Was interested in starting as a demo farmer at some point, so I threw together a spreadsheet to analyze it. One point i was curious about, was when does it become cost effective to start buying tech vs. just simply building more farms.

Some starting parameters for anyone interested in testing my analysis:
Assumed farms make up 90% of land area (10& for IC/CS)
Did not account for building cost reducer bonuses
Assumed zero starting tech
Government was democracy (no market commission, increased tech maximum)

Even setting the agr tech price to $2500 (something rarely seen until late in the set), it doesn't become net positive (from a purely bushels/$ increase) to buy tech until around 10000 acres. one thing not accounted for is the opportunity cost of investments in military and turns required to secure more land, which could be fairly significant (though there are several factors that influence military, tech and land size, beyond simple economics).

one interesting finding, which i haven't fully tested, is that maintaining the ratio of farms/acre with increasing land area, while keeping a static tech level results in a net positive gain in bushel production from you tech (e.g. if you go from 1000 acres to 2000 acres, keeping 90% land area as farms, but maintaining the same tech level, your bushel production from tech still increases). Not sure if this was supposed to be obvious and is true with other techs, but good to know.

I would appreciate some comments or feedback, there could be something i'm missing here.

doesn't seem to be a valid comparison

tech does not take turns only resources

land/buildings takes turns and has quite a few limiting factors other than the cost to explore/attack + build

its more of a tech vs military as you really should have enough money to build even if you go a straight 200+ cs startup. and this really depends on the server you're playing on. i.e. on alliance servers you would buy tech with every extra dollar that you're not using to build if you're doing all-x. on solo servers you would have to balance tech vs military so you can grab and prevent grabs

for the most part getting tech early with any available excess funds pays off for itself in a snowball effect sort of way (the extra income it produces you can buy more tech or military to grow with). there could be some sort of analysis on how long it will take for certain priced tech to pay off though

not sure if this helps at all but i can only see this set's stats. by the time i was at 10k acres in team this set, i had around 60k worth of tech. if i didnt buy tech, there wasnt much that i could do with those funds (minus buy some extra defense)

Ya I see what you mean. I like your comment about extra money which you otherwise wouldn't be able to invest. I still think its useful to look at it from a cost perspective, turns are a little less important to a farmer, as you're not worried about cashing or teching. If you attack two/three times a day, spend 5-10 turns spying, you've still got a lot of turns to build out, but that benefit would diminish over time with increased land area, larger grabs, longer build times.

This was mostly born out of me trying to figure out if buying tech early set was worth it (like less than 3-5k acres), which it really doesn't seem like it. Probably past there tech becomes pretty helpful. I was just surprised to see how long it took to outpace buildings costs.

hmm, turns are equally important to all strats in the early game, as they will be used to develop your land. cashers don't cash in the early game normally, and techers only tech to develop cash to develop.

you say that tech isnt really worth it below 3-5k acres. what then would you spend your leftover cash on that is better for your potential nw? (assuming you are exploring and building with all your turns anyway at that stage, and can afford some defensive mil)

I think that the point you make is NOT that early tech is not worthwhile... I think this conclusion is incorrect. I think you mean to say that you shouldn't sacrifice the ability to build, to buy tech in the early game. this I agree with and most strats will advise to deduct your build costs first then spend remaining cash on tech until established.

hope that perspective helps... I just think it IS worth buying early tech IF you can afford it, and wanted to clarify that point.

I would suggest that you buy tech when you build construction sites. As a casher or farmer (assuming you are selling on private market early) the best approach is to do this every turn leaving only enough cash to build 1 building. If you have an indy start you will buy after each public market sale.

After your construction sites are built up and you are exploring the tradeoff is more difficult. You will need to balance your military with tech. An all explore country can buy more tech than one that landgrabs, but they will grow slower. Acreage and technology are both very important, I am interested to hear how the top players ballance this after they are finished exploring. It is my guess that early on acereage is more important.

I think turns are the most important things in the game.

turns at start but later resource decay, etc permabonuses come handy.

What you are not factoring in is that a country with 10k acres and 100% agricultural tech will be much more likely to be attacked than a country with 5k acres and 200% agricultural tech.

Productions techs allow you to have the same production as a larger country, without having the excessive landsize that increases the risk of people grabbing you.

This isn't relevant in alliance servers where the risk of being grabbed can be extremely low, even when a country has a tiny military. But in those cases, a country should be getting a lot of construction sites very early on, which means that they should either stockpile their cash or spend it on production techs. Since they won't have difficulty affording their buildings later on, they won't need to stockpile cash to help afford buildings. It just becomes a question of whether its more efficient to buy tech at a high price early on and have it increase your production for a while, or to wait until later on to buy tech when the price is cheaper, but not giving yourself boosted production for the duration that you have stockpiled cash on hand rather than purchasing tech.

On non-alliance servers, the risk of being grabbed is reasonably high unless you're good at staying landthin. And its extremely difficult to stay landthin if you have horrible production techs. Thus, on non-alliance servers, getting production techs early on is basically necessary. The difference in military needed to protect your land between a 10k acre country and a 5k acre country is significant.

Also, you have to use your turns properly, they should all be used for growth (exploration, building, or attacking) with the exception of taking one or two turns a day to sell food. Unless, of course, you do a tech start, in which case you'll lose some turn efficiency in return for having a nice starting base of production technology. But once a tech start switches over to farmer, it becomes extremely important for them to use their turns properly since they are already at a disadvantage in turn efficiency.