I was curious about whether to upgrade industries in cities or provinces and what the benefits are relative to the cumulative costs. I made a little table here if you want to check it out.
CoW Economic Guide - 2024 (updated)
CoW Economic Guide - 2024
Originally prepared by General Nightman in May 2019.
Updated in Oct 2022 and again Nov 2024 (RSS removal of RM and Cargo) by OneNutSquirrel.
The Economy is the most critical element of a war. All wars are economic, and so was World War 2. The Great Depression meant, all countries had frail economies, and that is reflected in starting economies. The economy is the "might" of your country. Your entire ability to conduct war is based on what you can produce. This guide covers the basics of Economy in Call of War and establish the main ways to effectively build your nation in order to fund your military machine and win the game! Remember, one can have the best tactics, most loyal allies, but without resources to research and produce units to carry out those tactics, one is dead in the water.
Call of War Economical Terms:
- Resources (RSS) -There are 6 RSS in Call of War used to build units and upgrade territories and affect their production rates.
- Food, Goods, Metal, Oil and Rare Materials. As well as Cash, Manpower and War Bonds.
- Moral, though not produced needs to be maintained perhaps even more diligently than the others. Since it's the base multiplier for production of the above RSS as well as unit production and building construction times.
- Core: This the territory (around your capitol) you start the map with. This is your main production. Can be upgraded with buildings increasing province production.
- Non-Core: Production or RSS in territories which were captured during game play. (These territories produce reduced RSS amounts)
- Production Rate: This is the amount of a resource you produce in an hour. The bigger the number, the more RSS you are producing in an hour.
How to Collect the Resources
Provinces under your control automatically produce the RSS and that production goes right into your inventory in real-time. As you build and improve the buildings which boost your production, capture more territories, and improve their Moral, you will see that reflected in your hourly numbers in the Inventory Ribbon display. If you select the ribbon (PC) or each individual resource (Mobile) you will see display showing a further break down of the production.
NOTE - Premium accounts earn War Bonds at +25% rate above non-paying accounts. Earning 1,000/hr for Premium Accounts vs 833/hr non-paying.
Economic Boosters (EB’s)
- Industry - This is the key driving force of resource production. A single, core city fully upgraded to Lvl 5 at 100% Moral, will produce 12,000 of its resources, 12,000 cash. While a captured city will, when fully upgraded (at same cost) with 100% Moral, will only provide 25% of those resources. You will need to capture 4 additional cities, and spend 4x the amount in upgrading those cities to produce the same amount of resources outside of your Core territory.
- Recruiting Station - Recruiting Stations raise your Manpower production. Core cities once fully upgraded to Lvl 3 will produce 1,800 Manpower each. Again, any captured city will only produce 25% of the resource while costing as much to upgrade as your Core.
- Propaganda Office - These buildings improve the Moral of the city/province. More on the importance of this shortly.
Other Mechanisms in the Economy
- Money : As in the real world: Money makes the world go around. Buying resources, making deals and producing units are all essential purposes of money. Cash is essential to a victory and one can accumulate millions throughout the game.
- Stock Market : The Stock Market, in real life, is an ever-changing exchange and flow of goods between countries and companies. The prices of resources in the game's Stock Market are always changing, though at the beginning of the round AIs offer a good deal for a lot of resources. Each transaction on the market, buy or sell has a 10% fee on it.
- Invading : When one is short on a certain resource, one can always invade an enemy province that contains a resource. One thing to remember is captured provinces only produce resources at 25% efficiency. The Loot you collect from them is equal to 50% of their daily production at time of capture (to a max. amount of materials they have on hand). Captured provinces will come to your control at 25% moral (or less).
- Morale : Morale is very important as it affects your economy. In your core province, your economy begins at 70% Moral and rarely dips below 90%. The higher morale you have, the more resources you will produce. Building Propaganda Offices helps provinces to raise their Moral, hence improves their production.
Base Amount x Economic Boosters(buildings) x Moral % = Production <<<<<=======The Formula
Captured Territory Economic Output is calculated at 25% of the above production rate.
Factors Affecting Moral
There are several factors with an effect the Moral of a province, and in doing so, will affect the production of that province.
Distance From Capitol - Based on distance to Capitol City (max penalty -30, of if you lost capitol -40) if not rebuilt)
Neighbours - Based on Diplomacy of surrounding provinces - leaving an uncaptured territory has a negative effect on the adjacent ones
Expansion - As you grow this modifier gets larger and affects ALL provinces equally
Propaganda Office - Bonus to Moral based on building level (Lvl 1+10, Lvl 2 +23, Lvl 3 +40)
(The modifiers above are based on the 100 Player World at War Map)
Capturing and Enemy Capitol
When you capture an enemy capitol, all your territories immediately get a Moral Boost of 10% (your enemy gets a 20% penalty to Moral in every territory they control). During the first few days, it's advantageous to capture the capitols as the Last territory of an enemy, thus allowing all your recently captured provinces to get the Moral Boost.This not only improves the economy, but also immediately makes them Revolt Proof! Later in the game, when you control dozens of cities, the opposite is true. By capturing the capitol first, all your previously captured cities get the Moral Boost and produce 10% more resources every hour. If you hold off on capturing the capitol for 1 hour, so you can improve the moral of more 4 cities, you have just lost out on increasing production on 20, 50 or 100 cities by 10% per hour of delay.
Garrisoned Units
Though a garrisoned unit or two do not actually modify the Moral in a territory, they can effectively prevent it from revolting at day change on those first few days after it's been captured. Once the Moral is above 30%, provinces will not rebel.
Operations and Rewards for Watching Ads (on Mobile)
Recently added (2023 with a few modifications since their first appearance), these bonuses show up in the form of "Cards" or "Boosters" you can use to supplement your forces/resources. Forces which would otherwise cost you RSS or take time to improve on their own. Hence they are included here. They come in 3 different varieties: Units, RSS and Boosters
Units
The units are just that, extra units you can add to your forces without paying any RSS for them. Just select a card, pick the province where you want to place the new unit and it spawns in that territory. There are certain conditions that must be met such as Map Day on which the card becomes available for use, and the Moral of the province you place the unit.
Unique Units
There are several units are ONLY available from Cards:
Amphibious Tank - Tank that does not need any time to Embark/Dis-embark for instant landing from sea.
Flame Tank - Strong vs Infantry
Resources
Exactly that, cards containing various quantities of resources you can add to your inventory. The Ads also provide Gold.
Boosters
These abilities improve the field with things like Moral improvements or healing units. Others speed up build time, research or production.
All these are available to everyone. Find a map with Operations available (visible on the Map Join screen) or watch videos on your Mobile to get these Cards and Boosters.
These 'Incomes" are MUCH more valuable on day 1 than day 10. On Day 1 your production of any resource will be approximately 250/hr. So a 125 Card of RSS is approximately 30 minutes of game time. On Day 10 when you're producing close to 1,500 of each RSS per hour, that same card represents less than 5 minutes of resource production. So using them in the first 2-4 days of a new map gives greater benefit compared to your daily production where their value is minuscule in late game.
I hope this guide helps, yet if something is inaccurate or I've missed something, let me know.
OneNutSquirrel
===========
The following were involved in preparation of the original piece.
General Nightman, GGBugh, Ependable, Attacker101
Updated by OneNutSquirrel
Thank you jubjub bird for catching some mistakes and errors.
Post a Reply
Please log in to post a reply.
38 Replies
Industries in cities are most economical, If core cities with a certain resource are maxed then only start building industries in resource provinces. The province industries "pay themselves back" in about 5 days. Dont build industries elsewhere, with a production penalty of 75% percent it is not worth it. Recruitment centers can be built in cities foirst and then later in rural provinces without resources.DxC wrote:
I was curious about whether to upgrade industries in cities or provinces and what the benefits are relative to the cumulative costs. I made a little table here if you want to check it out.
It is imperative that, if resource limited, max one province first before you start building the same industry or recruitment center elsewhere. The top tiers provide more bang for bugs.
The propaganda offices become important if youre moral is slowly going down due expansion and if you need to recenter your capital, then your cores should have sufficient propaganda offices of appropriate level to maintain production.
The most bang for the buck is level 3 non city (see table; green is better). In cities level 3 is also slightly better in terms of gain/resource_cost, but for cities the various levels are pretty even in terms gain/cost.Gen. Smit wrote:
The top tiers provide more bang for bugs.
no you dont take money in account (spying trading) and the fact that the return will be always better the longer you play, you must have a flaw in the table.DxC wrote:
The most bang for the buck is level 3 non city (see table; green is better). In cities level 3 is also slightly better in terms of gain/resource_cost, but for cities the various levels are pretty even in terms gain/cost.Gen. Smit wrote:
The top tiers provide more bang for bugs.
Added, what you must also consider is that an industry is to provide certain commodities, There is only way to increase food, goods etc, and more of it, and that is by producing absolutely the most, it will always pay back once you finished investing. the earlier you can finish the better it is, yet it must be balanced by the needs for the unit production.
So industry is hurt or hurts unit (by) production when your army units are reliant on a lot of steel, oil and rares, but economy boosts army unit production that are reliant on goods and food.
The extra money that is generated will boost research, and allows trading on the stock market, improving relationships with AI countries. Thus as a consequence, infantry/militia/mot. infantry and non-SP ordonance are benefitting highly from industry development.
Rurals give more at lvl3 compared to urban lvl3 but they don't scale. If you go rural first, your lvl5 urban will be delayed. I always go urban first.
Sakki, consider building city to lvl 3 vs rural to lvl 3. They both take 42 hours cumulatively and use the same resources, except rural uses 100 more iron. After 42 hours the rural will be producing +3000 while the city will be producing +2700. Thus the rural will give you a bit of a better boost. This 300 per day difference will apply while you are building up your city Industries and overall you will have produced more resources by doing rural first.Z. Sakki wrote:
Rurals give more at lvl3 compared to urban lvl3 but they don't scale. If you go rural first, your lvl5 urban will be delayed. I always go urban first.
edit: actually the iron is the same. I put the iron cost at 1500 for level 3 urban but it's actually 1600.
I looked again to the tables and the flaw in there is that it is not integrated over time (i.e. a curve), and that is the only way to find the proper solution, you should find then "break even points" (in reality you cant because it depends on your needs and only one kind of resource is outputted). The break even points of the higher level 5 will be later obviously, but the slope of production is steeper, so at some point the total/accumulated production (minus investment which is a constant value) will be higher compared to lower levels.
BUT if have to look at the idea of developing rurals first, if they are timewise more efficient this may be interesting as you are free to build unit production centers unhampered. I find that an interesting idea/find you did. One should still consider that you dont build too high level in the beginning, but if they are finished at say level 3 unit production centers before you start building industry in cities there may be less interference in construction.
Yea that's what I've said, but it also delays your city lvl5. Rurals cap at lvl3 and it'll hinder you in the long run.DxC wrote:
Sakki, consider building city to lvl 3 vs rural to lvl 3. They both take 42 hours cumulatively and use the same resources, except rural uses 100 more iron. After 42 hours the rural will be producing +3000 while the city will be producing +2700. Thus the rural will give you a bit of a better boost.
Here the purple line represents building all urban to level 5 then rural to level 3 plus 24 hours of production with both maxed. The green line is building rural to level 3 then urban to level 5. The cumulative production is slightly better building rural first.Gen. Smit wrote:
the flaw in there is that it is not integrated over time (i.e. a curve)

The graph is very good on which you may start first rural or city, I will consider this in a next game, thx for the effort.
But it does not settle the issue of city lvl 3 vs level 5 and I am sure the lvl 5 comes out as the winner. you cant let your industries stay at lvl3, impossible that it is more efficient than promoting them to lvl5
What issue do you mean?Gen. Smit wrote:
the issue of city lvl 3 vs level 5
Fair, guess I'll have to try rurals first now. I'll see how it goes.
Still, I suspect being in-game is a different thing than just laying out the numbers tho. Other factors like build times, rural prov variation, the fact that this runs on a concept of lumping all 5 res into one, etc. aren't really considered.
Maybe I misunderstood, biut I thought you suggested that lvl 3 in city is more efficient than level 5, and that can only be the case on short time spans, since investment is fixed, and gains accumulate. and the greater/longer the accumulation the more it will favor lvl 5 industry. I dont know the break even point for these two.DxC wrote:
What issue do you mean?Gen. Smit wrote:
the issue of city lvl 3 vs level 5
It is more efficient simply in terms of production gain per resources invested. That in no way suggests you shouldn't build to level 5; just because investment A is better than investment B, doesn't mean investment B isn't still a good investment. Obviously, building to level 5 will pay for the investment relatively quickly and it would be hard to imagine a scenario where you shouldn't build core cities to level 5.Gen. Smit wrote:
Maybe I misunderstood, biut I thought you suggested that lvl 3 in city is more efficient than level 5
Been a few months, good to see the additional numbers for those interested in some of the math behind it.
Thanks for the Additional info DxC
Good bump.
There are a few things that need to be updated/corrected:
- It still states that Oil is consumed by Naval Bases, which was removed when going 1.0 -> 1.5
- It states provinces below 35% have a chance to revolt; that number should be 30%
- The economic formula states Morale percentage is a direct modifier, but AFAICT it's adjusted. 0% morale doesn't result in 0% resource production
- Capturing a province gets you up to 50% of the daily production, capped at whatever amount the other player has in their stockpile
- The Neighbours penalty also penalizes based on the morale of your own provinces that neighbor the target province. This number can, rarely, be larger than the penalty given due to enemy neighbors.
There might be more but that's what I noticed at a glance
Production vs morale equationjubjub bird wrote:
The economic formula states Morale percentage is a direct modifier, but AFAICT it's adjusted. 0% morale doesn't result in 0% resource production
Do you have one? I approximated a linear relationship based on only two data points (100 morale = 100%, 70 = ~77) but haven't gathered the data necessary to attempt something more detailed.DxC wrote:
Production vs morale equation
lol, its a link to the formula, jub.
- Alexander Suvorov.

Post a Reply
Please log in to post a reply.