Plague of Z - A Guide to Economy
The economy in Plague of Z is an extremely important factor that players need to learn about as early as possible. This is because everything that you do in the game will require that you either spend or gain resources that need to have the right balance. Once a player fails to establish a good economy for their city, the player will most likely fall downhill because it’s extremely difficult to keep up with the increasingly expensive costs of upgrading your structures or training troops.
There are a lot of things to learn about when it comes to an economy that we’ll be explaining in this guide. Luckily, all you need to do is learn about each of these fundamentals and understand their importance and which sectors affect them. Once you do that, you can learn the more complicated stuff by doing these tasks over and over so that you gather hands-on knowledge of how they work. Let’s take a look at all the things you need to know about to master the art of establishing a good economy in Plague of Z.
The Resources
There are 5 primary resources in Plague of Z which are food, electricity, petroleum, ore, and gold. There’s also the premium currency that you buy specialized items with called Gems, which you can get by spending real money. However, we’ll be talking about the primary resources since they will be the most important part of establishing a good economy and by understanding them, the player will know how to prioritize resource production or manage which resources to spend.
Food is, by far, the most important resource in the game because every single thing in the game costs food. Keeping troops in your base will also cost upkeep, which means they’ll consume a certain amount of food per hour that’s cut from your total production. Electricity, petroleum, and ore are all equally important too, especially in construction. Gold is the final resource that can’t be produced but can be levied by going to your command center and clicking on the Levy option.
Production Buildings
Production buildings are the primary way to get more resources in Plague of Z. In the outskirts of your city, you are given a certain amount of empty plots of land where you can construct resource buildings, up to 10 per resource type. Managing how many of each type of these buildings is the key, especially since you only get a limited amount of plots for your city. You can still demolish your resource buildings if you think you’ve made a mistake but you won’t get a full refund for the costs.
It’s a good idea to fill your city with resource buildings early so that you’re able to gather as many resources as possible. Additionally, you should have significantly more Farms than Oil Wells, Power Plants, Army Camps, and, Mines. This is because food is the most used resource in the game and will lower in production value if you have a large army. You can have 2-3 army camps since you don’t need to produce that many units if you don’t have the means to train that many soldiers yet.
Resource Gathering
Resource gathering is one of the best ways to get resources in the game. For this method of getting resources, you’ll need to constantly send your armies to occupy resource tiles in the World Map. This will take some time because you’ll wait for your armies to march to their destination and wait a few additional minutes for the soldiers to gather the resources in that tile. The higher the level of the resource tile, the more you can gather from that in one go.
This is considered the best way to gather resources because you can get a huge bulk of resources off of every skirmish. Of course, you’d need to have a large army to send so you can collect more resources. Otherwise, a small army will only gather small amounts of resources which is honestly just a waste of time. Unfortunately, each resource tile only provides one type of resource so try to determine which resource you’ll most likely need in the future so that you can gather that.
Research Upgrades
Research upgrades are done by going to the Research Center. There are a lot of options to choose from but it’s recommended that the player focuses on their economy first before moving to other endeavors. Research is a good way to indirectly improve your resource production and gathering since the base values are still a bit low compared to how much you can get in the future. A lot of players ignore this aspect of the game but it’s actually one of the most important things that you should do.
There are also other ways to upgrade your resource collection values other than researching. There’s also hero equipment which you can craft or collect as rewards. These pieces of equipment provide passive stat bonuses which can either benefit your economy or military. Another good way to increase the value of your resource collection is to activate and increase your VIP level, which you can still do even if you don’t spend real money.
Items and Inventory
The inventory is a place that most players don’t even bother to look. In this place, you’ll notice that you have a ton of items that you can use but the most important ones that you should keep in mind are the resources. These inventory resources can be used to provide your city with the corresponding amount that you opened. It’s not a good idea to open them all at once because your warehouse limits the amount of resources you can hold at a time.
During the early stages of the game, you’ll be consuming a large portion of these inventory resources because your economy isn’t stable yet. However, keep in mind that it will eventually burn out so if you don’t have a stable economy by that time, you’ll have a hard time keeping up. There are also some resource production bonuses that you can activate which you should reserve when you’re planning to spend some time playing the game for more than a few hours.
