The Economist ~ My thoughts on changes to the military module

Day 1,665, 12:33 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,

I was going to do an article on the Ministry of Home Affairs today, but in light of the new military module it’s on hold.

I thought I’d first of all outline the changes, then offer my thoughts on them. I’m bound to make mistakes since they’re brand new, if you know better feel free to comment.

OK so the most striking and obvious division is that each battle now has 4 divisional sub-battles. This is kind of like in boxing where you have different weight categories, except it is based on a player’s XP and not how fat he is 😛

The idea is (I assume) that countries that invest in baby booms can beat old strong countries, which at the minute is impossible. Even if you have twice as many players, if their army does 5 times the damage you are screwed. Now there are four categories: National Guard, Soldier, Special Forces and Tank. Basically I will be calling them Divisions A-D to avoid having to type all that out.

Division A: All players level 24 or below
Division B: All players level 25-29 (inclusive)
Division C: All players level 30-36 (inclusive)
Division D : All players level 37 or higher


Propaganda

If you look at your avatar on the home screen (top left) it should have an experience bar there with your current level, this shows which category you will be in. If you are say Division B, you will be fighting with other Division B soldiers to beat the enemies Division B soldiers, and you won’t see anyone from any other category. This makes it easier for a brand new player to get a battle hero medal, since they’re competing with weaker players. Really it makes it easier for everyone, since there will be less fighters in each category.

Now the way the system works, each “mini” round has to reach 1800 points like now to finish. Unlike now however there will be a delay at the end of each round whilst the other battles catch up. Thus for example a single close battle could stretch an otherwise very unbalanced fight out to the full 2 hours. This could be used (for example) to make night battles longer, shortening the advantage of those countries whose prime time is European night time.

When all four battles are ended, the divisions each get a certain amount of points awarded.

Division A winners get 1 point
Division B winners get 2 points
Division C winners get 3 points
Division D winners get 5 points.

So for example if you won Division A-C you would get 6 points, and if the enemy won Division D they would get 5 points. You need 83 points to win a campaign, so many combinations of divisional wins combine to make an overall win. The fastest you can win is 8 rounds, like now, which if every battle lasts the minimum time of 1.5 hours is 12 hours. This is extremely unlikely with the new system however.

The final minor change is that winning battle hero medals gives a different amount of gold depending on your division.

Division A: 2 gold
Division B: 3 gold
Division C: 4 gold
Division D : 5 gold

Although the medal is definitely the best part of getting a battle hero anyway, and this increases your chances of winning enough to compensate for the gold loss.


OK some brief thoughts:

The system at first glance heavily favours “tanks”, ie very strong gold using players. In fact when I first saw this I thought that is was God’s gift to EDEN, since they have a lot more gold users than ONE do, and more players at the extreme top of the spectrum. On any given day the percentage of the “top fighter” list which is Terra or EDEN damage is usually 60%+, which would suggest that they’d win every battle in that category.

However on closer examination, it’s based on XP. This means two things:
1. Your regiment is not related (except circumstantially) to your damage in battle
2. Many older players will find themselves in the highest division anyway

The first division is capped at 5000 XP. The maximum XP a player can get each day from fighting is approximately 240. Say a new player hits half of that, they would only be in division A for 41 days, just over a month.

The second division is capped at 25,000 experience points. So a player could reach division 3 by fighting half as much as is possible in about 200 days, which is about 6-7 months.

The third division ends at 60,000 XP. Now at the pace I’ve been setting a new player would take 500 days exactly to reach that- hitting 120 fights a day. At the maximum level of fighting (240 each day) it would take 250 days from birth to reaching the fourth division.


This will never happen, no matter how new you are

What does this mean for eRepublik battles? Well the first and second divisions are always going to be full of inexperienced and less active players. eRepublik has a very high turnover of players, but once you take the players under 3 months old out of the equation you’d find quite a high average age- over a year probably. The bulk of ONE’s armies will find themselves in either Division C or D.

OK, so looking at it rationally, Division D will remain a contest between the elite units and gold users of eRepublik. I would argue then that Division C will become the most important regiment for the game. This will consist of players who are relatively new, in many cases only four or five months old, but can now make a huge difference in the nature of the game. Organising and establishing these players makes a big difference mathematically too. Fighting in a resistance war, you are relying on mobile soldiers. You would struggle to move enough people in Division A or B to be able to beat the enemy. Losing division C battles as well means losing the war. So you would need to be able to adequately organise troops in Division C and D to be able to counter the enemy and win (8 points to 3, as opposed to 5 points to 6). Division D troops as I said will mostly be organised into elite MUs already, so the real deciding factor will be which country has the best organised medium strength soldiers.

The flip side of this is that is just became a lot harder to free countries using RW tactics. For example, say Poland’s occupation of Germany. In the past it would have been possible for Romper, Alex, etc to fly across with their elite units and strike. They’d out-damage ONE troops in a few key battles and win. But now those troops only count towards Division D. It’s pretty much certain that the superior numbers of Polish Division A and B troops will guarantee their victory in those areas, and with the entire Polish nation present in the battle it’s hard to imagine they will lose division C battles either.

It also brings in a new element of tactical prowess. It is only necessary to take 6 points from each round to win. So if for example you are winning enough rounds to hold the battle, you can divert other forces elsewhere. “All-In” no longer exists except on a divisional basis. The points you score at Division C will not help win Division D, so counter-intuitive though it is you can fight elsewhere whilst a crucial battle is going on, confident your own divisional sub-battle is won already.


New module has none of this unfortunately

Now how is this going to affect the military?

Firstly MUs and national armies will need to be reorganised by division. This is especially crucial because of daily orders. There’s no point having someone fighting in a battle if their division is winning 60%. It’s also stupid to have a captain of a regiment whose troops all belong to a different division- he can’t even see what’s going on in their battle.In future then it makes sense to have MU regiments and captains organised by division.

Secondly you have the question of supply. In the past the figure that counted was gross damage. Now what is important is organised damage. In the past you might have seen shouts saying things like “all troops +6000 hit go to #channel! Hail Alliance!”. Now you might find that it’s far more important to arm weaker troops, who can then win easy points for your battle. Remember that if you’re winning the campaign 81 points to 50, you only need a division B victory to win. Arming the hell out of your division B troops to launch a surprise attack is a lot more profitable at that point than spending the guns on Division D, which will obviously be a tougher fight.

Thirdly the value of ultra-mobile troops just went even higher. Mobile divisions were always important, but having high-activity mid-strength troops is more crucial than ever. Both alliances need to quickly accomplish this if they hope to ever have any advantage outside of MPP battles.

Fourthly the baby boom just became an instant source of 3 points per battle. Even a hopeless country can win 3 points each round if they have 2000 people in division A and B and the enemy has 200.

Finally you will need observers as part of the command chain of the army. Each division is invisible to the others. You can see the overall score, but nothing else. You need at least 4 commanders whereas before you could have one.

In conclusion the changes are a major headache but for me a welcome one. Although they don’t address underlying problems with gold as an essential item for training, they do at least make a half-hearted attempt to involve newer players more, and the complexity allows for greater tactical planning and execution.

Now let’s see what their economy module is like

Iain