One of the first pieces of advice new players hear in WarEra is not to spend money on food. Reroll the eating missions, sell blue-rarity equipment and above, put everything into companies, build your wealth, and leave military progression until around level 20.
I understand the logic. Money invested early begins producing more money, which can then be invested again. The sooner that cycle starts, the more powerful the compounding becomes. Enough experienced players agree on this route that I assume the maths behind it is sound.
I follow much of that philosophy myself. I am growing my economy, investing in companies and avoiding the most expensive food and equipment. However, I have never left my hunger bar unused. Most of the time I simply buy bread, and I tend to use blue equipment and below rather than selling everything that could improve my damage.
That is probably less economically efficient. What I am questioning is whether economic growth is the only thing worth compounding from the beginning.
Economic progression is easy to see. You avoid buying bread, keep the money, invest it into companies and watch your wealth increase. Both the cost and the return are visible on your profile.
Military progression is less obvious. At beginner level, health recharges at 0.4 per hour, up to a maximum of four without further skill investment. Leaving that health unused saves you the cost of replacing it with food. Using it converts that health into attacks, damage and military rank.
Both players are investing; they are simply putting the value somewhere different. A full eco player converts unused health into saved money and places that money into companies. I convert some of the same value into military rank.
A full eco player at my level should therefore have a stronger wealth profile than mine. That is exactly what I would expect. However, when I compare myself with players at a similar level, my damage and military rank appear to be slightly ahead.
I am only talking about a few percent, not some enormous hidden advantage. I also cannot claim that bread alone caused the difference. My use of blue equipment, activity levels and other decisions will all contribute.
Still, it made me notice something that I rarely see discussed in beginner advice: military rank compounds too.
The usual plan is to focus on eco now and switch into war later. That may still be the best route for most players, but military progression is limited by the hourly recharge. You cannot suddenly decide three months into the game that you want to become a serious military player and grind every missed action back over one weekend. Those hours have already passed.
A full eco player may have enough money to buy better equipment later. They may have a much stronger company income and be able to fund their future war build far more comfortably than I can. What they cannot buy back is all the military rank they could have been building during every recharge beforehand.
That does not prove eating is better. It proves there is a trade-off.
The economic cost of eating is obvious because the money leaves your account immediately. The possible cost of not eating is harder to see because it appears as military progress you never earned. A few percent means very little early on, but WarEra is a game of small actions repeated over months. The individual difference may look insignificant until enough time has passed for it to matter.
Perhaps the economic advantage still wins comfortably. I simply do not think military rank should be treated as something that can always be postponed without consequence.
I am sure plenty of maths has been done around the established strategy. Players will have calculated the best company investments, mission rerolls, equipment sales and level ranges for changing builds.
However, there is a difference between proving that a strategy produces the greatest early wealth and proving that it creates the most valuable player overall. If the starting assumption is that wealth before level 20 matters most, every calculation will naturally favour the route that maximises wealth before level 20.
That does not make the maths wrong. It may mean the question is too narrow.
Has cheap, consistent military investment been tested as its own strategy? Has the value of time-gated military rank been properly included? Has anyone measured the effect of large numbers of ordinary players dealing slightly more damage, or are those players simply judged as inefficient eco accounts because they did not specialise fully?
The current meta may already account for all of this. I am not claiming that it does not. Communities can, however, become very good at doing maths inside an accepted strategy while leaving everything outside it underexplored.
Sometimes the most useful contribution is not producing another calculation. It is noticing which calculation may be missing.
The advice not to invest in damage makes sense when comparing one developing player with one veteran. The veteran will hit much harder, and giving resources to an established military player probably creates more immediate damage than helping a beginner improve slightly.
At the individual level, that logic is difficult to argue with. Wars are not fought by one player, though, and with alliances they are not even fought by one country.
One newer player dealing slightly more damage may change nothing. A thousand developing players across several allied nations, each dealing a little more, might. The largest hitters will still produce the numbers everyone notices, and they remain essential, but total military strength is not only the size of the hundred biggest hits. It is also everything underneath them.
An alliance where ordinary players contribute meaningful damage every hour may carry more weight than one where nearly everyone below the veterans has been encouraged to remain economically passive. Perhaps a thousand developing players doing slightly more collectively contribute more than another marginal improvement among the hundred players already hitting hardest. Perhaps they do not.
I do not have the figures to prove where that balance sits, but I think it is worth testing. The current advice may maximise the future wealth of each new account individually while overlooking the collective value of raising the military baseline across an alliance.
Military strength is not only the height of the peaks. It is also the level of the ground beneath them.
The more I have thought about this, the more I believe the real limitation is how we describe players. You are either an eco player or a war player.
That tells us where somebody puts their resources, but it does not tell us what role they perform inside a nation.
Some players are bankers. They build companies, accumulate capital and help finance the wider country. One strong economic account may support several other players.
Some are hardened lifers: effectively career soldiers who have developed military rank over months or years and can be relied upon whenever war begins. Others are mercenaries whose value comes from deployable force, moving wherever the fighting, rewards or alliance strategy requires them.
Then there are flexers. A flexer may never become the richest player or the biggest hitter, but they can build enough economy to remain useful and self-sustaining while maintaining enough military strength to respond when needed. That is closer to the kind of player I am becoming.
There are other roles too. Organisers coordinate people. Diplomats maintain relationships. Suppliers make sure resources reach the right place. Recruiters bring new citizens in, while trainers and active community members give them a reason to stay.
Reducing all of that to “eco or war” misses part of what makes a social strategy game work. A nation should not only ask whether a player is investing correctly. It should ask what that player is growing into.
I also want to give some credit to @6a3eac616b85f6319f9d50fc, who started playing around the same time as me. While I have been questioning the advice around food and military rank, he has been challenging another accepted belief: that workers simply cost you money.
He seems determined to find a strategy that makes workers worthwhile rather than dismissing the mechanic because the established meta says not to use it. I do not know whether his strategy will eventually prove mathematically superior, just as I do not yet know whether mine will.
What I do know is that he has already found value elsewhere. He has been doing excellent work with recruitment, bringing people into the country and helping to grow the player base.
That contribution may not appear neatly in a wealth or damage ranking, but in a nation with roughly 130 active players, recruitment is not a minor role. A new citizen who stays, contributes and eventually develops into their own role may be worth far more than a small increase in efficiency on one existing account.
Perhaps his workers strategy succeeds. Perhaps it does not. Either way, he is experimenting, learning and finding his own place in the nation instead of allowing a guide to decide it for him.
He may not be becoming the ideal eco player or the ideal war player. He may be becoming a recruiter, and that might be exactly what the country needs.
This may be the larger issue with beginner advice. By telling almost every new player to follow the same route, we may be optimising accounts before identifying the people behind them.
Some players genuinely want to build companies, trade and become economic powers. They should probably follow the full eco path. Some want to become long-term military players. Telling them to ignore military rank for months may produce a stronger economy, but it may also delay the part of the game that would keep them interested.
Others will naturally become flexers, recruiters, organisers or alliance players. The best advice may not be one universal build. It may be helping people understand the trade-offs and choose a role deliberately.
That does not mean abandoning new players to make catastrophic mistakes. I love guides. They are one of the best parts of online games because they preserve knowledge, prevent waste and give people somewhere to begin.
The weakness is that guides become static while live service games keep moving. Mechanics change, balance shifts and players discover things nobody expected. Sometimes the game stays exactly the same and the community simply learns to ask better questions.
A guide should be a foundation, not a commandment. Make your mistakes, be proud of them and share what you learned. That is how the guides were created in the first place.
The United Kingdom has roughly 130 active players. With a player base that size, economic efficiency matters. We cannot waste resources carelessly, and supporting established military players is a sensible strategy.
But this is not real life. We do not have to recreate the United Kingdom as the restrained, sensible uncle standing behind somebody else while they collect the glory. We are allowed to decide what kind of country we become here.
Maybe our identity should be economic strength. There is glory in becoming the nation that funds, supplies and outlasts its enemies. I would also like us to develop players who become known for what happens when their damage lands—not only one or two stars at the top, but a wider population capable of contributing when called upon.
Bankers can fund the country. Lifers can form its military backbone. Mercenaries can provide force across an alliance. Flexers can fill whichever gap appears, while recruiters make sure there is still a country left to develop.
A nation becomes stronger when those roles support each other. It does not need every account to look the same.
I am not telling every new player to buy food. I am not telling people to ignore the eco-first strategy, and I am not claiming that bread and blue equipment secretly beat full economic specialisation.
If you want to relax, build companies and support the country through wealth, rerolling food missions may be exactly the right decision.
What I am saying is that military rank appears neglected in the way beginner progression is discussed. Its early value is small, its opportunity cost is difficult to see and economic growth is much easier to measure.
I would like guides to explain both forms of compounding: this is what you gain by saving the money, and this is what you may give up by delaying military progression. Then let the player decide what kind of account—and what kind of citizen—they want to become.
Maybe somebody will calculate all of this and prove that eating before level 20 is inefficient in almost every realistic situation. Good. I would rather understand why the advice is right than repeat it without knowing which assumptions it rests upon.
This is my first article. It is not an attempt to have the final word, and I am not publishing it because I need to prove that I am right. It is simply the first observation I felt was worth contributing.
To eat, or not to eat… that is YOUR question.
TL;DR: Have fun!