Income Guide (WC3)

Economy is one of the most important aspects of the game where you need to constantly find the right balance between greed and safety. Incorrect way of building up income might lead to you losing time and resources.

As a human you begin with a weak economy that is behind the hero mode income (This does NOT include major borders like Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Mongolia), which is a really bad situation. As long as you are behind the hero mode income you are not going to be able to provide any meaningful help and could have activated hero mode instead. **In this guide we are going to explain the best way to start up your economy.**

The backbone of any starting economy are of course Lumberjacks! Don't be afraid to train a lot of them. Their value is just way too good not to use and will greatly help you catching up with hero mode income. If you are a colonizer nation (e.g. England, France, Spain, Mongolia, Japan) you should get a free colony where you can train as many lumberjacks as you want which can boost your income even further. This includes conqueror nations (e.g. Scandinavia, Italy, Ireland, Iceland), you don't have to hold on to your colony but you can gather as much lumber as you possibly can for a little to no effort or investment.

But Lumberjacks cannot carry your economy forever as trees are limited so you have to build up resource buildings at the same time. The most efficient way is to build only Markets and upgrade them into Spacious Markets. But this won't completely solve our issue with limited lumber resources so you have to switch to Lumber Mills before you are starting to get overwhelmed with gold and you already have enough lumberjacks (which can be any number, for eg. 20+). This usually happens to a classic European nation at around 10 Markets. Having massive excess of gold compared to lumber will only hurt your economy or slow you down so you need to find the perfect time to switch which can be unique for every single nation.

Once you have switched to amassing Lumber income, you want to do that until you overwhelm the Gold income. When you reach that point, congratulations. You have already surpassed the hero mode income (most likely). At this point you want to have as large Lumber income as possible while keeping Gold income small but increased from time to time to not get overwhelmed with Lumber, this can still hurt your economy but not as much as pure Gold. Once you are satisfied with your income you should start balancing it in order to afford the late game researches and units. This will cause your stockpile of Gold skyrocket but do not worry, it is fine. The most ideal balanced income is to have 100 000 of both Gold and Lumber income which can be unachievable by some nations. However you can settle down with 50 000 of both incomes which is still a good income. Having 30 000 is decent but your income will be overthrown by the hero mode income around the 2nd hour of play time.

Unlike the Human Income, the Zombie Income systems can vary from variation to variation whether it be piles only, gold mine or brain extractors. Here we will cover the most widely used income system which is the brain extractor based. The most widely used balance is as follows:

```
Brain Extractor
Expenses: 2500 Gold
Income: 175 Gold
Efficiency Ratio: 0.07
Repayment: 14.28 minutes

Dark Brain Extractor
Expenses: 12500 Gold
Income: 1375 Gold (+1200)
Efficiency Ratio: 0.096
Repayment: 10.41 minutes

Uber Brain Extractor
Expenses: 25000 Gold
Income: 4975 Gold (+3600)
Efficiency Ratio: 0.144
Repayment: 6.94 minutes

```

(Data above might not be up to date) As you can see from the info table above, the higher the brain extractor tier the higher efficiency, which is crucial in building up your income.

At the beginning of the game if your chosen playstyle/role is to be the one who makes economy you want to train a decent number of zombies and sent them into the border of your choice. This will make the process of saving for the first Brain Extractor faster, every minute matters! If you are going to focus mainly on economy then presumably you are not going to invest in zombie upgrades so you will stop sending your zombies to the border as they will server only as feed for the humans. At this point you can do nothing other than wait or harass near the border with your hero.

Congratulations! You have built your first Brain Extractor and the Zombie Masters in Asia are about to discover a group of humans and provide you with a large sum of Gold which you can use for 2 more Brain Extractors. At this point you may be forced to be careful as Human nations might be planning to make a rush. It is always a good choice to build a couple more piles of flesh just in case that happens.

Once you amass 12 500 Gold you will be able to upgrade to your first Dark Brain Extractor which has a similar efficiency compared to the Human resource buildings. This is of course not enough to overpower the Human economy so you need to save for the Uber Brain Extractor with a staggering 0.144 Efficiency Ratio.

At this point you can either choose to evolve into zombie 3 if no one has already or build up more income.