How unlimited wellnesspacks and offensive MPP:s ruin warfare.

Day 1,051, 08:06 • Published in USA USA • by Sossu

The new MPP-feature was taken in to action today and look what eRepublik has become in a matter of hours. It’s like a real chick popped in to visit the Internet for 10 minutes once in 10 years. Every nation is taking advantage of the reduced attack costs and the possibility to take your friends with you on the offense, and has attacked everything that moves. Croatia is attacked by Serbia and Hungary, Romania is attacking Hungary and fending off a joint Hungarian-Bulgarian attack, Poland and Russia have attacked each other and Greece is invading Turkey. Finland and UK are exhanging attacks and once the Spanish president comes online, we might see attacks on France and Mexico, maybe even Brazil.
eRep surely isn’t the old folks home boring you to death it used to be in V2. It has turned in to a superfast space shuttle with 700 ADD kids in it.



Eden finally succeeded to take Liaoning from Serbia two days ago. It took almost a year and 3 different war modules to throw Serbia from their iron colony. Yet I’m not thrilled from our success. I’m rather disappointed, actually. In eRepublik, the ends don’t justify the means if it involves bending the game rules or winning due to a reason that has little in common with the game. In this battle, the unlimited Gold usage ruined the fun of the war and quite frankly the entire campaign. The legend of Liaoning had grown to mythical measures as it seemed nearly impossible to invade it, no matter what Eden tried. The campaign to liberate Asia should’ve ended to a battle at least as epic than what Heilongjiang’s ninja tanking was. Instead, China won the battle 8-1. Sort of a let-down, wasn’t it? The only soothing thing was that Serbia shouldn't have been in Liaoning in the first place, as Russia managed to invade it by blatantly DDoS:ing the game on the final hour of the battle.

The reason I’m complaining about this is personal, but I think a great deal of players share my concerns. Buying Gold and using it is totally cool, but being able to buy a god-like status with it is not. In V1, a player could run companies or work hard to get enough money to fight as many times as the richest man of eRepublik in one battle. Anyone could feel like a millionaire for one day. Even further, players could get equipment from their governments and even Gold if they were strong enough. Now the most effective tactic is to give the entire country treasury to one guy who exponentially gets more rank points and becomes a better soldier. If a nation has x Gold in its disposal, it doesn’t matter if it’s given to one guy who makes 100,000 damage or 100 guys who make 1000 damage each.

I won’t put my real money to this game and I doubt the vast majority of players won't either. When other people can benefit infinitely from buying Gold, we others feel irrelevant. I laid 8088 damage in Liaoning, which is around 1,3% of what Haferkorn did in one single round. My damage was a piss in the ocean which didn’t affect anything, and that sure is depressing and de-motivating. And hey, I consider myself quite a strong soldier. I’m a Veteran* FM* and albeit I didn’t use the best guns possible in Liaoning, I did quite good by not spending any Gold at all. Haferkorn can do more damage than the entire army of a superpower (not many nations have 100 Veteran FM😒 in their army), so the battle for Liaoning was fought mainly between Serbia and Haferkorn.

Another blooper is the new MPP-rule. The power balance would stay the same if MPP😒 were disposed completely (small countries won’t stand a chance in either case) but as MPP😒 cost, it’s financially profitable to have them around. They’ve lost all their meaning though. A small nation can scrape 100G in a month to get a nice, protective MPP with some stronger country. In the new world that doesn’t protect anything if there is a giant neighbour with 10 MPP😒, ready to swallow the smaller nation in one bite. The wars waged between smaller nations are just a competition of which one can afford more MPP😒 and get the attention of the said MPP:ed nations to actually fight in the war.

War is good. It gives us something to do and it cheers up the in-game economy. It enriches the game as a whole. But just as Christmas is such a fun time as it is only once in a year, eRepublik will grow tired of war if it’s too frequent. The really good battles will drown to the endless flow of other battles and situations will change all the time. There will be no consistency and many tactical feats are erased from the game. You can’t for instance colonialize a region because it’s nearly impossible to keep once the enemy gets to neighbour it with their best MPP-stack. Also the game is about to turn very one-sided. The unlimited wellnesspack feature greatly favours Eden as Eden’s member nations’ real life counterparts are generally richer than Phoenix’s and Eden’s citizens are more willing to spend money to buy Gold in eRepublik. To me and other Edenites who don’t want to spend real money on eRepublik, the game is about to lose its drive. We won’t be needed on the fields as almost every battle will turn in to a severe beating of Phoenix when Haferkorn decides to pay attention to it.

To put it shortly, eRepublik warfare is distracted by these two features. It’s way too hectic, unbalanced and preferential of the real life rich. The new war module is very addictive and fun, but there isn’t a point in fighting when you inflict just the tiniest fraction of the damage the battle hero is able to inflict.

My suggestions for a more balanced but still offensive-encouraging war module are the following.

1. Just put a limit on wellnesspacks. In V1, full tanking cost 80G. The cost is one-quarter in V2 or V1.5, whatever the current version we’re playing is, if we’re talking about a limit of 40 wellnesspacks. This will allow more players to tank and it’d make large armies important again. Add the amount of free available battles, and with the right equipment, one could fight around 80 times by spending only 20G on wellnesspacks and using the maximum health that can be recovered by eating food.

2. eRepublik needs more offensives, I agree on that. The solution to encourage nations to attack each other more frequently could be limiting the amount of MPP😒 a nation can have at the same time. Another option would be to limit the MPP😒 a nation can use in an offensive. For instance, a nation could be allowed to have 3 offensive MPP😒 BUT if someone attacks you and activates your MPP😒, you can use them all, just like in V1. MPP😒 could be divided to two groups, offensive and defensive MPP😒. The offensive ones could cost more, with the population of the MPP:d nation as a factor, or the same nation couldn’t be in both offensive and defensive MPP😒. For instance, Spain would sign an offensive MPP with Poland. Poland would help Spain in all their offensives, but couldn’t defend Spain if Spain got attacked. The options are endless.

I sincerely hope that eRepublik war module is (once again) adjusted to a more user-friendly model. But let’s enjoy this one while it lasts. Total war isn’t a bad thing, but just like Christmas, it should be hosted only once in a year. We might just see more battles in the upcoming week than in six previous months.