets, and more money flowing in each month that I can spend on new corporations (the limit is 3 monthly), so I started to loan out money as well...

You seems to have grasped the basic concepts on how to make money fast now...

For your defensive army, don't bother upgrading it too above the newbie newspaper guide too much unless you really feel threatened. It would be a waste of money and of workforce on your part since it require quite a lot of LLW and MLM. Since about everyone seem to have or had a shortage of LLW lately, I guess you probably don't have too much to spare either.

What about your corporation expense in your CEO? That's a new "fix" for CEO's, and that's mostly what is killing them right now. Almost no CEO's manage to end up a profit in the end because of that.

I don't get profit of new companies, but once I increase the product quality to roughly 150, the dollars start rolling in. I've got a good base of companies that make profit, so this is not such a problem .

As for the defensive force, there's an overly aggressive neighbor, who already attacked another country where the owner is active. On our continent, we have the No. 1 player, who is the leader of The Strong Arm of the Law federation. He's something like the US - he coerces everybody to follow his rules. Currently, he does not allow others to attack countries with CEOs that logged in within the last 2 months, but my neighbor doesn't seem to care. So yes, I feel threatened .

And so it happens, that after a few days of being neck-to-neck with Eagle, I passed him in the rankings today .