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BRE build-up / economy strategy (for staging test scenarios)

Purpose. How to build a BRE empire up (regions, income, military) efficiently when driving the original binary headless to stage a test scenario — for example an attacker versus an allied pair. This is play/economy technique for setting up test worlds, not a mechanics spec (numbers live in docs/mechanics-reference.md) and not emulator plumbing (driving/scraping lives in the bre-gather skill).

Tax

Set 12%. It never triggers tax riots, still earns tax income, and keeps popular support near 100% so Coastal output does not slump.

Region priority

Buy in this order:

  1. Coastal first — Tourism is the cash engine. Going 3 -> 33 Coastal took Tourism from ~13k to ~146k gold/turn in a single turn; it compounds hard.
  2. Agricultural — food for a large empire and army.
  3. Industrial — needed to PRODUCE military units, especially tanks.

Coastal output "slumps drastically" at low public support, so keep tax low and support high (see Tax).

Buy cadence (per the project owner)

Do NOT buy a little every turn. Bootstrap with a max-Coastal buy early to kick off Tourism compounding, THEN accumulate gold across several turns and bulk-buy in large batches. Rationale: region prices ratchet up as you buy — both within one purchase and persistently across the turn — so spacing out many small buys pays the rising price repeatedly.

Turn economy

20 turns/day. Use the end-of-turn Do you wish to continue? (Y/n) prompt — Y chains straight into the next turn without returning to the main menu. When turns run out, advance the DOS DATE by a day and relaunch to refill 20 more.

Producing military

Two paths:

  • Industrial regions + System Menu -> Set Industries (set the Tanks %) produce units per turn.
  • Buy units directly for gold at the Spending Menu (Tanks ~2163 gold each at base).

Which is faster depends on Industrial count versus available gold — a large Industrial base out-produces direct buys over several turns, while a gold surplus buys a batch instantly.

Snapshotting

Full-directory snapshots of the game data (see the bre-snapshot-workflow) let you save a built-up world for reuse. BRE's game.dat has integrity checks, so you cannot byte-edit it — build the world in-game, then snapshot the directory.

Verified numbers (live run, 2026-07-27, BRE v0.988)

Measured while building three empires headless:

  • Turns: 20 per empire per day. Each empire has its own counter (they do not share). When exhausted, advance the DOS DATE a day for 20 more.
  • Land-market price ratchet is PER-EMPIRE, not global. One empire buying ~750 regions pushed its own region price from 1,412 to ~27,020, while a second empire in the same world still started at 1,412. So one empire's expansion does not inflate another's land cost.
  • Region marginal price rises within a purchase and ratchets up persistently for that empire ("the price shown is only for the first piece"). Buy in the order Coastal → Agricultural → (Industrial), and expect the price to climb.
  • Coastal → Tourism compounding (with 100% support, tax 12%): 3 Coastal ≈ 13k Tourism/turn; 33 Coastal ≈ 146k; ~547 Coastal ≈ ~2M; 679 Coastal ≈ 2.9M gold/turn. Coastal is the whole economy.
  • Tank price is FLAT (~2,027–2,164 each) — no ratchet. Buying is purely gold-limited, so 10k tanks ≈ ~20–21M gold. At ~3M gold/turn income that is ~7 turns of max-buying. This makes DIRECT PURCHASE the fast path to a big tank force (no Industrial regions needed) once Coastal income is large.
  • Food: population grows fast as you buy regions; food demand scales with it. With only the 2 starting Agricultural regions a rapid Coastal build WILL hit a shortage. Buy ~100 Agricultural early (≈30k food/turn, comfortably ahead even at ~3B population), or let the driver buy food from the market as backup.
  • Empire letters are assigned per enrollment order (1st enrolled = A, 2nd = B, …).
  • Per-turn prompts a blind macro must handle: the Diplomacy menu opens EVERY turn (not just the first); a "Queen Royale requires N gold for Taxes" prompt appears some turns; underpaying food/taxes triggers a "DISASTEROUS results — reconsider? (Y/n)" warning. Drive by matching the active screen, never a fixed key count.