Join the new world

Our eCitizens live a life that out-Spartans the Spartans. They eat, work, fight and heal. Three times a month they can vote for various things. Sometimes they travel someplace to fight; less often they travel someplace to vote or to start a business. At least the men of Sparta got laid from time to time. In eRepublik there is no sex. Gender matters about as much as where you live within your country, which is not at all.

Now anyone who has known SledDog (and the guy behind him) back to the days of the invasion of eCanada knows that I am less than a fan of the military portion of the game. The War module makes Risk look like high strategy because at least in Risk you have to move units adjacent to what they're attacking. I even wrote an article promoting my point of view back in the day: "If eRepublik Is A Wargame, It's A Crappy One." So you can basically tell that my interests in the game lie outside the mainstream.

It is believed that an update for eRepublik that will be enough to call it V. 2 is coming, and soon. There are concerns about what it might mean for the war module - will it change the effects of Defense Systems, will it change the way we fight, should we hold off on doing things until it is introduced of should we rush in before it is introduced. If some screen shots that slipped out a month or two ago are to be believed what we'll see is the a couple of new industries (aircraft and titanium mining if I'm not mistaken) and the tweaking of a few concepts. As we used to say back in the stone age when I was in high school, "big fat hairy deal." I'd like to see more sweeping and radical change, part of which would force us tro re-examine established ideas and theories, and part of which would make us less Spartan than the Spartans.

I think that my previous article pretty much explains what I think is wrong with the War Module in this game and I know it won't be fixed. I go out like a good little Spartan and fight my fights and come back with my shield rather than on it (since you can’t actually die in battle in this game) but it leaves me thoroughly unfulfilled. Therefore I want to spend most of my time on the two things that really interest me right now in eRepublik: Business and Politics.

One of the things that bothers me about eRepublik is that while the game has regions and allocates resources to regions, regionalism has no place in the game. There is no need to live in the location where you work, and depending on your government considerable disincentive to live there. For work in the Raw Materials sectors this makes no sense. Apparently a worker in the Newfoundland Oil fields can run an offshore oil platform from a hospital bed in Banff, you can harvest a Grain field near Harris Saskatchewan from a sofa in Montreal. Trust me on that, you can’t. What I’d like to see in a revision is that employees in the Land industries have to live in the regions where their employer is based. So if you want to work for an oil company you have to live in Newfoundland, or if you want to mine diamonds you have to live in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories. That would give a reason to live in regions outside of Alberta, Quebec and Ontario and in turn provide a reason to build hospitals in the regions. They’d never do that of course.

Another idea that I’d like to see at least considered is creating a Stock Market or Bourse for companies to acquire investors. They would share in the profits and be able to influence the direction that the company would take. In turn the company’s manager would decide on how much capital would be needed but wouldn’t be fully exposed financially. The investors can buy and sell their shares, can opt to remove the general manager provided they control votes equal to 50% of the shares. Best of all, if the general manager disappears from the game they can take over the company and either run it or offer all the shares for sale. In that way no company would ever really die. Not going to happen.

Turning to politics, we are stuck with a system that is based on equal representation of regions; in other words the American Senatorial system. Canada use this system. Most of the countries in the world don’t use this sort of system of representation. The inevitable result of this, combined with the “fortress strategy” that allows some regions to become wastelands with few if any real residents, is the use of Strategic Voting Units. There are those who decry these Squads as being anti-democratic, but the sad truth is that the existing system of representation is what is truly anti-democratic. What we have now is reminiscent of the system of pocket boroughs that corrupted British politics until the 19 th century reform movement. And yet there are some places where the existing political system is most familiar for people and where the population is so balanced that the system that the game imposes on everyone is acceptable. What I’d like to see is for countries to have the ability to change the electoral system. It wouldn’t do to totally eliminate regional representation entirely but at the very least representation by population would at least partially be implemented. But the way they have it is easy and consistent.

But the changes I would like to see in the political system go beyond this. I would like to see them allow countries individually decide on their form of government, and develop forms closer to their own reality. While I wouldn’t expect a Canadian monarchy, why not a presidency that behaves more like the Governor-General than an American chief executive? Why not a bicameral Congress? Most of all, why not the option to have referenda to decide important matter which would be used for important issues? I would like each country to have the ability to tweak its political system to a form that suits that country. But they’re never going to let us have that.

In the end even if the changes that are coming to eRepublik are going justify labelling what follows them as V. 2. Most likely our eCitizens will continue behaving like little Spartans, working, fighting, healing and occasionally moving (and not getting laid). Even if they don’t adopt the ideas that I’ve presented – and of course they won’t – I would hope that they are sufficiently aware of the status of things that they add more Skill Level groups so that someone with a Skill Level above 7.99 doesn’t get paid the same amount as someone with a Skill Level of 7.00. I would like them to recognise that not everyone is fascinated with the military aspects of the game, and reward those who participate in businesses and in politics or even writing in their newspapers more than they currently do. I’d like to have these things happen ... but even with these I’m not holding my breath.