Understanding the problems of the economic module

Day 677, 00:48 • Published in South Korea Spain • by Calangao

The economic module we have today was clearly built with the idea to generate a overproduction problem under peace. Starting a war should be the solution for this problem, creating the demand for items not consumed during peace periods. But we have been in a world war for two months, there are two war games with the participation of 2/3 of the existing countries and there is still an overproduction problem.

The overproduction problem under peace

There are 5 items for consumption in the game: food, gifts, weapons, moving tickets and houses. Weapons are clearly useless if there is no war. A very small fraction of players have a clear understanding of how gifts can help them save money during peace. The only reason to change location was to fight, or to vote, or to move definitively away from a country; but now with citizenship the demand for voting is greatly reduced. Consumption of food is limited to one every day and a worker with manufacture skill 1 and 50 wellness can produce 3 units of Q1 food in a company with 10 workers. So it is actually very easy to produce food enough for everybody. Houses are eternal and their only effect is to decrease the quality if the food demanded, which requires less production points and more food available. And the fact that houses are eternal create a problem that nobody will buy more than one house Q5 and the used lower quality houses are sold through donation competing the companies. That is: without a war the only possible outcome is stockpiling because of the lack of demand for items other than food.

How the war should solve the lack of demand

The standard fighting strategy with weapons requires either 5 weapons or 6 weapons and 10 gifts. For the 5 fights scenario, it requires 5.56 skill points in manufacture and 2.32 skill points in land (Q3 company in high region) to produce the 25 units of iron and transform them into 5 Q1 weapons, all companies with 10 workers and employees with 100 wellness. This is a total of 7.88 skill points just for one soldier to fight fully armed. In the second scenario, 6 fights, it requires 6.68 manufacture for the weapons, 4.46 skill points for the gifts and 4.63 skill in land to produce the raw materials, adding up to 11.14 skill points in manufacture and 4.63 in land, or 15.77 total skill for a 6 fights strategy with Q1 weapons. Anyone with less than 7.88 skill receiving 5 Q1 weapons a day to fight or more is being subsidized. The great majority of players are not even close to this skill level, which makes it a production impossibility today to supply all players with weapons every day. And many players fight with better quality weapons. For instance, 5 fights with Q3 weapons would require 23.64 skill points, and nobody has this skill level yet to be able to fight with Q3 weapons every day. So there are only two ways to fully supply players with weapons, sometimes with something better than Q1: (i) don't fight with weapons every day, or (ii) make some players to fight barehanded while giving the weapons to a selected group of players.

So, while in a peace period it is extremely easy to supply everybody with their basic needs, during a war period it is nearly impossible to supply most player with the very basic items for 5 miserable fights. Hence the war periods were supposed to heat the economy and solve the peace problems of overproduction, but at the same time it should heat too much to keep it as a continuous state of the world. Assuming most of the players would not like the idea of fighting barehanded while some others receive almost everything they produce.

The dream of self-sufficiency and the failure of the completely free market

It is pretty clear that players willing to fight will either join an army that will supply them with weapons using some resource like taxpayers money, or they will want to create a company to make more money than their salary. The preferred companies to start with are food, weapons and iron. Because most of them don't study the market well enough before doing that, now there are 26,976 companies in eRepublik (and counting) that demand 288,250 workers to operate in maximum productivity, while the world population is around 223,500, so around 130,000 gold wasted in vacancies in the equivalent of 6,500 closed companies. It is not uncommon to simulate a company with the salaries being offered in the market (not by trap companies) that are unprofitable by a very big margin in many countries, like Ukraine, Hungary, USA... Bankruptcy seems to be the way people learn in the game, not without creating instabilities in the job market before that.

The effects of war games, constant war, and the forgotten trivia

Almost everyone who joined the game after me never saw the trivia. There were five questions you had to answer each time you worked, trained or fought. Getting those questions right or wrong and the time you tool to answer affected the productivity, the training or the damage in battle. I never used the trivia in war because the module was suspended when I started playing and the trivia was removed when the war module came back. So working, training and fighting war more challenging tasks, but there was also a hack for the trivia to give you the answers, but not fast enough for the full bonus. A good memory could beat the hackers.

The end of the trivia made the last minutes of wars more important, because people could fight much faster without having to answer five questions for each hit. Wars started to pop up, countries trying to conquer regions for raw materials or just trying to solve an economic problem due to a prolonged period of peace. Very few countries had a daily battleground, like Romania and Indonesia, and the baby boomer of that moment: Hungary. The positive effects on the constant war for the wellness, ranking and demand were very clear and the war games came up. USA using resistance wars in Baja, the PEACE war games in Chile×Argentina, the USA war games with Ireland... The war games made the weapons companies to get stoned with constant demand stabilizing the prices during war periods and decreasing prices dramatically during peace.

A surprisingly large and increasing number of players that simply don't care about anything but food Q1 shows up with the war games. And when the real war came up they kept fighting barehanded. They solved the supply problem in a continuous war environment, but precisely because of them the economy don't runs smoothly without a major conflict. With all the conflicts we had the last 2 months, the price of weapons Q5 fell from 1.2 gold a piece to 0.88 gold a piece. Q4 weapons fell from 0.74 gold to 0.54 gold. Q3 went from 0.47 gold to 0.37 a piece (numbers taken from ErepTools). And the world stock of weapons is going up. This is a completely strange consequence due to a counter-intuitive behavior of players.

General suggestions for the new economic module

We have history enough in the game to have war for a reason. The new economic module should have a challenge per se where supplying the citizens' needs during peace is already a scarcity challenge. Because every single product has a military application, foreign trade is often blocked, and this is something that could change as well. Specialization in production could be broader than the individual skill in a way that countries can have more gains from foreign trade.