Fortresses and Hospitals: A Guide for the Perplexed
Day 698, 11:05
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Published in USA 
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by
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by Silas Soule
Fortresses and Hospitals: A Guide for the Perplexed
Citizen johnpauljones has been after newly declared congressional candidates in the eUSA to address some key questions that reveal their knowledge, or lack thereof, of game mechanics. Though I pine for our brothers and sisters in the new Democratic Party to drop their "holier than thou" attitude, it's certainly not an altogether unreasonable approach to the silly season. And I do cringe when seeing campaign articles promising things like "clean air and clean water". (I mean, WTF?!)
Channeling Ben Franklin, first-time congressional candidate Mohan Kumar, running for the Oregon seat on the AAP ticket, has written a concise and lucid response to johnpauljones' queries. See his Reply to johnpauljones' Queries. Kudos to Mr. Kumar for responding in a way that we can all learn from and for keeping the discussion at a respecful level.
Likewise, this useful article A Beginner's Guide to Congress is getting good circulation. As is that remarkable citizen system0101's thoughtful and interesting article What is the eUSA Congress?.
As a first-time candidate myself (Mandatory self-plug: Vote for Phoenix Quinn in South Dakota on October 25th! I'm an SFP candidate running on the AAP ticket.), these questions and responsa, as well as the articles linked-to above, have helped me to focus my thoughts. All first-time candidates could do well to consider the questions being asked and to ponder the info in these articles.
Since I pretty much agree with Mohan Kumar's responses to johnpauljones, I won't bore you by regurgitating slight variations on the same answers. Just go read citizen Kumar's article.
And if you want to dig a bit more deeply into the vexing and inter-related questions of the placement of hospitals and tanking strategy, then as background to the first argument, I highly recommend John A Kelly's provocative article In Defense of Q2/3/4 Hospitals. On the second question, a decent starting point is citizen dreaeuh's polemic in Blueprints for a Green War. (Citizen dreaueh is also running for Congress on the AAP ticket, for Arkansas.)
I recommend these two article not because I agree with them in every detail, but because they challenge received wisdom in a mindful way.
======================================== ===
In this article, I want to delve a bit into the question of the fortress strategy. For those of you who tend to post "tl; dr" for anything longer than a comic strip, kindly move along, or bookmark this for reading when you have more time. If you're just looking for some good snappy slogans, then please refer to my campaign announcment: Dance as if no one's watching, sing as if no one's listening! Also, please note that my purpose here is mainly to do some analysis. So if it's polemics you're after, then I refer you back to John A Kelley's piece, which demonstrates how to do so without being annoying.
OK, for the 3 or 4 of you left.. let's get into it.
Good problem-solving is often a matter of finding the right algorithms or models. That means finding the key variables and their relationships. Models are better than either arguments from authority or simple statistics, because you can see what rules and assumptions are at work. And models allow us to do "what if" analysis.
So... what are the critical factors here? Well, there's a number of things to consider concerning the fortress strategy, right?. The key variables that we have some level of control over are: defense systems, hospitals, and population distribution. The quality and distribution of weapons is also important, but I'm not going to cover that in any detail at this time. The main outcomes that need to be looked are likely to be: investment cost, impact on player retention, overall economic impact (including protection of key resources), and of course the role of fortresses in military strategy, particularly defensive strategy, which can also be thought as their cost to the enemy.
Population Distribution
At present, since Washington State and Alaska are occupied by the nefarious Huns, the eUSA has 49 regions . Today's total population is 20,080 eUS citizens, with 334 new citizens having been born or been granted US citizenship today. At this point, the eUSA is the fastest-growing country in eRepublik, an important fact that I'll return to at the end.
So, what if population were to simply be distributed evenly across all currently liberated US regions? That would mean 410 citizens per region. But population is not distributed evenly. Instead it looks like this:
The concentration of population in Florida and California is a key ingredient of the fortress strategy.
Defense Systems and Hospitals
As every informed citizen should know, the eUSA has Q5 hospital and Q5 defense system only in California and Florida. Again, the primary rationale for this, as often stated by our fine military group-mind, is to support the fortress strategy. By concentrating population, maximizing the wall bonus (+50% wall points for a Q5 defense system), and maximizing wellness after fighting (with Q5 hospitals), the goal of this strategy is to create and maintain regions that are as impervious to attack as possible.
Hospitals play the key role in maximizing fighting effectiveness, no matter where you fight. Contrary to some arguments, Q5 hospitals in and of themselves are not the key ingredient in making a fortress a fortress. Rather, Q5 hospitals draw players to the fortress regions; they are the means for concentrating populations there.
It's the combination of high population and a Q5 Defense System that turns a particular region into a fortress.
Strategic Retreat
From a military perspective, the fortress strategy implies a battleplan of strategic retreat in case of a massive invasion. In the recent PEACE GC invasion of North America, this plan worked quite well. Although one fortress, New Jersey, was taken down, in the end it was too costly for the enemy to try to take Florida -- and so e-America was saved.
As a defensive military strategy, the concept of strategic retreat can be jarring for real life Americans, who're accustomed to living in a superpower that has overwhelming military capabilities in nearly every area. But this is not real life, vatos! Here, despite the population differences, the eHungarian armed forces are stronger, better armed and better funded than the eUSA's. And they have lots of allies.
Defensive wars of attrition, backed up by a fortress, have proven their worth in real life history in exactly these kinds of circumstances. Think about the Napoleonic and Nazi invasions of Russia, or the military strategy of the Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Revolution, or even the overall course of the Vietnam War. In each of these cases, a powerful enemy was defeated by "drawing the enemy in deep", as Mao Zedong put it, then annihilating them in a counter-offensive when their supply lines were stretched too thin, their resources were drained, and their morale was shaken.
The Wall
The wall formula is 100 * Population * (1 + Defense System Quality / 10). Of course, other factors come into play in determining the outcome of a battle: strength of fighters and weapons used, level and experience of citizens, and how many mutual protection pacts are involved. But it's the size of the wall that an enemy must take into account when contemplating an attack, first because the cost of launching an attack is 50G plus (G * 25% of the population) and then of course the attackers need to have enough firepower to take down the wall by the 24th hour.
Let's do a little math, shall we?
First, let's assume that our enemy has a distribution of forces similar to what the Hungarians had when they successfully defended Manitoba on October 15-16:
* 4% big tanks (over 200 dmg per fight)
* 28% small tanks (over 100 dmg per fight)
* 43% normal players (over 30 dmg per fight)
* 25% new players (ove 0 dmg per fight)
Let's further assume a farily conservative rough total battle damage estimate and a rough total expense in gold for arming each of these divisions:
* Big tanks: around 15 fights with Q5 weapons + wellness packs; average strength of 17; average damage = 4,000; ~20 G per fighter
* Small tanks: maybe 10 Q3 weapons; average strength of 14; average damage = 900; ~5 G per fighter
* Normal players: say 10 Q1 weapons, average strength of 7; average damage = 400; ~1 G per fighter
* New players: bare-handed, average strength of 4; average damage = 100; No cost
Of course, not all of the estimated equipment costs are borne by the government. Think of these as total cost to the attacking nation.
Finally, let's assume that our Hungarian enemy has a Legion of 1,000 fighters to engage in an attack on a US region.
If a region had 410 citizens (our flat distribution of population), then the wall woud be as follows, varying according to the quality of the defense system...
No Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.0 = 41,000
Q1 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.1 = 45,100
Q2 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.2 = 49,200
Q3 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.3 = 53,300
Q4 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.4 = 57,400
Q5 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.5 = 61,500
Cost to Attack: It would cost our Hungarian Legion roughly about 2,783 gold, all told, to utterly destory this wall no matter what level of Defense System was in place. Using the rough measures outlined above and the formulas, it would cost 153 G to launch the attack and about 2,630 in total expenses to equip the fighters. The Hungarian Legion would do somewhere in the neighborhood of 609,000 points of damage. So, even with a Q5 defense system, this region would quickly be at -568,000, a difficult and costly deficit to overcome.
Now let's compare that scenario to our two fortress states:
California
Q5 Defense System: Wall = 358100 * 1.5 = 537,150
Cost to attack: Goes up a lot: 50 + (3,581 / 4) = 895 G, plus about 2,630 G in armaments and wellness expenses comes to 3,525 G. The initial advantage still brings the wall below zero, but only to -71,850.
Florida
Q5 Defense System: Wall = 923500 * 1.5 = 1,385,250
Cost to attack: Goes up to a whopping: 50 + (9,235 / 4) = 2,359 G. Add 2,630 G in armament and wellness expenses and that brings the total cost to attack with 1,000 fighters to something like 4,989 G. And it still leaves the wall well above zero, at +314,500.
That, my friends, is a fortress.
Two, Three, Many Fortresses?
It's rational to ask: If one or two fortresses are good, then why not three, four, five or six? In the abstract, that makes perfectly good sense. But the devil, as usual, is in the details.
Map of Venetian fortresses
There's the investment cost and the investment risk involved. Both hospitals and defense systems are expensive. And when a region is conquered, they are destroyed. On the open market, a Q1 hospital can go for around 1800 USD, or about 45 G, while a Q1 defense system costs around 3,000 USD, or about 75 G. Q5's are correspondingly more expensive. And building them takes time and a lot of work and resources. Not something you'd want to buy, or build -- or lose -- on a whim.
But still.. countries have budgets and taxes. And patriotic consortiums like McFarland have donated a Q5 defense system to the government. The investment cost is manageable with some planning.
There's also an interesting argument for the number of steady jobs that can created as a result of building these kinds of systems. Particularly with the proliferation of trap companies that seek to destroy new players' morale by offering bogus wages, but paying nothing, it might be strategically wise for the government or a consortium to invest in this kind of manufacturing.
Which brings me to the conclusion of this little thought-experiement...
Baby Ka-boom
The "nut" in all of this appears to be population distribution. As mentioned above, the presence of a Q5 hospital is a magnet that draws people to a given region. And the multiplier effect of a defense system is really worthwhile only when there's a significant population to multiply.
The big risk in building multiple fortresses is drawing people away from the existing ones. The worst case scenario is draining population to the point where our model Hungarian Legion can contemplate attacking one of the existing fortress regions.
The optimal outcome would be to build up additional fortresses without denigrating the existing ones. The key to accomplishing this, it seems to me, is having specified population targets. In other words, IF a given region can build its population up to a certain level that would withstand an assault by a formidable foe (without lowering the population of an existing fortress), THEN it would make sense to place Q5 hospital and defense system there.
I believe that the imperialists of the world, who are the enemies of the e-United States, are well aware of the critical importance of population growth in the eUS. That's why we see increasing attempts at economic sabotage in the eUSA. If new players can be discouraged from playing the game, they'll either quit or move to some other country.
An effective counter-measure could be to create jobs for new players in nationalized or subsidized companies or communes that provide the resources needed to construct hospitals and defense systems (wood), and also provide a way to "move up" into working on building hospitals and defense systems. This would be more than a training company; it would be more like a job corps that offers new players a steady career path and way to contribute strategically to the national defense. The big pay-off for them would come when enough have been recruited to turn an already high-population state like Texas or New York, or a high-resource region, into another fortress, at which point they could benefit from the Q5's that they built.
Citizen johnpauljones has been after newly declared congressional candidates in the eUSA to address some key questions that reveal their knowledge, or lack thereof, of game mechanics. Though I pine for our brothers and sisters in the new Democratic Party to drop their "holier than thou" attitude, it's certainly not an altogether unreasonable approach to the silly season. And I do cringe when seeing campaign articles promising things like "clean air and clean water". (I mean, WTF?!)
Channeling Ben Franklin, first-time congressional candidate Mohan Kumar, running for the Oregon seat on the AAP ticket, has written a concise and lucid response to johnpauljones' queries. See his Reply to johnpauljones' Queries. Kudos to Mr. Kumar for responding in a way that we can all learn from and for keeping the discussion at a respecful level.
Likewise, this useful article A Beginner's Guide to Congress is getting good circulation. As is that remarkable citizen system0101's thoughtful and interesting article What is the eUSA Congress?.
As a first-time candidate myself (Mandatory self-plug: Vote for Phoenix Quinn in South Dakota on October 25th! I'm an SFP candidate running on the AAP ticket.), these questions and responsa, as well as the articles linked-to above, have helped me to focus my thoughts. All first-time candidates could do well to consider the questions being asked and to ponder the info in these articles.
Since I pretty much agree with Mohan Kumar's responses to johnpauljones, I won't bore you by regurgitating slight variations on the same answers. Just go read citizen Kumar's article.
And if you want to dig a bit more deeply into the vexing and inter-related questions of the placement of hospitals and tanking strategy, then as background to the first argument, I highly recommend John A Kelly's provocative article In Defense of Q2/3/4 Hospitals. On the second question, a decent starting point is citizen dreaeuh's polemic in Blueprints for a Green War. (Citizen dreaueh is also running for Congress on the AAP ticket, for Arkansas.)
I recommend these two article not because I agree with them in every detail, but because they challenge received wisdom in a mindful way.
======================================== ===
In this article, I want to delve a bit into the question of the fortress strategy. For those of you who tend to post "tl; dr" for anything longer than a comic strip, kindly move along, or bookmark this for reading when you have more time. If you're just looking for some good snappy slogans, then please refer to my campaign announcment: Dance as if no one's watching, sing as if no one's listening! Also, please note that my purpose here is mainly to do some analysis. So if it's polemics you're after, then I refer you back to John A Kelley's piece, which demonstrates how to do so without being annoying.
OK, for the 3 or 4 of you left.. let's get into it.
Good problem-solving is often a matter of finding the right algorithms or models. That means finding the key variables and their relationships. Models are better than either arguments from authority or simple statistics, because you can see what rules and assumptions are at work. And models allow us to do "what if" analysis.
So... what are the critical factors here? Well, there's a number of things to consider concerning the fortress strategy, right?. The key variables that we have some level of control over are: defense systems, hospitals, and population distribution. The quality and distribution of weapons is also important, but I'm not going to cover that in any detail at this time. The main outcomes that need to be looked are likely to be: investment cost, impact on player retention, overall economic impact (including protection of key resources), and of course the role of fortresses in military strategy, particularly defensive strategy, which can also be thought as their cost to the enemy.
Population Distribution
At present, since Washington State and Alaska are occupied by the nefarious Huns, the eUSA has 49 regions . Today's total population is 20,080 eUS citizens, with 334 new citizens having been born or been granted US citizenship today. At this point, the eUSA is the fastest-growing country in eRepublik, an important fact that I'll return to at the end.
So, what if population were to simply be distributed evenly across all currently liberated US regions? That would mean 410 citizens per region. But population is not distributed evenly. Instead it looks like this:
The concentration of population in Florida and California is a key ingredient of the fortress strategy.
Defense Systems and Hospitals
As every informed citizen should know, the eUSA has Q5 hospital and Q5 defense system only in California and Florida. Again, the primary rationale for this, as often stated by our fine military group-mind, is to support the fortress strategy. By concentrating population, maximizing the wall bonus (+50% wall points for a Q5 defense system), and maximizing wellness after fighting (with Q5 hospitals), the goal of this strategy is to create and maintain regions that are as impervious to attack as possible.
Hospitals play the key role in maximizing fighting effectiveness, no matter where you fight. Contrary to some arguments, Q5 hospitals in and of themselves are not the key ingredient in making a fortress a fortress. Rather, Q5 hospitals draw players to the fortress regions; they are the means for concentrating populations there.
It's the combination of high population and a Q5 Defense System that turns a particular region into a fortress.
Strategic Retreat
From a military perspective, the fortress strategy implies a battleplan of strategic retreat in case of a massive invasion. In the recent PEACE GC invasion of North America, this plan worked quite well. Although one fortress, New Jersey, was taken down, in the end it was too costly for the enemy to try to take Florida -- and so e-America was saved.
As a defensive military strategy, the concept of strategic retreat can be jarring for real life Americans, who're accustomed to living in a superpower that has overwhelming military capabilities in nearly every area. But this is not real life, vatos! Here, despite the population differences, the eHungarian armed forces are stronger, better armed and better funded than the eUSA's. And they have lots of allies.
Defensive wars of attrition, backed up by a fortress, have proven their worth in real life history in exactly these kinds of circumstances. Think about the Napoleonic and Nazi invasions of Russia, or the military strategy of the Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Revolution, or even the overall course of the Vietnam War. In each of these cases, a powerful enemy was defeated by "drawing the enemy in deep", as Mao Zedong put it, then annihilating them in a counter-offensive when their supply lines were stretched too thin, their resources were drained, and their morale was shaken.
The Wall
The wall formula is 100 * Population * (1 + Defense System Quality / 10). Of course, other factors come into play in determining the outcome of a battle: strength of fighters and weapons used, level and experience of citizens, and how many mutual protection pacts are involved. But it's the size of the wall that an enemy must take into account when contemplating an attack, first because the cost of launching an attack is 50G plus (G * 25% of the population) and then of course the attackers need to have enough firepower to take down the wall by the 24th hour.
Let's do a little math, shall we?
First, let's assume that our enemy has a distribution of forces similar to what the Hungarians had when they successfully defended Manitoba on October 15-16:
* 4% big tanks (over 200 dmg per fight)
* 28% small tanks (over 100 dmg per fight)
* 43% normal players (over 30 dmg per fight)
* 25% new players (ove 0 dmg per fight)
Let's further assume a farily conservative rough total battle damage estimate and a rough total expense in gold for arming each of these divisions:
* Big tanks: around 15 fights with Q5 weapons + wellness packs; average strength of 17; average damage = 4,000; ~20 G per fighter
* Small tanks: maybe 10 Q3 weapons; average strength of 14; average damage = 900; ~5 G per fighter
* Normal players: say 10 Q1 weapons, average strength of 7; average damage = 400; ~1 G per fighter
* New players: bare-handed, average strength of 4; average damage = 100; No cost
Of course, not all of the estimated equipment costs are borne by the government. Think of these as total cost to the attacking nation.
Finally, let's assume that our Hungarian enemy has a Legion of 1,000 fighters to engage in an attack on a US region.
If a region had 410 citizens (our flat distribution of population), then the wall woud be as follows, varying according to the quality of the defense system...
No Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.0 = 41,000
Q1 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.1 = 45,100
Q2 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.2 = 49,200
Q3 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.3 = 53,300
Q4 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.4 = 57,400
Q5 Defense System : Wall = 41000 * 1.5 = 61,500
Cost to Attack: It would cost our Hungarian Legion roughly about 2,783 gold, all told, to utterly destory this wall no matter what level of Defense System was in place. Using the rough measures outlined above and the formulas, it would cost 153 G to launch the attack and about 2,630 in total expenses to equip the fighters. The Hungarian Legion would do somewhere in the neighborhood of 609,000 points of damage. So, even with a Q5 defense system, this region would quickly be at -568,000, a difficult and costly deficit to overcome.
Now let's compare that scenario to our two fortress states:
California
Q5 Defense System: Wall = 358100 * 1.5 = 537,150
Cost to attack: Goes up a lot: 50 + (3,581 / 4) = 895 G, plus about 2,630 G in armaments and wellness expenses comes to 3,525 G. The initial advantage still brings the wall below zero, but only to -71,850.
Florida
Q5 Defense System: Wall = 923500 * 1.5 = 1,385,250
Cost to attack: Goes up to a whopping: 50 + (9,235 / 4) = 2,359 G. Add 2,630 G in armament and wellness expenses and that brings the total cost to attack with 1,000 fighters to something like 4,989 G. And it still leaves the wall well above zero, at +314,500.
That, my friends, is a fortress.
Two, Three, Many Fortresses?
It's rational to ask: If one or two fortresses are good, then why not three, four, five or six? In the abstract, that makes perfectly good sense. But the devil, as usual, is in the details.
Map of Venetian fortresses
There's the investment cost and the investment risk involved. Both hospitals and defense systems are expensive. And when a region is conquered, they are destroyed. On the open market, a Q1 hospital can go for around 1800 USD, or about 45 G, while a Q1 defense system costs around 3,000 USD, or about 75 G. Q5's are correspondingly more expensive. And building them takes time and a lot of work and resources. Not something you'd want to buy, or build -- or lose -- on a whim.
But still.. countries have budgets and taxes. And patriotic consortiums like McFarland have donated a Q5 defense system to the government. The investment cost is manageable with some planning.
There's also an interesting argument for the number of steady jobs that can created as a result of building these kinds of systems. Particularly with the proliferation of trap companies that seek to destroy new players' morale by offering bogus wages, but paying nothing, it might be strategically wise for the government or a consortium to invest in this kind of manufacturing.
Which brings me to the conclusion of this little thought-experiement...
Baby Ka-boom
The "nut" in all of this appears to be population distribution. As mentioned above, the presence of a Q5 hospital is a magnet that draws people to a given region. And the multiplier effect of a defense system is really worthwhile only when there's a significant population to multiply.
The big risk in building multiple fortresses is drawing people away from the existing ones. The worst case scenario is draining population to the point where our model Hungarian Legion can contemplate attacking one of the existing fortress regions.
The optimal outcome would be to build up additional fortresses without denigrating the existing ones. The key to accomplishing this, it seems to me, is having specified population targets. In other words, IF a given region can build its population up to a certain level that would withstand an assault by a formidable foe (without lowering the population of an existing fortress), THEN it would make sense to place Q5 hospital and defense system there.
I believe that the imperialists of the world, who are the enemies of the e-United States, are well aware of the critical importance of population growth in the eUS. That's why we see increasing attempts at economic sabotage in the eUSA. If new players can be discouraged from playing the game, they'll either quit or move to some other country.
An effective counter-measure could be to create jobs for new players in nationalized or subsidized companies or communes that provide the resources needed to construct hospitals and defense systems (wood), and also provide a way to "move up" into working on building hospitals and defense systems. This would be more than a training company; it would be more like a job corps that offers new players a steady career path and way to contribute strategically to the national defense. The big pay-off for them would come when enough have been recruited to turn an already high-population state like Texas or New York, or a high-resource region, into another fortress, at which point they could benefit from the Q5's that they built.
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Comments
Excellent article.
An article Par excellence !! Thanks for the support.
Voted & subed already.
This article is a manual on the fortress strategy, I will save it for future reference !
Bravo, very helpful.
I almost cried. Reading this was such a relief after all the articles complaining about Hospitals, etc. Bravo, man. Bravo.
-Drake
Thank you, PQ. The SFP's very own Maimonides.
Very important article. Well-written. And it mentions me. Gotta love it.
I'm going to respond to it in my article later.
Jesus Christ Quinn are you like... God or something? Not only is this article immense in length, quality, and content of knowledge taught but you also make reference to a number of other articles that further quantify the immense genius being exuded by this article, which we can only assume is but a small portion of the overall knowledge you contain. Therefore, given that this is an article about a game and only a very specific situation in that game, we can assign this article to be about .001% of your total knowledge if we are being very generous. Math math math * .001 / holy crapping God almighty = QUINN IS A FREAKING GENIUS OF UNPARALLELED PROPORTION!!! If you do not get elected to congress I will become the first eSuicide bomber and decimate all those who didn't vote for you. I wish I could vote 20 times because you deserve international recognition with this behemoth!
A correction: "steep discount" was a gross understatement. McFarland donated a Q5 Defense System for California at the token cost of $0.01.
Alex, you're too kind. I'm just a cantankerous windbag with too much time on his hands on a Sunday afternoon.
Phoenix,
I love the detail you provide, and I concur with your assessment on being careful with future infrastructure placement. Just because I am building unlimited Q5 Infrastructure for donation to the eUSA, does not mean I think it should all be installed right now, and that we should blanket all 49 regions. The Executive and Military leadership know what they are doing. there is already one additional Q5 Hospital in stock in McFarland Hospitals; it will not be placed for sale at $0.01 USD until the Executive or Military ask for it. Also, both infrastructure companies are already working on building the next Q5 DS & Q5 H.
Thank you for posting the clarification. For any who are interested, just look up the recent articles in my newspaper for details.
As I mentioned to Phoenix in a private message, I strongly believe the government needs to develop a training hub for both land and constructions skill, to parallel Fort Harlot in the manufacturing sector. I operate a constructions training hub with 999 daily job offers and a roster of 200+ workers, but it should really be the government doing this. I would be happy to be the patron, paying all start-up costs for the organizations, newspapers, and companies, if the government chooses to move in this direction. I only ask for the token concession of having whatever organizations, newspapers, and companies I provide be named after me, with pictures following my theme. Nothing more.
V/r,
Max
why cant all congress people be smart like this one?
Awesome article, voted, subbed and (in a sec) shouted.
So... I think your logic says that TX and NY should get Q5s next?
And then we either add others to strategic resource regions, or just add nothing until another state reaches the critical population threshold?
Hopefully this will get to the top 5.
The key to having a strong country is to have high level hospitals. I believe the hospitals are more important than the defense systems because the better you can heal your fighters, the more they can fight. The more they can fight the higher they can put up the wall. I'm not saying that the defense systems aren't important themselves, I'm just saying we should make it a higher priority to get more high level hospitals.
Excellent article. Sound reasoning and fancy numbers. What more can I want? 😃
Voted and subscribed. This deserves to be a global top 5 article.
lovely
I voted this up, even if I do think what JPJ is doing is a worthwhile endeavor to probe the candidates' knowledge going into a job that DOES effect all of us equally. I think Mohan might even surprise us.
@anon anon -- I think I agree with you in a general overall sense, particularly when talking about offensive strategies.
But in a country like the eUSA that's disadvantaged by having so many regions, defensive military logic seems to point to the need for a fortress strategy, otherwise it can be too easily overwhelmed by a sustained offensive from a stronger army.
I'm not even going to ask you the questions because you clearly are knowledgeable about the game. You make the connection that at a certain point, the cost to attack a region, and tank it down becomes so great that it repels all but the most determined attacker. If we place more fortresses then the existing fortresses are weakened (see Kansas and New Jersey), and attackers can and will attack them.
voted
This article is so long and infomartive that even the comments are reaking with brillance
Great Article. V/S
Simply fantastic article! You have a great ability to write the facts while keeping people interested. If some people would simply read a long article instead of running away at the sight of all those words we would have a much smarter population.
Voted and Subscribed!
Fantastic article. Voted.
Excellent article. I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment of a baby boom in general. I don't think we are prepared to retain a bunch of new players. Some time, sure, but we have to prepare intense efforts to keep those players active. All the same, it seems we should be looking at defensive systems and hospitals in regions that already have high populations and would fit naturally into this fortress strategy.
can we put defensive systems down? will help defend regions and willnot lower fortesses just help us stop them before they get there idk thats what i think we should do
Rational and well-thought commentary on the economics of regionalism are few and far between. I commend you for readily and easily justifying the concepts and practices in place now via easily understood and reasoned facts and mathematical principle.
@Zanmor: pertinent points, for sure.
All that my analysis has really done, so far, was try to establish some kind of rational baseline for what level of population makes for a sufficient fortress. And of course I ignored the fightback potential; this model only shows the defensive role of the wall itself.
With regard to your points, the things worth considering would be...
The indications that we do seem to have a least a mini-baby-boom going on now, along with active attempts by our opponents to "euthanize" the new workers and future fighters.
Whether NY and TX currently achieve the baseline that makes turning them into fortresses worthwhile, or just expensive boondoggles. Unless there's a flaw in my model (and BTW I'm happy to improve on it; I'm certainly not pretending to be an expert) it would seem that even the CA fortress-wall wouldn't currently stand up to an initial attack from a well-organized Legion, much less one the size of the larger forces that could be brought to bear. It would be an expensive bump on the road for any attacker, for sure, but probably not impregnable.
So that brings me back to the need to find more, better ways to retain and rank up new players IF the goal was to create more fortresses.
I've suggested more attention to nationalized or semi-nationalized work programs aimed at provisioning exactly those hospitals and defense systems might be one good approach.
A study of whether EVER having more than one or two fortresses is worth it (from a military perspective) would also be interesting. I obviously tend to think it would be, but that's just a conjecture on my part.
Would love to hear other ideas on this topic.
Vote and Sub without hesitation! Great article!
South Africa rejoices as Ajay Bruno is banned.
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-gasp-ajay-bruno-banned--989273/1/20" target="_blank">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-gas[..]/1/20
V&S! This is excellent. may you have many many Sundays will too little to do.
Great stuff as usual Quinn!
If this isn't in the top-5 tomorrow morning, I'm buying it advertising.
Really good article!
Subscribed on the spot.
You are right about Florida Fortress: during the war each of the Indonesian, Portuguese and Russian forces got to the immediate neighbourhod, but the costs of attacking (and the related risk to fail) were so big, that noone had the courage to take the last step.
You are also right in the Napoleonic comparison. Florida was too far away for everybody. By the time the Peace forces got there, they just have spent far too much money on conquering 7-8 (10?) other regions.
Speaking of the wear-down of invading forces up to reaching the fortresses, would that happen today? I wasn't around before most of America had been conquered by PEACE. Did we have random Q1-4 Defense Systems and Hospitals scattered in other states that may have provided more of a speed bump and helped to wear them down?
I don't doubt that the US is better prepared (as far as trained citizens and also the almost immeasurable factor of organization) for an attack today. What I wonder is if future invaders won't meet quite as much resistance leading up to the fortress(es) since we aren't putting down lower quality defense systems or hospitals in other regions. Of course, if that's not what they encountered the first time then there's no point to be made with this. I simply don't know what our overall defense looked like when PEACE invaded.
But with wearing down the invaders up to the fortress is part of the strategy then perhaps lower quality systems and hospitals should be considered for regions surrounding the fortress, if not elsewhere. Their ultimate loss would be understood, it would simply add that much more to discourage that final assault. Again, this is something that would have to be analyzed as far as what the gain would be compared to the costs. It may very well not be worthwhile.
Finally, concerning population distribution, it seems to me that eAmericans are very good about doing what their country asks of them. If it factored in to overall defense then I bet the DoD need only publish moving orders, telling citizens to consider moving to region X until its population reaches a certain (defensible) level.
Nice
Excellent work, sir! Voted and subscribed.
Great article. Vote/sub
Voted 246 sub 145
Sub+Vote+Supa
@Zanmor Yes, a majority of the states had a hospital and Defense of some level. All of it was destroyed when each region was conquered. Since then we placed a q5 stack in CA. CA has two high resources, a naturally high population, plenty of companies, and is a bottleneck via Asia. It made perfect sense to make it a fortress.
FAF is better
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/usa-buy-hospitals-eng--990433/1/20" target="_blank">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/usa-[..]1/20
USA, buy hospitals!
Hey. You got a mention from Zoli. 😃
Okay everyone, here's my analysis of the fortress situation. In short, we need to engage in the sort of analysis Quinn has undertaken with each region, especially high population areas.
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/our-best-defense-991018/1/20" target="_blank">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/our-[..]/1/20
Very thoughtfully-written article. Thanks for taking the time to share your insights.
Great article, thanks for this as it helped to drastically increase my understanding of some game mechanics.
V&S
Good article dawg.
Good article.
Well written Phoenix, hopefully you get in Congress this time around.
Nice article Quinn.
I agree with the article up to that last paragraph. You showed clearly the benefit of not building more fortresses, but you didn't show the benefit of building new ones.
Why would it be optimal to build new fortresses without degrading the old ones? There are lots of numbers but none of them point to getting a benefit from fortress #3.
I've heard the argument about giving our construction workers something to do. They can build houses. The market demands houses so they'll have something to use their high skill on.
The problem with hospitals and DS are numerous. I'll mention the two most damning.
1. DS are only useful if we lose. If we win, they have almost no effect. As such a DS is a one-use item like a weapon. Unfortunately we don't get to chose when to use it, our opponents do. From a tactical standpoint DS are terrible.
2. A nation only needs one Q5 hospital. All the other hospitals do very little to improve the damage we can create.
So, I see plenty of reasons not to build, I just don't see any good reasons to build.
I think there are decent reasons to build other 'forts'. That's what I tried to explore in the article I linked above. At the very least I don't think you condemn the entire concept off hand but instead must look at the specific circumstances of each region.