Join the new world

I'll try to make it simple to everyone, so I'm sorry if part of this is too basic for the most experienced players.

Production in this game has two stages: Raw Materials and Manufacturing. Construction has a different skill and a different productivity calculation of Manufacturing, but for my purposes here they are essentially the same thing.

Manufacturing is the same in any region of the world. You put the raw materials and the workers transform it in final products: food, gifts, weapons, moving tickets, houses, defense systems, or hospitals. The consumption of raw material by one worker is the same independently of the quality of the company. What changes is the amount of raw material required to finish one unit of the product.

Raw materials are different: grain, diamonds, iron, oil, or wood. Each region has a productivity factor for each resource: high, medium or none. The productivity of a worker in raw material company depends on the quality level. For a comparison, a worker in a company Q2 in a high productivity region has the same productivity points of a worker in a manufacturing company, but he produces a raw material of quality 2. Keep this in mind for later. If the company is in a region of medium productivity, there is a penalty of 50% in the production. And if there are no resources, the penalty is 99.9%. So it is nearly impossible to succeed with a raw material company in a medium productivity region. So the famous high regions are the motive of many wars and occupations in the world.

If you were wondering about the relation we need between raw material companies and manufacturing, you have the answer above. A Q2 raw material company can supply two manufacturing companies with workers with the same skill level and wellness. A couple of days ago I was looking for what would be necessary to supply all workers with five weapons a day, one of the challenges for our economy. I figured out that two Q1 weapons companies with skill 5 workers are able to supply 30 workers with 5 weapons a day. Given everything else that we need, I concluded it is a production impossibility.

Switzerland has no high productivity regions in any of its four original regions. We currently have a medium productivity region in grain: Italian Speaking Area. The only raw materials companies in operation here are our two Q3 grain companies. So we are basically a manufacturing country, and another challenge for our economy is to import the raw materials we need. And for that we need...


GOLD

Our CHF is useless for anyone outside Switzerland. We can't use it to buy raw materials. Even if there are companies exporting raw materials to us, they would take their revenue in CHF and sell it for gold in the Monetary Market. The second alternative is to move our organizations abroad, buy the raw material there and donate to our companies. In both cases, we need gold, to buy the CHF back, or to buy foreign currency. The only way to get us those exchange values is exporting. And there are two ways we can do that. The first is to have export licenses in our companies to sell our products abroad. The second is to sell our products in our market for prices low enough to attract organizations that would buy them in bulk to donate to their owners, so that they sell gold for CHF in the monetary market. The former alternative is more profitable and guarantees that the gold goes to our companies instead of some speculator of the monetary market. This necessity is one of the reasons why we are struggling to keep the value of the CHF. A not very popular solution would be to put it back to the exchange rate we had before the last economic reform.

We could also decrease our necessity of gold by producing abroad part of the raw materials that requires us the most amount of gold (that would be iron, grain is the cheapest). For that we would need our land workers to move to a country with high productivity and work for a company owned by us. We all receive the same salaries and we have the compromise to work in a theocratic company, so we could pay them the same net amount and supply ourselves with iron at a cost similar to the international price of grain. This is really cheap iron!

But all problems have a solution that is simple, fast, and wrong. The problem with this one is our unity. We experienced recently sending some of our most experienced members to Italy to produce Q5 weapons. Some of them got involved in the Italian politics and divided their attention between Italy and Switzerland in an uneven way, which was not good for us. Those who are here for more than three months might had noticed a bump in this machine that usually runs so smooth. When we are in a country the recent events and news are at most one click away. But to get the recent news from a foreign country you need 5 clicks (unless you use Firefox with Greasemonkey and eRepublik Plus, a script authorized by the admin, with Swiss press as a quick link). We all know how important our unity is for our strength, and it would not be good if our land workers detaches from us.

Maybe we could have a solution in between. Let the workers take turns abroad. Change them when we have elections. Or something more smooth, like changing one worker every day, so that no one stays more than 10 days away from Switzerland. This is a hard question to answer: how to use our land workers better without compromising our unity? So far I have some ideas, but no final answer for this last challenge.