Ok, I read the Newbie Guide. Now What?

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Camps

1. Begin with the End In Mind
2. Recruit Every Day
3. Explore Every Day
4. Build Every Day
5. Anticipate Threats and Defend Against Them
6. Maximize Turns
7. Join an Alliance

Begin with the End in Mind

Before you leave anonymity, probably even before you choose your terrain and class, you should select your win condition. There are three obvious ones: build the most nukes, smelt the most gold, and kill the most people with mechs. However, each player's win condition is slightly different. One player may choose to build the most nukes by having a high enough research level to build four at once. Another player may choose to build the most nukes by having more people building nukes. Within each focus path, there are multiple possibilities for win conditions. Which win condition you choose is not as important as having one.

From that win condition, set goals. If your win condition is to have the highest research, then you need to have the most labs and use them the most effectively. Each focus path has research requirements, but before you can get to those research requirements, you need to have a defended camp, but before you can have a defended camp, you need to have a sustainable camp. In addition to the research requirements, the nuke path generally has a very large population requirement. The econ path has a very large land requirement. The military path also has a very large land requirement and a larger than average population requirement.

Based on the requirements for your specific focus path and win condition, you need to set goals for the amount of land, amount of population, amount of CEP, and amount of ore that you will need. You will need to achieve other steps in order to achieve these goals, like building certain buildings and vehicles. Those buildings and vehicles will require other buildings as prerequisites. Keep breaking it down until you know in which order you are going to do your research, open up new buildings, build new vehicles, etc.

This plan first approach is tedious at first but pays off in reduced grief in the current and improved score in future rounds. Many players have successfully taken the trial and error approach, but those players are more subject to missteps like forgetting to build power before communications.

Recruit Every Day

The first thing new players learn is to explore and recruit. Soon you will have enough population where you will have to make a decision about how many people to send recruiting and exploring, and how many to leave behind to produce necessities and do research.

While there are diminishing returns on the numbers of explorers and recruiters, this is not usually a factor for new players. So until you start to hit the limits described in Recruiting and Exploring Limits, keep as few people in camp as you absolutely have to and send the remaining recruiting and exploring.

Recruiting is more important than exploring simply because with more recruiters you find more people who can go exploring. So, if you have to make a decision between recruiting and exploring, then send more recruiters.

Explore Every Day

Just because recruiting is more important than exploring doesn't mean that you should ever not explore. Even if you only send one person, send somebody every turn. Even if you don't need land and are producing all of your resources, send someone exploring for land. The only time you should ever not be exploring for land is if you are about to be over 5000 land and have not opened up the ability to generate power or create communication relays. Even if you are about to come out of anonymity still explore for land. Any attacks that happen early game will not be able to hinder you enough to affect your late game play. Even if you get attacked, the people are probably just aiming for the First Ops or Attack. After you get Comm Relays, explore for land, even if you don't need it. Because, you will need it, and once you do need it, you won't be able to find it as fast as you want.

Build Every Day

If you explore every turn, then you will need to build mines and communications relays nearly every turn, eventually. Recruiting people means needing more shelters. In addition, many of the goals mentioned above involve constructing new buildings. Most activities in a camp require increasing the number of structures in the camp in some way. So, it's best to just plan on building something every turn.

Anticipate Threats and Defend Against Them

Do not come out of anonymity without defenses. Be aware that as a new player, the more experienced players are going to get to weapons before you do. When you first come out of anonymity, you have a huge bull's-eye painted on your shirt. Most camps do not have sufficient defenses when they come out of anonymity and are easy prey. While getting sacked at this stage in the game is largely only frustrating, it does slow you down while accelerating the attacker's growth. Don't give someone else easy points.

In most cases, it is possible to get defenses against vehicles before those vehicles are available to attackers. Build fighters before other camps have bombers. Build anti-tank guns before other camps get tanks. Keep an eye on the market to see what people have opened up and are selling. That will give you some idea as to the scope of the threats out there. Just be aware that not all threats may be visible this way.

Finally, when you build defenses, make them significant. A token defense is more costly than no defense. Don't train army, if you don't have weapons for them or can't quickly use them to make their own weapons. They cost you extra food every turn and can't defend your camp, if you get attacked by someone with as simple a weapon as bows. Militia who man anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft guns must have army officers in the field for them to ever fire. Don't build these structures, if you don't have army in addition to militia.

Maximize Turns

Population, Land, and Turns are the three limiting resources in this game. The first two are fairly obvious, but new people tend to forget that turns are also a valuable and important resource. Make sure that you are doing everything you can do within a single turn. Train army, train officers, make weapons, make vehicles, send spec ops, recruit, explore, and build all in one turn. At the beginning of the round, when you have 3988 turns, it seems like you have an enormous amount of turns. However, at the end, when you need just 10 more turns to attack the guy ahead of you and switch places with him, make sure you have them by not burning them by forgetting something and having to use more turns than you needed to accomplish some goal. This is especially important with research. Watch your research, and don't go over the level that you need to hit to get to whatever goal you are trying to achieve.

The flipside to this is that you can only store 400 turns (500 with the Time Management mastery). If you have 400 turns stored and the next turn comes, you lose it forever. If you get into a situation where you are going to lose turns but you need to be away from the game, then get your camp into a stable situation resource-wise. Don't recruit or explore, and just quickly burn turns until you have enough buffer to last until you can return to the game. You might lose out on people, land, CEP, and many other opportunities doing this, but at least you will have the research from those turns.

Join an Alliance

This game is a group strategy game. You need to be part of a group to fully participate. You need to be in a strong group to be competitive. The winner is almost always a member of the strongest group. Any group is better than being alone. For most alliances, the only requirements you really have to satisfy are: you must be willing to take orders, and you must be willing to learn from the other members of the alliance. In most alliances, the orders you will receive are infrequent and are not onerous. In general, you will be asked to do at most one or two things that benefit everyone in the alliance, including yourself. That is why alliances are so powerful. 10 people get to benefit from 10 advantages as opposed to one person getting to benefit from one advantage in that same period of time. Also, the game is a lot more fun, when you interact with the personalities behind the camps. Make some friends, then make some enemies!