Every time you accumulate 250 strength points, you are awarded 5 Gold (which is also called a "Super Soldier" medal).

If you never upgrade any of your Training Grounds, and if you only ever train in the Weights Room, you will accumulate 6.8 Strength per day yielding 5 Gold every 37 days or 0.135 Gold/day.

In other words, your BASE INCOME of Gold (provided you play daily) is about .3 Gold. This will not get you anywhere in this game.

So in order to increase your Gold income, you must upgrade your Training Centers.

From your Training Grounds page, you will see a small green arrow pointing upward. Clicking that enables the upgrade screen. Clicking the upward green arrow next to your Weights Room will show you the following dialogue:

As you see, it takes Gold to upgrade your Training Grounds. BUT WAIT. On a fairly regular cycle of approximately once per month, the game administrators offer a discount of 44% on Training Grounds upgrades. So that first upgrade to Q2 (the option with 2 gold stars) is not 20 Gold but 11.2. That amount of Gold can be easily earned by saving your Gold income for 38 days (or sooner depending on how much Gold you already have.)

This upgrade to Q2 Weight Training should be the first thing you ever spend Gold on. If you haven't done so yet, you've been doing it wrong.

By upgrading that training center to Q2, you increase your daily strenth gain to 11.8 and you increase your Gold Income to .4 Gold/day.

The goal is to upgrade the Weights Room (of course only upgrading during a 44% sale) to Q4. At Q4 you gain 21.8 Strength per day and your Gold income increases to .6 Gold/day.

Once you've upgraded all of that (and you can always expedite the process by purchasing Gold for RL money - something which should also be done during an Admin sale), it is time to upgrade your Climbing Center. However, you are cautioned that spending .19 Gold/day on training in your Climbing Center will decrease your daily Gold Income unless you've upgraded it all the way to Q4. In other words, you will be upgrading, but not clicking it until it is Q4.

With a Q4 Climbing Center, the additional 10 Strength/day (2.5 x 4) actually yields an increase in your Gold Income of .01 Gold/day.

All other Gold spent on Training will REDUCE your daily Gold Income. However, increasing your strength is the most important dynamic of battlefield success in this game, and it is far more important than increased Rank. (You can learn more about the effect of increased Rank in our article in "Maximizing Every Click.")

So it is important to get over the fact of spending Gold on Training. If you want to rise above the average player, you must spend Gold on training.

Most importantly, increased Strength influences how much damage you will do on the Battlefield. And there is additional Gold to be won by flexing your Strength in a battle. Each battle includes a running total of the top-damage-producing citizens, and at the end of each mini-battle a Gold award is given to the citizen with the highest damage done in each Division. This is called Battle Hero (BH) Gold and it is pointless to chase it unless you can achieve it by spending less than the Gold awarded to get it.

All of this is a long way of emphasizing the importance of increasing your Strength.

If you are willing and able to make the commitment to upgrading all four of your Training Grounds to Q4, you can very easily maintain a positive Gold Income in this game, FAR MORE than by investing in manufacturing and raw materials buildings.

The total cost of upgrading all four centers to Q4 (assuming you upgrade during a 44% Sale) is 381 Gold. Yes that is a lot of Gold. But if you are willing to spend about $135 of RL money, and if you purchase the "best value" Gold pack from the Purchase Gold page (especially during a 50% bonus sale), you will enter the following scenario:

Strength Gain per day: 91.8

Gold Cost per day: 2.87

...but wait. eRepublik offers a "Training Contract" every 35 days or so. The 90% Training Contract costs 53Gold, but it reduces the daily Gold cost to .287. Subract from that your .167/day Gold Income from working and you can see your daily cost is reduced to .12 Gold/day.

In order to recover .12 Gold/day you must earn a BH medal according to the following chart:

Division	BH Award	BH needed every:_
D I	2 Gold	16 days
D II	3 Gold	25 days
D III	4 Gold	33 Days
D IV	5 Gold	41 days

Any experienced eRepublik player will tell you that it is entirely possible to achieve a BH medal in the frequency indicated in this chart. And what is better yet, the stronger you are, the easier it is to achieve the BH medal.

Here is a testimonial from one of our members

"I upgraded all of my training centers very early in my eRepublik career. I also was very careful to never "overkill" or chase a BH medal until my Citizen had gained strength for about a month. I mostly skipped D1 BH medals which helped me get even stronger (relative to other players). Now, I can earn a BH medal at least once per day."

This soldier raises another key bit of advice to becoming a successful Easy Company Soldier. We will cover this in the next article on "Maximizing Every Click."

But the most important thing you will have learned from this article is to SAVE EVERY OUNCE OF GOLD. Do not liquidate your Gold for USD. If you need a few extra weapons or food, ask a fellow EZC member by shouting your request on our MU Shout feed on your home page.

And that brings us to the last item for this article: spending USD.

USD Income

If you are working for an EZC commune, (and it is by far the best "deal" for you), you are receiving a free House, a cash stipend each week (or Gold for Training Grounds) and heavily discounted prices on Q7 weapons.

Generally speaking, an EZC Soldier will need approximately 750 Energy (more or less) to complete his Daily Order of 25 Kills. If you need food for this, just ask for it in our ingame "Shout feed".

(Our Shout feed is very active with players of all different levels, so you should definitely feel at home using it. It is like a built-in friends list. The only rules we have about our Shout feed is that we do not allow any Political messages to be posted there. Post those in your Friends or Party feeds.)

Now back to finances:

eRepublik gives you 4 companies (5 if you complete a certain mission) for free. By working in the three Food Raw Materials (FRM) companies and the Food Manufacturing company, you can produce enough food to account for some of your needs.

However, as you grow, there are other better strategies...

One of your companies cannot ever be sold or liquidated. That is your Food company. So get used to seeing it. You might even eventually consider upgrading it to Quality 2 when you have completed your Training Grounds upgrades.

However, the food raw materials companies and the weapons raw materials company that you got for free can be liquidated (provided you are at level 25+) for 750USD each. If you liquidate those companies, you can generate 3,000 USD - enough to provide for your additional food needs for a long time. It is worth consideration.

Better yet, by selling that 3,000 USD on the Monetary Market, (and under current exchange rates), you can convert it into 15 Gold, and purchase a Fishery. This will produce enough FRM to supply your Q1 Food Company, and will only cost you 2 clicks/day instead of the 5 you would have been clicking with all 5. (Again, see the article on "Maximizing Every Click" for why it is desirable to reduce the number of clicks you spend on economic activity). All that and you'll still have 5 Gold left over.