New Player Basket Power

After comparing Food, in second article Weapons and Aircraft separately, this analysis asks a more practical question: If a new player lives only from one wage, where can they buy the basic products needed for daily activity and still get the most energy?

This time I expanded the calculation to every country where the player can actually buy all three required things: at least one Food quality, at least one Weapon quality, and Q1 Aircraft needed for daily mission.

How the ranking works

Each player starts with one wage in gold calculated by avg NPC wage as closest stat I have. From that wage, the player buys:

1 cheapest Aircraft + 1 cheapest available Weapon + Food with everything left

For Aircraft and Weapons, we check Q1–Q5 and simply buy whichever available quality has the lowest gold price.

Food is more complicated because quality determines energy:

Q1 = 10 · Q2 = 20 · Q3 = 30 · Q4 = 40 · Q5 = 50 energy

And, importantly, a player can consume no more than 32 Food units per day.

That means buying the cheapest Food is not always optimal. If a country lets you afford 50 Q1 Food, only 32 can actually be consumed. A more expensive Q2 or Q3 may therefore produce substantially more usable energy.

This wider method leaves us with 23 eligible countries.

Top 5 countries

The new ranking changes considerably:

1. 🥇 South Korea
   31 × Q3 Food

2. 🥈 Japan
   24 × Q3 Food

3. 🥉 Serbia
   32 × Q2 Food

4. Saudi Arabia
   29 × Q2 Food

5. Greece
   14 × Q4 Food

South Korea is the clear winner.

Its wage is only 1.505 gold, much lower than wages in Saudi Arabia, Croatia or Japan. But its combination of very cheap Aircraft, Weapons and Food allows the player to keep enough of that wage to purchase 31 Q3 Food.

At 30 energy each:

31 × 30 = 930 energy

The 32-unit limit is what makes this analysis especially useful. The optimal Food is Q2 for most countries, but not all. South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Slovenia and Spain get more usable energy from Q3, while Greece goes all the way to Q4. Simply searching for the cheapest Food would therefore produce the wrong ranking.

Saudi Arabia: 4th place

Saudi Arabia performs very strongly in this practical test. Its 2.474-gold wage is third highest in the wage dataset, behind only North Macedonia and Croatia. After buying one Aircraft and the cheapest available Saudi Weapon, the player has enough money for:

29 × Q2 Food

At 20 energy each:

29 × 20 = 580 energy

Saudi Arabia therefore looks considerably better when we evaluate the complete new-player budget rather than individual product prices. Its Aircraft and Weapons are not among the world's cheapest, but the high wage and strong Q2 Food purchasing power compensate for those costs.

Another interesting detail is that Saudi Arabia does not hit the 32-unit limit. Q2 remains the optimal choice simply because it produces the greatest amount of energy the remaining budget can afford.

New Player Basket Power

This is probably our most realistic measure yet of the economic experience of a new player: not who has the largest wage, or the cheapest Food, but how much useful daily activity one wage can actually finance after the necessary purchases are made.
We will close our PPP analysis with our final New Player Basket Power and in next articles focus will be on some other economy analyses.

Thank you for reading and once again you can check full table in premium section.