Join the new world

Dear friends,

Let me continue in the same vein as my last article, and talk a bit about the game, and where it can and should be improved. Today I’m going to talk about the war module, but first I want to give you all a thought experiment to be pondering whilst you read.

Imagine that the admins add a new country to the game. Like North Korea or (in theory) Kosovo, the addition was intended less as a real genuine desire to improve the game for a minority of players without a home, but was instead intended as a thought experiment. It is well known that the admins added North Korea to the game to see what would happen- to make us their lab rats. Imagine then that they chose to do this again, and the way that they chose to do it was to add a country without borders. The other day I noticed that if it were added, Uzbekistan would border no other country in eRepublik. Say then that tomorrow Uzbekistan was added- or Antarctica if you want to be more politically neutral.

Say that this country had a fair balance of resources- say 3 food and 2 weapons resources. This is the normal balance for countries with more than five core regions. However, the country cannot attack any other country. It cannot be the victim of an attack itself. It cannot engage directly in war at all, only via MPP. Now what I’m asking is, what would happen next. This game is entirely community generated. Would people move there, despite there being no war? Who would move there? What kind of community would form. What exactly, without a war module, would they do?


Coolinbun would say they want to move it move it

Whilst you’re sitting thinking about that (the obvious answers put aside) let’s move onto the issue of the war module. Please remember that I don’t think of all my ideas as separate suggestions, and so you should bear in mind my last article whilst you read this one. It is apparent that the war module is the goal and the purpose for the game now. Originally made in beta as a political/economic simulator with a military module, it is now a military module with some political and economic elements. Essentially the whole purpose of the game is to increase your damage in battle, and the only sideshows to that are to what extent you can afford to do it. If you’re particularly talented at the economy you can perhaps afford to be a strong citizen, but there are no real goals beyond that- other than reaching meaningless and arbitrary goals like “one million currency” or “200 companies” or whatever else you care to name.

So we’re stuck with nothing but a war module. And for that matter, it’s not even a very good war module. Our only option is to attack, and attacking doesn’t guarantee victory. Attacking isn’t a means to an end anymore; it is the end in itself. We’re not trying to establish Empires; we’re just hamsters running on a wheel. The war is the hamster in motion, and the never moving goal is the achievement of the unachievable- sustainable and beneficial conquest and “improvement” of the nation.

To improve the war module we need to make some big changes both to the nature of warfare, and to the end results. A lot of the ways to do this hinge around the re-introduction of a much modified wall system.


And even some music for you

For those of you too young to remember, in V1 of the game battles involved attacking or defending a “wall”. We still call the battle counter that today out of habit, but despite having the same name it is totally different. In V1 the “wall” was literally a blockade keeping the enemy out. When a country attacked a region, it incurred a cost relative to the size of the wall. It also faced the often daunting prospect of trying to reduce the wall to zero or below, then holding it there for a full 24 hours. A wall represented a damage block equivalent to the number of people living in a region multiplied by some number I forget. So for example, the wall might be 1,000,000. You would therefore need to do 1,000,000 damage to reduce the wall to 0 and hold it there until the end of the battle to win. On the other hand, the defenders would be trying to keep the wall above 1,000,000 until the end of the battle so they could win.

This gave wars a much more strategic element. In those days, reducing a wall alone would cost a good chunk of your available damage. A particularly high wall required an enormous amount of coordination to beat. It affected and changed the whole nature of warfare- it gave an advantage to the defender and made the interchanging of regions a lot less frequent. Empires did exist and defending regions was much easier. There will be people reading this saying this would be unfair for small countries- people said it in the last article too. I don’t care, small countries are the natural prey of this world, and small countries are going to get crushed. And I come from a small country. It is a lot better and more satisfying than the current region ping-pong game we’re all playing now, where you barely beat your enemy before you’re getting attacked by resistance wars.

So yes, I’d introduce a cost for war.


He had silly hair, but he knew how to hold initiative

Secondly we are missing a lot of potential changes to the initiative feature. In the real world, an attacking army generally gains initiative when it wins, and loses it when it loses. Thus far it’s in keeping with the game. But what if you defeated an army and chased them to another region. They’d be defeated, low morale, poor defences. You would expect an advantage. Why not give this advantage in terms of a modifier on the size of the wall. For example, on attacking for the first time you have a wall at 100% strength. The next region is 90% and so on down to 50% strength if you’ve routed the enemy five times in a row or more.

In Snooker, which is a game I am hopeless at by the way, each shot is made with consideration for where the white will end up at the end of the shot. This is so you’re in position to make your next shot. We could quite easily add an element of strategy to eRepublik by introducing a mandatory attack period after the end of the last battle, but most importantly by making that period 6-12 hours after the end of the previous battle. This makes it difficult. This makes strategy more important. Say you start your battle in prime-time, and say your prime time is 00:00. A normal battle would therefore end between twelve and thirty hours later. At the minute, you just wait for the clock to tick over to prime time again (assuming you won) and then assault. Putting a fixed time in would mean that there might be a need for forcing a quick victory, or for dragging it out a bit so you could attack at a good time the next day. This would make eRep like snooker, so when you assault you're not just thinking about where the ball starts, but where it finishes. Alternatively, you could scrap the fixed time period and just give the defenders a large bonus on their wall if you showed up before or after the allotted period- thus introducing a secondary layer of strategy in the form of whether or not you should risk fighting at a poor time, or risk fighting against a stronger opponent.

What about Military Units in battle. I suggested half-heartedly a few months ago that the admins could do worse than introduce some sort of benefit for fighting with other people in your unit. How about, with minimal effort, they add a system whereby if half your regiment or more succeeds in the “fight” mission in a single daychange-daychange period, the regiment gains a 10% boost in the following 24 hour period. It would be easy enough to make the requirement so you needed a minimum amount of troops in the regiment (ie, you couldn’t be in one on your own and get a free damage boost), but it would benefit those units which are well organised and well led.


And here was a man who knew how to retreat...

In accompaniment with the above ideas, how about we reintroduce retreat as an option. If a country pushes retreat, it immediately loses the battle. However the normal “rout” bonus isn’t given to the attacker, because the defender has managed to make an orderly withdrawal. Obviously there would have to be limits here, otherwise every country 7-0 down would retreat in the last 5 minutes. Perhaps a good option would be that you can only retreat in the first four rounds. We could even add in a “pursue” button for the attacker, which would become available within one hour of a retreat and would eliminate the normal disadvantages of attacking early or late (as described above). It would give yet another layer of strategy for a general leading a war.

In the real world, it is hard to defend a region full of partisan guerrillas, as the Nazis learned in France and the Americans learned in Indochina. It wouldn’t be hard to reflect that in the initiative/wall system by giving a penalty to defenders in a region with an active resistance. This could be done two ways. Firstly the admins could make it so if an attacked region came under attack from an internal resistance (or vice versa) the wall bonus for the defence was reduced, to reflect the fact it was under attack from within as well as without. Secondly the admins could go the complete opposite way, and say that an attacking force would “join the resistance” so to speak, combining it into one larger conflict, and making life more difficult for the defender.


Yes, that's a picture of an arsenal

Last week in my article I talked about national projects. At the time the focus of my article was on economic issues, and so the national project ideas I spoke about were mainly focused on giving bonuses to production. How about we add two new national project ideas: the Arsenal and the Fortress. An Arsenal is a weapons storage facility, and in eRep this could translate into a Launchpad for assaults. If you’re a country which frequently attacks, it might be worth building an Arsenal or two. The Arsenal could (for example) be designed to give a 5% stackable attack bonus to assaults made on regions bordering the region with the Arsenal in it. The Fortress on the other hand would be defensive, and could perhaps give a 10% defence bonus to anyone attacking that region. Now this is where things get interesting. You cannot build both in a single province. So by building the means to attack, you make yourself vulnerable on the defence. In addition, since a fortress gives an advantage to the defender, attacking without an Arsenal would be even more difficult. To make the situation even more painful, in my concept of “national projects” each project would be manufactured at the same cost, and would come in different qualities. To have a really good defence, you’d need to focus on building for a long time. It’s unlikely any country would have a defence without any holes in it. You could quite easily end up with a Maginot Line situation, where the enemy skirts carefully round your hard build defences and bites you in the arse.

As I’m rapidly approaching my own self-set limit of 2000 words, I’m going to call it a day. I hope that it’s not been too boring. To bring this article full circle, cast your thoughts back to our country without borders. The admins talk about how they want to bring more players to the game, but they cater only for one kind of player- the player who loves fighting, and (preferably) has a grudge against a natural enemy in the game. There are few people who could live in a country without borders, because those kind of players quit the game. We had lots in Beta, a few in V1 and virtually none now. The admins tried their best to get the numbers back after V2, but until they make the game complex enough that living in the country without borders is possible, you’re not going to ever sell it to the masses.

Best,

Iain



A few ideas on terrain bonuses by a reader