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As usual, let me start by saying you must visit eGobba's World Map. This tool is invaluable to anyone, especially in helping me try and collect the visual representation of what the heck is going on in eRep.

In order to understand these maps here is the legen😛


Included below the continental pictures is a link to allow you to see a larger version of the image.

Yesterday's Article

New Retreat button rules went into effect today
Most of you are probably aware that new rules on the retreat button went into effect today. This new rule states that presidents may only retreat from the battlefield in the first six hours of a battle. This was most likely implemented because the admins did not want to or did not know how to fix the self attack bug in the war module. What this means is that after the first six hours, both sides must accept the outcome of the battle. No last minute retreats on either side. After thinking about this a while it seems that the biggest strategic difference has to do with wall sizes, as opposed to initiative. Previously, an attacking country could wait until the end of a battle, and if the defender had built up a large defensive wall, the attacking president may decide that rather than spend the effort attempting to defeat that wall, he would simply retreat and attack again. This would allow the attackers to then attack a fresh and smaller wall, getting their tanks in to do damage that day, while the defender will have spent a great deal of their defensive damage already on a wall that was in essence erased for free by the attacker. Remember, this presumes that the attacker had another battle open with the defender, otherwise the retreat counts as a defeat and the attacker loses initiative to the defender for twenty-four hours. You can assume though that any attacker will follow the rules of always having a new battle open before an old one closes as an initiative keeper, if there are multiple regions that the attacker borders. Getting back to the point, this means that defenders gain an advantage that the attacker must either overcome their walls, or wait the battle out. Erasing defensive walls is mostly out.

This change also means that some defender tactics are gone as well. In a situation where a defender bordered two hostile countries, and was under attack by only hostile country A, the defender could retreat at any point from the attack, and then attack hostile country B, as the war with country B was not affected by the 24 hour lost battle cool down time. This was used in situations where an ally was under attack by country B. This sacrifice by the defender would place an initiative block on hostile country B, allowing allies under assault to regain initiative should they win their battles with B. This tactic is much harder now, as the window to perform this is reduced to six hours, and the hostile countries can time their battles to make this action futile to one of the defenders, if not the other. Attackers facing a bottleneck region (attackers who have only one border with the country they are attacking) will find coordinating initiative suppression against a defender easier, as the allied initiative suppressing country need only attack six hours and some change before the country facing the bottleneck region has their attack run out to ensure that the defender does not retreat all other battles to turn and attack the original attacker.

Training wars have also gained a new risk that did not used to exist. In situations where the training war exists between two countries, with allies with relatively equal strength, the initiator of the training war will either have to cut the training war's length down to under six hours, an action that increases the cost of training wars per unit of available experience citizens can gain by at least double as well as potentially eliminating the option of fighting for citizens who log in at the wrong part of the day, or the parties involved will have to ensure that if it appears the attack will succeed, that they have enough military units in reserve to defeat the attack. This may seem an unlikely scenario as the 'defender' in the training war usually has many allies available to back them up via MPPs, hostile nations and alliances can now wreck havoc by fighting for the attacker, and the training war participants will be able to do little to prevent this.

Landswaps will also have to be completed within six hours to ensure that hostile forces or confused citizenry do not prevent the success of these landswaps. Previously many landswaps had doubled as training wars, but with the new retreat button the benefits of this strategy will be reduced as the time of guaranteed success is now six hours.

Of course, this is just based on what I have reasoned out in my head. I may be wrong, and frankly the war module is still a capricious tart and may behave in new and surprisingly weird ways with the implementation of the new retreat button code. Since so many of you reading this are high level, I'm hoping some of you might shed some additional light on the consequences of the new retreat button too.

Editor's note
It was pointed out that the biggest reason why Spain switched to attacking was to keep France from attacking Asturias. Thanks Walter Joseph Kovacs! Our readers are very smart people.

Apparently Indonesia is reacting to the new retreat button rules by swapping battles back and forth every five hours. If this continues I expect to have to come up with a new way to map this, as mapping five attacks and retreats on a state every day is fairly stupid.

Also note that for the attack/resistance war 'double whammies' I will no longer be differentiating the battle heroes between the attack and the resistance war, but listing both together for each side, as the double whammy in effect acts as one action, and I currently map them as one action.

North America

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* Indonesia attacked Arizona, USA. This was done to maintain initiative as..


* The US secured Nevada against the Indonesian attack. The US hero was Polish tank Miles Teg. The Indonesian hero was Portuguese tank Antonio Moutinho. Whether he is acting on orders, or is acting on his own behalf is not known by me, but remember that in theory Portugal has a non-aggression pact with the US. Of course, most countries find ways around this from time to time, no matter what side of which alliance they belong to.


* Five hours later Indonesia attacked Nevada, USA. This was done to maintain initiative as they were about to...


* Indonesia retreated Arizona. Remember the new retreat button rule is that president have five hours to retreat, not the previous rule, which was as long as the battle was open, the president could retreat. The Indonesian hero was one of their own citizens: Nandi. The US hero was the American Ananias.


* Canada launched a double whammy attack against Hungarian Nunavut. The resistance war half of the whammy was started by US Marine Eugene Harlot. This was done to maintain initiative as...


* Hungary defeated the double whammy in Montana. The two battle heroes for Hungary were PetiB a Hungarian and KhOrzU an Iranian. The two battle heroes for Fortis were Peruvian farmacop, getting his first hero award, and Croatian JuniorSoprano.


* In a break from the traditional double whammy, Canada launched two attacks against Russian to maintain the initiative as the double whammy in Vermont was about to close. The first attack was against Russian occupied Idaho.


* The second attack was against Pennsylvania, Russia.

Europe
reported by Pangolin

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* France repelled the Spanish attack on Galicia. A departure from the earlier Spanish resistance war strategy, this attack was designed to deny France the initiative while Spain prepared their defenses in Asturias. Spain has constructed a Q5 hospital and defense system in Asturias since launching this attack. The hero for Spain was Pluvio, whom we've seen many times before in this war. The other hero was rober_6 - a Spanish-speaking Ukrainian citizen fighting from France to win his first award.
* Once Asturias was more secure, Spain returned to it's earlier strategy with a resistance war started by Xirgu in the Balearic Islands. So far, all residents of Mallorca contacted for comment have assumed we were reporting on the battle between British and German tourists over deck chairs at the hotel pools


* The Hungarians landswapped North Rhine-Westphalia back to Germany, through resistance war, by Hungary.
* Hungary continued returning territory to Germany, now that the Polish PTO has been sent packing, by starting a resistance in Baden-Wurttemberg. There'll be no shooting in Stuttgart tonight, as this is another land swap.


* Latvia headed back to Samogitia for their training war with Lithuania.

Closed Training wars
* See previous days maps for locations of started training wars.

Thanks for reading!