V2 - Vengeance Weapon Against the Elites?
Day 961, 08:10
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Published in Finland 
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by
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by Erwin Schauman
Despite the torrent of articles published recently that either hail V2 or curse it to the lowest levels of Hell, I still felt inclined to write about few things that caught my eye in the economic and war module which simply do not make sense to me.
.....................Economy module.....................
Generic, boring, overused picture depicting economy!
I guess we can all, or most, agree that the economy module looks and feels better than in the V1 version. Well, I am not really a big fan of the scantily clad hentai girls but who am I to judge people that prefer them? Graphics, however, are something that have the least impact to me. What I am more interested is the overall concept. The big picture, if you may.
The V2 economy module allows the General Managers to tailor their products which brings much needed differentiation in the market. This combined with the product search feature means that successful business management isn't just about who can manufacture the cheapest products (though that naturally still helps).
The user is given 24 hours to use during his gaming day to complete various activities. These activities being working, training for the army, studying and resting. It's entirely upto the individual where he wishes to emphasize the given hours. Some want to rise military ranks rapidly, some invest in the future and study while others are strapped of cash and need to work. It's a nice idea to let the users to have more impact on the development of their player character.
Quite good changes, admittedly, but these are made moot by the realities of the system.
The feature I find most annoying in this new system is undoubtedly the bubble gum fix placed in the products that increase wellness and happiness such as bread and tickets. I had a ticket leftover from V1 that said very clearly that it increases wellness and happiness by 1 when used. So I happily hopped on a plane to see new sights, only to find out that I lost 5 wellness and happiness at arrival. I dismissed it as a bug at first but unfortunately it wasn't.
Little research provided me this amazing line:
"The displayed health/happiness restore values are based on a citizen’s health/happiness of 50. If your citizen’s health/happiness is lower than 50, then the product will provide more health/happiness, and less if the health/happiness is higher than 50."
Apparently, instead of showing the user just how much a Q5 bread gives him wellness/happiness, it now mocks him and says all the stats it shows are based on wellness 50. What the hell? I am suppose to freaking calculate it now? In real world this would be called false advertising. In this world it is called a lazy way to ”fix” an issue since apparently users aren't suppose to get easy wellness and happiness anywhere so one has to urinate in their cereals by coming up with arbitrary, Soviet style Tac 'N Stick changes to make the entire system hold together.
Hopefully the admins understand to add a way to see just how much happiness and wellness products give you with your current wellness, instead of dumping all the responsibility on the users.
Now, moving on to the second issue. I imported all of my skills on engineer like many of you and now have the rank of guru*. Wohoo! If I study a lot to make more money and-- wait! Lets look at the productivity formula the admins finally put on the wiki first before getting carried away, shall we?
Productivity formula:
Productivity = 1/2 * A * B * (C + D) * E
A: Employees multiplier
B: Skill level
C: Health multiplier
😨Happiness multiplier
E: Working hours
"B: Skill level." Skill level... so wait, all the surplus points I have on engineer are worthless and only the level matters!? Everyone who's at the same guru* level as me do exactly the same amount of productivity as me?!
Alright, alright. Calm down, Erwin. This can't be as bad as it seems. I am sure the level differences are very small to compens-- 80 000 POINTS?! I just got +63 for working 12 hours today! Even if I study 4 hours and work 8 hours a day with full health (how exactly?), it will still take 168 days to level up!
Now, one could use boosters to get there faster. The only problem being that it's going to cost you a dump truck full of gold AND hours that could be used somewhere else. Not to mention that in addition to the booster studying, you have to increase your happiness somehow and that takes gold yet again. Brilliant. It's going to take ages for that investment to pay for itself. Provided that you get a raise when you reach a new level, that is. And no, your salary isn't going to double. It's more than likely to get a 10% increase.
Okay, so studying doesn't seem all that smart at high levels. What else does V2 offer us to waste our hours on, then?
.....................Militar y module.....................
Why couldn't it be like Hogs of War?
🙁(
Naturally there's not all that much I can say about the military module. It isn't ready yet. Perhaps never is. I know what I saw during the testing and it's not going to be good until the issues with wellness recovery, cherry picking and hospital use are fixed.
I am not here to talk about those though. There's another thing about the war module, specifically in the skill importation, that is amusing.
You see, I had strength 22.something in V1. That's agreeably pretty low. Not enough to ever get proper government funding in fights in the form of wellness pack gold. That funding went to the monsters with strength 40+. Oh, how I envy them and their huge... wellness pack funding.
Now, lets look at the fighting formulas in V2 as per the defined by the almighty wiki.
Attack chance formula:
A = B + ((ATT - DEF) / (100 / (100 -
😎))
A: Attack hit chance
B: Basic Hit Chance (60
😵
ATT: Attack Value depending on weapon customization and including all bonuses
DEF: Defense Value depending on weapon customization, including all bonuses
Hmm... no mention of military skills having any impact. It seems that military training didn't teach you the basic skill of dodging. Oh well, even if the tanks of old are as lousy shots as Timmy 13 years old that just started playing, I am sure they'll do vastly more damage than the rest of us common mortals.
Lets see what the damage formula says, then:
D = ((1 + (S - 1)/10) × W) + R
😨the soldier's damage
W: the weapon's basic damage
S: the soldier's weapon skill
R: random modifier
”S: the soldier's weapon skill.” So wait, we are again looking at levels here, not the points that are between two levels? I am Field Marshal Veteran 10... lets look what Rupetot has then... must be 18 or something... Field Marshal Veteran* 11?! Well, this is a bit shocking but I am sure the level differences in damage are huuuuge. No need to panic! Lets see... veteran 10... increased weapon damage +90%... veteran* 11... increased weapon damage +100%?
So wait. This dude that made roughly thrice as much damage as me in V1 now only makes few points more?! And cannot hit any better than me?! Oo
Note that all these formulas are taken from Wiki, and although there's a fair chance that they are not correct (since when has Wiki ever been right?), and even larger chance that they will be ultimately changed, right now it seems that some matters weren't thought trough at all. Like how wasting an absurd amount of gold for months and months (333 days to rise from veteran* to veteran*
😉to train your military skill simply to get... +10% weapon damage. Woo..hoo?
If the formulas and concepts remain unchanged, I'd say the best idea for older users like me is not to train or study at all. If the points you have between skills are worth exactly zero, then continuous studying isn't going to increase your salary in the short run. You'll only get a salary increase after reaching a new level. Same with military training that bears fruit only when you reach a new skill rank. And even then the increase in your fighting potential is laughable. Certainly not worth the hundreds of gold wasted on Napoleon. Too bad for those who did that in V1.
So my scheme, under these settings, is simple: Work 12 hours a day, rest the rest. Working trains your work skill a wee bit and you even get paid for it! The money you gain from working can then be used in the military module which also conveniently increases military rank points. The 12 happiness you lose each day for working can be recovered by sleeping 12 hours without using boosters (or actually 11 hours is enough since the free booster gives you 1 extra).
Progress might be slower this way but seeing how there's little or no reason to progress, especially by paying gold for it, then maybe it's better to skip these unnecessary parts altogether.
Training and studying are for noobs.
[img]http://cdn-www.cracked.com/phpimages/article/2/0/8/26208.gif?v=1[/img]
V2 war module
-Erwin Schauman
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You should also consider that now the fights are PvP, so the 10% increase damage are now much more significant because it might be the diference between getting "killed" or not.
great article 😃
voted
Voted!
@Phusion9: Well, no. I don't see it that way. If we consider that I make on average 30 points of damage (completely arbitrary at this point) then the older tanks that were so ridiculously much stronger than me in V1 make 33 points of damage. In the larger schemes of things, it really doesn't influence the battle all that much.
If I were to fight against rupetot with the current settings, then the winner would very likely be decided by who gets the first strike. Heck, even the anti-weapon bonuses are bigger than his natural "advantage" of +10%.
The tanks of old are castrated. When before there was no one that could had challenged them, now there are thousands.
Yeah, I'm quite interested in the fighting module as well... if the formula is good, then strength in V1 counts for nothing, and people are going to leave the game, if a couple of months old character can hit 90% of a 3 year old character...
Just as a note: I am not actually complaining about the elites getting trashed a bit in this new version. I am all for it and gleefully accept it, but I do not think that the elites that spent hundreds of gold to consolidate their position in the upper tiers of the eSociety agree with the changes.
I got nerfed
;_;
@Ervin Schauman:
"The tanks of old are castrated. When before there was no one that could had challenged them, now there are thousands."
If this is true, it sucks @ss... Maybe I'm the idiot, but I didn't play this game everyday for 1,5 years just to be beaten by some n00b... this really isn't fair.
@Galantai: I actually doubt they know exactly how the war module should work either. They only added some formulas to throw a bone to the users. Those cannot possible be right as Q5 houses will be worth roughly 80 gold and Q5 hospitals 1000 gold according to current production estimations. Admins have no choice but to tweak them.
They could had of course shown the formulas before and saved themselves and the users some trouble but noooo...
This is it how it should be considering skills: people should actually be able to catch the big guys, and to change their profession when the economy's needs change without losing all of their current productivity forever (especially in this new model that needs way more flexibility). The problem is, exactly, the people who bought gold with real money to improve their character. Heck, the admins could even get sued for this..
@Erwin:
What I don't understand is: why did they have the fricken Beta testing if they didn't fix the issues???
A logical man would say, that when I want a new version, I test it THOROUGHLY until it is perfect, THEN I release it...
These goons just did a few weeks of testing, concluded that the whole thing sucks, and then they released it anyways... Talk about morons...
i don't think those numbers/formulae re right. Even during the beta battles, the damages made by someone with say, 10strength more is approximately 3damage/turn. multiple that by 10 turns, you re talking about 30-40 damages difference in p2p
so one has to urinate in their cereals by coming up with arbitrary, Soviet style Tac 'N Stick changes to make the entire system hold together. x2
This is what happens when you get an Admin team that cares more about paying off a 2 million euro debt than they do their own player base.
Its why eRepublik will slowly wither and then die.
So the ones who bougth gold in V1 are puked on. Rest can just settle and learn the new way of living in V2.
@Carr De Vaux: Well, alright. Lets consider a scenario where I always make 30 points with each fight and the old tank I fight against makes 33 points with each fight.
I get the first attack:
Erwin Schauman deals 30 points of damage to X
X has 70 wellness remaining
X deals 33 points of damage to Erwin Schauman
Erwin Schauman has 67 points remaining
Erwin Schauman deals 30 points of damage to X
X has 40 wellness remaining
X deals 33 points of damage to Erwin Schauman
Erwin Schauman has 34 points remaining
Erwin Schauman deals 30 points of damage to X
X has 10 wellness remaining
X loses the battle!
If this is how it goes, how does that 3 points of damage per fight help?
The tanks might deal more theoretical damage but their chances of winning are only marginally higher than people that had twice as little strength. First strike is still more important. So yea, they are "better" but not as good as they were in V1. The difference has been reduced a lot.
Of course, I don't expect it to stay this way.
"There's always a chance that some hits will be stronger than usual. They are called critical hits. The chance is higher with higher military ranks. The critical damage is 50% (+ eventual booster used) higher than the normal damage."
http://wiki.erepublik.com/index.php/Military_rank">http://wiki.erepublik.com/index.php/Mili[..]_rank
hogs of war o/
Thats the reason I'll quit. After more than 2 years of playing now i'm just like a noob.
@Phusion9: Correct. However, those work in my favor as well. And I did mention that the old tanks and I are all basic Field Marshals. They are more than likely to go up various Field Marshal levels once the importation is final, but those only add +1% to critical hits each.
Not a huge advantage is it? +10% to damage and some +5% increase in chance of getting a crit? Still, the one who strikes first counts more.
good job admin ,now the rich nubby player are tank
Thank you Erwin for writing my thoughts 100%, saving me precious time.
I'm about 160000 skill points away from Guru** (level 12), so I think I'll just library to that point without boosters and then give it a rest. I probably will never train again, because it's pointless. I'm already as good as Rupetot, Veteran* (level 11).
Then funny thing is that in V1 I used Napoleon every day (even though I had a ~4 month break), now there's no point in using boosters at all 😃 So admins are going to get less gold than they did, which is great 🙂
voted. gg admins
@Scadens: But the point I was trying to make that you shouldn't study or train at high levels at all. 🙂
160 000 points is a massive amount. I seem to recall that training 12 hours yields you slightly less than 1000 study points (with 100/100 setting). With the skill increase gotten from working that makes roughly 1000. It's about 160 days of training that could be reduced to about 53 by using the best booster.
Now, if you use the best booster it's 1.79gx53 = 94,87gold. Since training so hard eats up your happiness, you have to boost it periodically and that's not free. Yes, you can go to the gym for free but in reality every hour wasted resting eats away from somewhere else. And if you want to have the biggest bonus, you must have happiness at maximum.
So we can add an estimated 20 gold into the expenses of that studying, making it roughly 115 gold.
Now the question is: how fast do you think that investment is going to pay itself back? You aren't going to get double as high salary from your boss, as guru* gets +800% production bonus and guru** receives +900% production bonus. That's basically 800 products compared to 900 (or however they calculate it. Ain't double in any regard).
If you answered "long after I've stopped playing", you're probably right.
Erwin you're right, I did calculations too hastily. I figured I'd be a guru** in a couple of months, but I didn't figure the cost would be so extremely high in production.
Now that I studied the situation more, I can conclude my own situation:
If I don't use boosters at all while working 12h/day when compared to 8h work+5h library, I'm better off till 330 days.
The break-even point for 8h work+6h library is 282 days and for 8h work+7h library at 252 days 😃
And that doesn't include the happiness lost in studying.
Ridiculous. Oh, I forgot: training military 7 hours a day for 580 days would make me veteran** 🙂
Healt / Happiness formula:
http://erepmanuale.altervista.org/utilita/calcolo_health_happiness.xls">http://erepmanuale.altervista.org/utilit[..]s.xls
Saruman iski jälleen!
Health/Happiness calculator, please vote.
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-nuova-versione-salute-e-felicit--1449558/1/20">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-nuo[..]/1/20
both economy and military modules are utter failure so far... and even worse due the release of them in this pre-alpha state
idea of pvp sucks hard
tanks are crying "every noob can pwn me" and leave, noobs (real noobs with private rank) are crying "im got pwned by other players without any reason, it is not fair!" and leave. Both of them are right.
The idea of PvP is very good for MMORPG like WoW/Lineage 2/etc (where strength of player depends of his activity in game), not here!
@Diamond101: yea, as a concept it sounds really, really great. More interactive battlefield, who doesn't want that? The problems arise from the practical implementation that is far from being easy, as well as the way how the human psyche works. People don't want fair fights. They want to win. That then leads to cherry picking, which demotivates the new players to continue playing.
This was a major issue in a browser game I used to play. It was basically a game of football where anyone could issue a challenge to any team. Needless to say, many rather chose to pick worse coaches and weaker teams so they get an easy win and develop their team much quicker. This created a lot of bad blood between the users and eventually with the administration, which was forced to make some changes.
The way it was solved was by placing restrictions how much the team power difference could be for the match to count, as well as by adding coach rating that was affected by the fairness of the match. Naturally, picking on the weaker teams didn't earn you much prestige points. Indeed, you would lose a lot if you happened to lose. In addition, you could at anytime see what kind of opponents the user fought against. The public shaming of cherry pickers did the trick and people started to pick fairer matches due to peer pressure.
Something similar could work on eRepublik V2 war module too, I'd imagine.
Erwin, you seem like a very smart person as mostof your replies rally show common sence which seems lacking by a lot of other human beings (especially the species that also surf on the internet)
I think the idea of a 'hall of shame' type of thing like you described above would be perfect. But the differences between persons that played for years and persons that played for months should be much higher.
i was actually surpriced to see i'm allready a Master (skill 😎 while i only played for maybe a few months, while the highest skill i have seen so far is 11 (Guru*😉. those 'high skills' have usually played for 2 years or something i guess. the point is, they only produce about 30% more then me. what's even worse, it will take MONTHS to get from skill 10 to 11 and YEARS to get from skill 11 to 12, and i don't even think anyone would ever make skill 15 in his LIFE.
the formula's aren't thought of thoroughly (sorry for my spelling if it's not right) and the beta period was clearly way too short.
Not really too short as too badly organized.
It was just used for hunting visible bugs but similar focus should had been placed on perfecting the formulas. Obviously it was difficult since people didn't play it like it was the real version, but come on! These formulas are so visibly flawed that they should had been noticed on the drawing board. And indeed they would had been HAD those all been showed to the users. But again, no.
It was obviously too difficult to vomit out simple mathematical formulas before publishing the live version. And now users end up paying for it while the admins keep on changing the formulas blindly over and over again. It's like Survivor on eRepublik - the guys with the shortest temper are voted out by the admins. Too bad this all hurts the company image and people are less inclined to recruit friends to play. Friends, that might become paying customers.
But admins seem to be happily living in their dream castle where users are garbage and keep on playing no matter how shitty job they do, and all who complain are wrong and everyone who praises them is right. It must be a great fantasy world to live in. I wonder if it has less bugs than this fantasy world and if they are handing out invitations...
I can remember Hogs of War.