Starter Guide - Corp

Starting
When I play Corpotocracy, I usually start in Warsaw, Poland. It is a central place with 3 chokepoints from wherever Russia comes from, the north between Lithuania and Poland there is a river if Russia decides to expand to St Petersburg, if Russia decides to invade you from Crimea you can put a sentry gun over there, also I should note this, but at the start of the game It is recommended to place a sentry gun on the right side of your base and then put a bunch of scvs on it, this should be enough to hold against Russia solo for a couple of mins in any difficulty until Nightmare or Very Hard (This is due to me having not tried it out in these difficulties, because after beating them Ari decided to update both Helicopters and Russian tech). You also need to try to get Pacifist as quickly as possible, because this will give you a lot of money and food, If you have 2000 lying around and you can take 8000 in loans, it is highly advised to change to pacifism and start paying them back with loan repayments slowly as this will be important for later

Research - Start
At the start of the game what you want to research is the food bonus and Substations (this will be important soon), so as soon as you have around above 800 in profits including the economic boom and after you have gotten pacifism, It would be best to give 1% to your research and let the 50% farming output research slowly, you do not need it fast yet. So after you fill up your entire starting capital powerfield with houses and farms, now what you need to do is to take 10000 in loans if you don't have 10000 lying around already, after the research lab is built, start upgrading as much as possible. This is where you also want to nationalize your company and set resource share in economic tab to 50%-80% depends on how many metal you get, with this you should be able to afford a sentry gun when Russia declares war lab research, once you finish the 50% farming output (Also instantly replace it with 150% farming output research) now is the time to get MD housing, by this point you should have an already maxed laboratory so it shouldn't be that far. And after you set your research to that, now is the next step

Population boom 1
During this phase where I call population boom 1 (Don't worry you will get more), you would have a huge amount of food and your profits would skyrocket, this is where you would have 10000 necessary to build a substation to the left of your houses, build a clinic next to the substation and spam LD housing, and by this point you should have a bunch of metal in stockpile, what you want to do is constantly upgrade LD housing to MD, It doesn't matter if you have to take loans to do it, as long as most of them go to MD. Now after you have finished that, It is time to get some military research, you want to get the basic flight research as in higher difficulties you need tanks and aircraft to storm Nizhnevartovsk as it is an annoying city. After you finish the 150% farming output upgrade, you should get the CPG upgrades for oil, this doesn't effect your economy too much so It doesn't matter if you have enough oil or not, after you finish the first CPG upgrade, you want to build 5-8 CPG on the bottom right of your base or somewhere close.

On Lower Difficulties
this depends on the difficulty you are on, but you could ignore the CGP upgrades and instead go for the centralization bonuses, this has a good effect of giving you a lot more money, which is probably what you want if you play on lower difficulties as Russia isn't a threat to you

Resources
by this point your corporation has been nationalized for quite a while, if you have the money for it. Upgrade your metal mines, this is great for later when you had to mass produce tanks and helicopters, upgrade the ones in the mountains first as they give 200% more metal

Research - Mid Game
By the mid game, once you have the advanced flight research, what you want to do is to get some training time upgrades and/or electricity (After upgrading to futuristic engines of course), It is highly advised to not build any helicopters before getting advanced flight as this helicopters will now become useless and you have wasted a huge amount of valuable resources. After you have got the tanks and helicopters, your first target is Moscow. If you have seen my replay, I did it very easily. But since then Ari had nerfed helicopters, this would make it harder to take Moscow in the first place. But it is not that hard if you sniped it, now you have to defend the city until it is fully destroyed, the cities keep their health when the Russians retake it, so it is okay to lose Moscow instead of helicopters (tanks is expendable by this point). When you manage to burn Moscow to the ground, next target is Volgograd. This city is rather important as this is where Russia produces tanks and airplanes so burning this city to the ground is also quite important.. Also after you burn down Volgograd, this should be around the 1 hour mark where the Americans will declare war on you, so build a bunch of sentry guns on the Atlantic coast, and on the Rhineland as the Americans like to land there. Now after you manage to burn these 2 cities to the ground next is the second population boom

Population boom 2
This depends if you are playing solo or not, if you are playing solo this phase happens around the 1 hour mark, as this is when the Americans will declare war on you no matter what, for me specifically if the Americans are already at war with me, I'd build a regional capital in Berlin and some substations around it, build max farms near the regional capital, this will give you a lot of food and spam MD housing on the rest of the substations.

Or if someone is already Germany you could move it to Belarus, this is really flexible as long as you get the regional capital and MD housing and or farms over there.

Finishing Russia off
At this stage of the game, you would probably be able to wipe off the russian cities without taking too much casualties, but becareful to losing your helicopters. They are really important, now what you want to do is have maxed supply of 100 tanks and helicopters in front of Nizhnevartovsk, and then storm it. Right click your tanks without a-moving, and make your helicopter target Nizhnevartovsk. After this Russia will not send anything at you ever, after this if you were playing solo, after you beat up Nizhnevartovsk, you want to destroy all the peace keepers left behind by Russia as they have Borehole 5s which you would probably like to have. After you beat Russia and destroyed all remnants of their resistance, you have won the game America would never get stronger but you would and then you can nuke them to win the game, that shall be it as there is nothing left to share.