Join the new world

Warning: More than 3000 words article.

In the last days of the year I defended a different position on the future of theocracy. One of our founding members said I’d have his approval on what I think would be he best for us to do if I wrote a 5000 words article on that. He fundamentally disagrees with me, of course. I could reach the 5000 mark if I said here some things involving diplomacy that I will not, because it is not the time to do so. If I say something here you think I should not have written, blame the person who asked me to write an article.

Some ghosts from the past

Since the Hungarian baby boom, I’ve been saying that this game is about the large numbers and that would be the a problem knocking in our doors sooner or later. Our model with political and economic control with strong military power is only sustainable with an increasing population to ensure the de facto power for those three pillars (game mechanics do not allow the de juri power after all). For some time we managed to increase our numbers. When I joined theocracy in Switzerland we had half the members we have today, and we could have more if some people didn’t leave, even to they are still playing. So, since we moved to South Korea I sai😛 we should recruit like crazy if we want to keep the way we are. But the best thing we could do is change our system to be more open, so that it would be more easy to let people in.

At that same time we had that self-entitled group of south koreans (those that live in New York, California…) coming to us trying to reach an agreement after the failure they had together with Japan to erase us from the map. That was the first time we had a sketch of how we could work in a country without complete control of the government and the economy. At that time the plan was to have theocratic companies paying minimum salary and distributing items as payments. We would have shared military budget with the other citizens of South Korea that we could use as well. Unfortunately for me they were too stubborn to accept the offer I put on the table, so we stayed the way we were.

Now with complete control of South Korea, more than 20 companies to manage and the army that has the highest ratio of Field Marshals of the new world we face a very old problem. Quoting from my article “Challenges for the Theocratic Nation: moral hazard”:

“The challenge we have in our nation is that we make some goods that are private into public. But imperfectly public because of their nature. Many of us own companies abroad. Companies are mainly private goods. We are usually the only ones who have access to our private companies. But here we also have the Holy Pantheon, the Holy Army and its divisions, the deposits of the army and the organizations that run the companies and our welfare. The grand total is almost 30 organizations whose access is given to more than one player.

The access to those organizations comes with great responsibilities, as they should be handled by every single player as well as if they were his, but with consciousness that ultimately he does not own what is in any of them. When I was a bare soldier, I was always happy to receive my supplies, although I didn't know at what extent I was being subsidized on that. When I got to division commander and access to the deposits, I felt a greater responsibility on our consumption of weapons in battles and ranking programs. Once I got access to the companies, I noticed the greater challenges of our welfare system and our production (my next article will be about it) and started to use my own gifts when I had free pass to fight abroad. And I never put a single item for sale in our market without agreeing with somebody else. […] only a few of us know how difficult it is to supply our army and how much does it cost to put our army in the battle field. I already mentioned in my last article that producing Q1 weapons for all of us to fight 5 times a day is impossible. Now imagine supplying half our army to fight with Q3 weapons for six days straight.

Unfortunately, this consciousness is not a blessing for us all. Some people behave differently than expected when given access to our organizations, and that is called moral hazard. Once the password is granted, one can use the organizations for some private luxuries: some extra gifts with the free pass, gifts for a free fight, some extra supplies... and maybe more. Of course it is of our interest that our soldiers rank up. But those small luxuries don't always take the factor cost into account, and they end up undermining our economy and our security. Those who have access granted to our organizations must have a complete understanding that this access comes with greater responsibilities and not for their own convenience. They must be the first ones to understand the difference of public and private. And the first ones to say no to use our organizations for private conveniences.”

It is pretty obvious facing the recent events that that same problem I pointed 7 months ago is still a problem today. Actually it got worse: back in Switzerland we didn’t have problems of people taking resources from our companies in the same magnitude we had recently. Now we have many more companies consuming much more resources, which requiring a lot more effort to donate raw materials, to invest money for salaries, to update salaries, to gift for welfare, to sell products. And more resources going around making pilfering and theft more attractive at the same time we have to look for people to help sharing the chores, making it very hard to differentiate someone that wants to help because he wants to share the burden from someone that wants to help to have access to the companies for the resources.

What difference is there from 2 clicks to 7 clicks?

You can add up to these the availability of wars issue. Or the war games issue. Do 5 extra clicks make any difference? Only real wars are interesting to me. The game is just as boring with war games or not, but when you have to gift 200 workers because there is no battle, things get though, tho. Besides that, even tho we have the highest Field Marshals ratio of the game, and probably the only army where the great majority of soldiers are already Field Marshals, not all of us got there yet, and they want to. So we tried to join a couple of war games. We even managed to have 2 war games at the same time. But the Erepublik team decided to change the cost of the MPPs raising it to 100 gold for each side, independently of their population. This made two war games completely out of the cost charts and in terms of deployment costs an MPP is worthwhile only if we have more than 5 battles at home. Anything less than that is just cheaper to deploy our soldiers, leaving the congressmen behind. Once the Slovakian war games were destroyed we did not renew the Malaysian war games and joined the USA games instead, that did not give us the battles from home we needed to save the job of gifting hundreds of people daily nor gave the opportunity for our soldiers needed to rank. The majority of us were against the MPP with USA to avoid same situation we had in Switzerland. The final outcome, you all know, was Flashgun’s impeachment and his removal of the CDSM position, which made him go back to Brazil and I’ve never heard a word from him ever since. In the end he proved to be right in not creating the situation we had in Switzerland, but wrong in solving the war games issue. We were all wrong in something. The problem is that top countries in population cannot commit with a situation in which they are blocked every day, since they are the ones that can count on their unarmed population for prolonged wars, when choosing the right time to attack or retreat is what defines the majority of the battles.

For the lack of real wars, our neutral position with an unusual political and economic system was so effective in the past that instead of always having someone big trying to fight us, like Uncle Sam with his embargo on us and later Hungary after the Sardinia battle, now we have all big countries willing to have good relations with us theocrats. Everybody knows we can be very inconvenient as enemies when we want to fight hard, but today both sides are more interested on who we can block than on the damage we can do. As a side note, having Japan as enemy is only fun for the media, because they don’t really do anything in the battle field. On the other hand, while being formally neutral yet fighting against Hungary all the opportunities we had and defending Croatia for helping us in the last battles against Japan (when the once PEACE alliance gave up on California and had a great number of tanks fighting against us in the resistance wars), we got to the weird position of fighting along side with Eden for months and being caught by surprise every time we had an opportunity to join some real action, even when I asked when some specific battles were going to happen to deploy the Theocratic Holy Army for them. The battles were showing up abroad and with some luck I was able to set up the supplies and issue orders to have one tenth of our soldiers fighting both days, while hearing at home we were not fighting our own battles anymore and that our congressmen were not being able to fight and all.

Benefits and costs of owning a country

Owning a country can be fun. We often see some people that think they are able to defeat us in the elections when they are actually absolutely incompetent to do it. They don’t know where to place candidates, where and when to vote, and keep posting silly articles in the media as if they made any difference. I can count in one hand the number of elections we didn’t face a take over attempt, and I don’t even have to use all fingers. The only elections we actually lost was in Italy, when we were running in both Switzerland and Italy at the same time, and Italy had almost 10 times Switzerland’s population. We still won 10 seats out of 40 in congress. Of course the elections thing results in holding some of our strongest soldiers in congress, including some of the most active players in search of the congress medal.

Having control of the congress allow us to control almost all the economy, that is, minimum salary, taxes, money printing and donations. I’ll not say anything about minimum salary. For our functioning as army, the least important of those are taxes. The only items we don’t use for the army are exported and, therefore, generate no tax revenue. The items used by the army are bought at very low prices and bought instantly for distribution and, hence, generate almost no tax revenues. We only have a few products sold internally to let the KRW paid to our employees to be useful, that is for weapons Q1, food and some moving tickets. Sometimes we sell houses in the market, but they are more often sold by donations, generating almost no tax revenue. The salaries do pay 50% income taxes, but they would be much lower were the taxes lower. We could perfectly just redistribute the revenue from the companies among themselves to keep all of them running if taxes were lower. Since they are high, we use the taxes revenue to ensure we have enough KRW to pay the salaries in the companies that are used to stock products for the army. But the donating power is actually effective with the money printing. Why? Because some people think they can make a lot of profit in our monetary market buying a lot of KRW to increase its value. We love those people, because we print a lot of KRW for much less than what they pay in gold and it is more profitable than our companies. I’m glad they did not give up in the last months and sent us all the gold we needed for our MPPs, which is a lot of gold.

And since the MPPs came up, for those who don’t know, each MPP costs 100 gold for country regardless of their size. This would be the profit of one of our best companies in one full month, not considering the cost of gifts for all workers to work with 100 wellness and counting income taxes as revenue. We usually have 4 MPPs, so we are very grateful that we have speculators buying a lot of KRW, because having 40 theocrats working for the whole month to pay for hose MPPs is a huge cost. I hope they show up this month again.

Having control of the congress and the president, we are able to set the diplomacy, since only the president can declare war and peace, attack, retreat, propose MPPs, and trade embargoes. The congress alone can only accept MPPs proposed from other countries. The president alone can only attack or retreat in wars already open. And a super-majority in congress can usually impeach the president. Some people like diplomacy in this game. I don’t like to be held on any conversation that lasts more than 5 minutes. I regret every single diplomatic contact I did in the game. I don’t care about it anymore.

Do we really need a country after all?

In my opinion, were our founding members as active as they were before, having a country was very nice. Fun, for sure. Not entirely necessary. Since they are not, I think the country give us more problems than anything else.

If everyone were active, we would be one of the strongest military units (not army) of the game, but most of our founding members are 2-clicking today and don’t even show up in IRC when I call everybody to fight. So we are not the military power we could be.

To keep what we have, we need active people joining us, but I see no reason today why someone should join us the way I did 11 months ago. Theocracy was a way to fight more frequently in the past, but it is not today. Theocracy has never been a path to be rich, which was a common misconception of many people. Besides that having more people joining us in the proportion we need implies kicking out all inactive workers and doubling the number of companies, which increases even more the moral hazard issues on managing companies.

An alternative model as military unit

I believe that decentralizing the management and the resources will decrease the issues we have to manage the companies. And it will not create such a bad situation for those willing to rank up while we are not involved in some war. I played with some numbers and I think it is possible to work anywhere.

The companies, or cells.

The starting capital of one cell would be a company and the payroll for one week. We fix a salary across the company sufficient to buy food Q3 or Q4. Each one would be responsible for his own wellness. Buying cheap food and using wars to go back to 100 wellness or buying gifts and using an org or gifting partner, it would be an individual problem. At the end of the week profits are computed, a share is kept for reinvestment (upgrades, market licenses and creation of new cells) or collective supplies, and the rest is divided proportional to productivity. We make a Google doc available to everyone to see and people have one week to post an offer in the monetary market to collect the profit. If someone does not put the offer on the monetary market until the next week closes, his share goes back to the pool to be divided. For this we need only one manager for a group of 10 people to take care of only one company. He would be one of he workers for that company. He cannot cheat without everybody leaving the company and we can even write contract to avoid that. My thoughts are of 2 companies per organization at most. We can employ regular workers outside this payment plan if it is desirable. Alternatively we can distribute items according to productivity, but I prefer the way described above and have people buying weapons if they want or using their share for advanced training if they prefer.

The military

We would still have our closed chat and a forum to issue orders besides the articles of the The Holy Army Speeches. We coordinate where and when to fight. Moving tickets for deployments would come from the collective supplies pool and weapons are responsibility of each soldier unless we have some extra source of revenue for weapons distribution, which may happen or not depending on what our future will be.

Where?

As you can see, the way I described does not require a country at all. The best place to do that would be a country with high population and high iron resources in an original region (unless admin changes too much with the next economic modules). Why? Because it is the best for our land workers and it would save a lot of work to buy raw materials. And weapons chain is the most profitable industry yet. Good candidates today would be Russia, Spain, Brazil and Greece. Brazil would have some problems to accept me around after my Christmas present to them, but that is my problem, not our problem. I don’t have specific thoughts about Spain or Russia. My first thoughts were to move to Greece because we could really improve their military strength: I am a below average soldier in our army and I’d be among their top 20 soldiers if I moved there alone today. That might give us the alternative to work as a theocratic unit of their army.

Would that mean the end of Theocracy?

If you believe Theocracy needs a country to exist, then yes, of course. This is not the way I see. I’m about to complete one whole year playing this game and I saw great achievements of the Theocrats. When USA attacked Mexico and the war started, we did almost as much damage as Hungary in that war. Per fight we did a lot more damage than anyone else. Russia was not even in the map, occupied by Norway and Romania. We fought against USA, against Romania, against Norway, against Italy, against Hungary… We put countries back in the map. We erased Pakistan when it was PTO’ed by Romania. Can we do any of those things today? I don’t think we can. We could if we had a lot more people, but we will not be able to recruit enough people to do those great achievements again the way we work today. Something significant has to change for those things to happen again.

What I do know is that I’m willing to work with a lot of friends I made here. I’m not willing to work for them tho. Specially when it involves a path I disagree with for such a long time. I’ve worked with them for a very long time and we did amazing things. But if we stay in the path we are, I’d be working for them instead.