Join the new world

Oh, and sorry about the wall of text.

Nice work! A shame there are no really solid economic investments but I agree, the investment in the free training centre seems to be the best approach particularly as it lets you rank up faster as well.

Every now and then there is a 'special offer' that allows you to upgrade the training centre at about half the normal cost, if people can hang on until then the payback is much faster.

This is quite helpful. Thanks for doing it - I think I learned this the hard way.

because company building is tied to the monetary market (MM) it is at the moment expensive to build companies for gold or for currency. and as you write there is if any then just low profit (with weapon-companies you even lose money).

use your money and trade it on the MM that's the only way to make some money these days
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2171240/1/20

by the way:

working will give you 2experience points/company (fighting is just 1exp/10energy😉 so working in many companies as newbie is not a good idea because you will level up quicker with working and higher level and with this you will get into a higher division in the fights - this equals stronger opponents in the battle for a battlehero medal and the gold reward coming with it. at the latest in division4 you won't be able to get a battlehero for a long time!


*thats not the same as clicking fight once as it varies how many single hits you need depending on strength and energy of the opponent - so you will need 10energy to kill one weak enemy but 30 for the next stronger one and respectively 1use of a weapon vs 3uses but both will be done with one click on fightbutton!

Thanks for that Chris - I forgot about that, even though one was on under a week ago! I'll edit the article with that.

And eisenmutter2 - thanks for the hints. I know it's tied to the MM, and because the AUD converts to gold rather terribly at the moment, it's a pretty bad time to make any investments. But we don't know if the economic climate is going to turn around anytime soon, and it's pointless to have 50 gold sitting in your account and never doing anything with it. Might as well have some fun, thats what the game is for! But if you really wanted the most out of your gold, you could cash it all into AUD now, and wait for the AUD-Gold exchange rate to increase, then literally double your gold when it does. But the presumption there is that the AUD-Gold exchange rate increases. If that happens quickly, you can easily make a lot of money. But the AUD-Gold exhchange rate has been pretty much terrible for years now!

And you're correct that working will level you up quicker (ignoring the gold bonuses from leveling up here) - it's one of the reasons I recommended the training centre. Battle Hero medals are useful, but they do require you to have weapons - you can't really get the BH medal on your own if you haven't played, you need to find a MU that will give you supplies, or a government. Thanks for the hints - I'll edit them into the OP. I thought them, just didn't write it! 🙂

Join an MU (Military Unit) and they will cover your daily fights with food & weapons (Hopefully)

Spend all your gold on upgrading your training centres (When the 44 to 50% specials are on)

The 1st 3 training centres at Q4 will actually earn you gold with the SS medals and HW medals combined, at a rate of 51.7 strength per day.

It is better to focus on personal strength rather than being a businessman if you don't buy gold, after all soldiers win battles and not factories ; )

Good effort by the way : )

v + s

But needs more pics ...

😛😛

Thanks Henry - I would've but in more pics, but they just didn't feel right... plus it's hard to balance the pics between Binda's love for cats and everyone else's loves for... other images 😛

Yeah, the MU hints are useful, but I felt they shouldn't be covered in an article on gold investment, more in an article on fighting. I would definitely advise spending your first gold on a training centre, but this article was more to show why than just say it... I wouldn't spend gold on the 2nd and 3rd training centres untill you've upgraded your first one to Q4. But thanks for the hints! 🙂

And thanks guys! Just got to 23 votes, more than the 5th article in top news - should be in the top news sometime soon! 🙂

V+S

Thanks 🙂

If/when my application for the eAus forums is accepted, I'll post this in the guide section 🙂

Just as a heads up, the discounts aren't only on during holidays, they cycle through every month or two 🙂

Other than that, good article. And it's sad but true that there's no such thing as a true investment in this game :/

Don't know why I didn't put that in there, I meant to say "often occuring during the holiday events" rather than "occuring during holiday events". Thanks for picking that up!

Yeah, it's sad how terrible the investments are. But if you can get that first upgrade at 50% off, the 125 days isn't a bad deal, for eRepublik 🙂

Really good. I've been thinking about this for a while, and makes me think for the moment to sell all my Raw food producing businesses. My only reason for not doing this sooner is I already have them, and it doesn't cost me anything to have them aside from opportunity cost, but may consider buying another food or weps factory with the income... It would also be interesting to see the how the Return on investment changes with spending money on higher quality businesses.

I'll run the numbers to see how Weps factories and raw weps work along this profit side of things.

Yeah, I haven't used Wep factories yet, so I didn't include them. I started off with raw food, then Q1, then I realised my mistake, and started researching it. The problem is - raw food is so unprofitable, but it's also needed for Q1 food. If your initial investment is a Q1 food company, someone else has to have a raw food company (well, for every 5 food company 4 raw companies are needed)... but there is no benefit to having the raw food company, so it'll be underproduced if everyone reads this 😛

If you want to message me with the weapon factory info, feel free to 🙂

From an article Vyrin posted a week or two ago, he showed that instead of upgrading from Q1 to Q2 food, it is much better to buy a second Q1 company - minimum profit from a Q1 company is $0.05 per unit compared to an increase of $0.03 per unit for going from Q1 to Q2.

What would be interesting as well is the difference between having two Q1 companies an a Q1 and a raw - would not purchasing the materials be a good enough reward for sacrificing that extra profit? I don't think it would, unless raw mat prices increase and Q1 prices decrease (which should happen if everyone started making Q1 food instead of raw food, but I doubt it would. eRep economics and real world economics are quite different)

That is the biggest challenge in the game economics is that it is not like RL. If 50 active players sold their Raw Materials businesses, the price of Raw Materials would go up. If I released 10,000 units of q1 food for 4cents, that would force prices to drop. This is most evident in the Money Market. I have made money before buying out much of the AUD being sold for 0.002 Gold and then just posting it for 450AUD = 1 gold (which took about 2 weeks to sell). It is an aspect of the game though not many people focus on, so I appreciate the article.

Yeah, in RL economics everything would change rather easily - but in eRep, you need to have a big player to change something. For the price to drop, someone needs to drop 10k units to change the price, which means as a noob you can't do much but try and get the most out of the climate - only the really big players can change it.

Thanks eisenmutter for your article - this is good stuff - finally being discussed in eAUS

Agreed, this type of thing needs to be discussed more 😃

@Mickskitz Day 1,867, 04:44
with producing weapons you lose money (except q6 and q7)!!
(see the article i linked there is one about products and companies too)

if you produce as manager 1q3 weapon you need 30raws (its 10raw per qualitylevel you can see this if you go to upgrade a weapon company and then hover over the companies)

these 30raws alone cost 1.80cc and even the expensive q3weapons on AUS market are just 1.00cc
so it's cheaper to (sell raw and) buy the weapons

well i produce 13.000foodraw i sell (before it was ~16k) and 10.000 weaponraw per day. the admins have the bot who is still buying foodraw i think because it would drop to 0.01cc the second the bot would not buy...

weaponraw-price is still at 0.06cc because weapons are used (even the low quality ones - for rockets).

what i can't understand is that there are still low quality weapons on market for a lower prize than the worth of the needed raw. i think it's because many newbies are just producing without calculating
just had a canadian newb who produced q3-weapons because 'it's a much more open market than weapon raw' and 'diversification' as day one-economy knowledge and such nonsense.

that producing q3 weapons meant burning ~11cc profit*/company every day didn't impress him... same with all weapons from q1-q4


(*canada has more weapon-boni than australia - so if you produce weapons here you lose even more money)

and training + bazookas from the MU daily-order will bring you BattleHero gold in div1and 2 maybe in 3 but when you reach div4 you will just be a small fry. so don't work more than you need.

what i also do is buying q1-companies for 9.00g (for example when there is the 44%upgrade offer - when everyone needs gold hey will try to sell the companies)

and then i sell them for 9.95gold later (so for a buyer it is still cheaper than building the company)
in the sheet you see after making the offer it takes ~10days to sell a q1 company (but i have some q1 that took over 40days so usually it is less than 10days)
this should work in australia too


however higher qualities don't sell nowadays because every other week we have the 44%upgrade-special... this kills the business


with MM now it probably would bring more profit to just make all gold to currency and wait for the MM to go down more and buy gold then. but some month ago with 2500cc = 1gold on MM company trading was an easy way to always have enough gold to train at least in the small training center


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjMtJU7oDAUPdHdENUhoTUM5RjBLcEVBZUdDZGhLSGc#gid=0

You make good points eisenmutter2 - especially about not working as much as possible if you don't need to, otherwise you'll reach Div 4 and won't get the Battle Hero gold for a long, long time. This game really needs to encourage making raw goods, because from what you're saying there is no point making raw goods into weapons, it's cheaper to buy them... something is seriously wrong with this economic model 😛

Thanks so much for your usefull hints and links 🙂

@Arcaian Day 1,867, 11:18

yes it's in the history books of erepublik and all begun with managerworking to make it easier for newbies to earn money

before we had real! management of individual! companies in different countries
= different tax and boni

and we had much more products and influence of worker number and health on productivity and and and

so all in all you really had to manage the companies and you couldn't do this with 50 and more companies like some have now and just work there as manager



so the beginning was
1. manager working = admins fail

then we got
2. overproduction and the admins tried to buy all not needed stuff (like food because everyone now was born with a food-company) and made the BOT

3. the bot bought all stuff and we got more and more currency from it ingame
(goldbuyers back then could just buy bazookas - so just damage came into the game)
[3a we got 1 MM for all countries so no different currencies anymore ]

result of the bot money was
4. the MM rocketed from 1000 up to 2000 and then nearly 3000cc for 1gold = fail

with this everyone was able to
5. buy q4 raw companies en masse for like 3gold and less
~ so 1medal with 5gold reward was nearly 2new companies!

because BOT bought all raw and more raw was produced becuse more companies wer built we got more and more currency

6. admins saw that the BOT won't work so they made the prices for which the bot was buying lower and lower - prices on market followed without any delay because of massive overproduction

7.admins invented rockets (need weapons to be built) so now goldbuyers are pumping all gold into the MM to get currency to buy weapons for the rockets

good thing but too weak

weaponraw prices skyrocket - more companies are built

8. admins invent airstrike
but it is too expensive so no one is using it = admins fail again

9. filled with panic admins invent q7
the weapon doesn't use like 70units of raw (with q6 being 60units and q5 50 and so on) no it has to be 200!!! they want all the raw absorbed!!! so 200units per weapon it is

result: the weapon raw prices go up from 0.07cc back then to 0.25 and even 0.30 and higher!!!
more raw-companies will be built to get some of this nice profit

funny things
a. because of the high raw prices q7-weapons are built with loss for quite some time

and even today with buildingcosts for a q7weapon (with employees / without) ~ 13cc / 12cc and prices on market around 14 to 16 (with tax to be paid) you don't really make decent profit

b. all low quality companies are killed because they all work with loss (because of high raw prices)
and this is true until today - we just have q7 and q6 with profit (and q5 is maybe ~0.50cc per unit profit)

so again big big fail

results:

monetary market is nearly gone with just one currency (one market) and the 10gold-limit per day
and fisrt the up because of the bot-currency, now the down because bot is nearly killed and goldbuyers pumping gold into game

food companies and raws were killed with managerworking and starting companies for newbies because the only ones buying food always have been the newbies - now they have their own food from the start
(just with very low wages because of q7 they made huge! profits for some time but thats history now)

weapon companies were killed alltogether with q7
some can now produce again though

all in all companies bring not much profit or even lose money because of overproduction
only winners are weapon-raw-old-farmers

admins: nowadays they try in panic to keep the prices up with special events. so we don't have one every 3 or 4 weeks like before but now we have multiple specials together coming about every week and sometimes even accompanied by missions

well thats the history of economic fail of the admins from memory (so was not able to trace the MM-movement and tie it to the fail that it was based on)

Thanks Eisen! I know that start of that history - I was playing in 2008 and 2009. It seemed much better then, with the economic model at least. Since I came back, I've figured out what changed, but not why it changed. That makes sense! I still wonder why they let you work for your own company... kinda sad whats happened. Only way to make money nowadays is by gaming the MM... You should put that somewhere to keep, Eisen. The wiki maybe? It's very interesting 🙂

@Arcaian Day 1,867, 18:56

i think the aim was to make the game more simple to make it easier for newbies
there are many citizens who are losing money in this 2click economy we have now so i would say back then with a more complex economy much more have lost money


now it is easier for newbies
- they start with some companies
- there is just one monetary market so no exchange to other currencies
- no companies in different coutries but just in your CS country
- management of companies is now central with the citizen and only variables are tax and boni of your CS country

- bazookas to enable newbies to get battleheros
- different other medals you can get as newbie
- different divisions


so in the past the admins got their RLmoney from eliteplayers like Romper
now the new goldbuyers are newbies who invest money to get the easy BHs in div 1 and 2 but many quit after reaching div3 or at the latest div4 because then they can't get the BHs that easy anymore and get disillusionated

well for now i have bookmarket this article - maybe i delete an article from me and paste it into it...

Yeah, I got a battlehero yesterday, but nearly lost out on it to an Indian player, who only had 125 strength.. to my thousand. Seems pretty stupid that he can do 510k damage to my 560k, when he has 10x less strength than me. It does make it easier for noobs, but it removes the satisfaction you get from going well - it's the same tradeoff so many games are making - depth versus accessibility. You can have both, but many games make themselves accessible by removing depth and it really damages the game.

Thanks for bookmarking it - it means a lot for someone who obviously knows so much about the game to bookmark my article!

@Arcaian Day 1,868, 04:37
"Thanks for bookmarking it "

yeah i did that*

i often miss new articles of my subs so to be sure to monitor some of more importance i keep them as bookmarks too because it's hard to find a paper in the subscriptions (and if you are looking for a single article and can't exactly remember who wrote it it is even harder... )

* it's not on book market. the later in the day the worse my english

Yeah, when you're subscribed to a lot of newspapers you can easily lose track of articles 🙂

This is now an official tutorial on the Australian eRepublik forums! 🙂

Interesting, V+S

Thanks Jack 🙂

V+S