[COs] Paying the soldier makes him no soldier at all.

Day 2,308, 01:11 • Published in USA USA • by The Mike


Dear readership,

thank you for the interest shown in the previous article of mine. It was very nice to have more pure votes than purchased ones! Today's article will present you with the issue of COs (Combat Orders). For five years military strategists and commanders managed to organise and lead armies of steel. Combat Orders were presented to us, the players, more than half a year ago and nowadays they play a very contradictory role - on the one side they are extremely expensive, on another side they can be uniquely helpful and crucial and on further side they can be totally devastating for both sides. I will finish off with how do COs affect soldiers' mentality and what threads do COs present themselves to be for military strategists.
I am publishing the current article on 15.March 2014 and enjoy 886 newspaper subscriptions as of moment of writing. The last article I wrote was guilty for bringing in 21 new subscribers.

The game launched back in late 2008. The first military module lived for pretty much two years, then it was replaced with another one, known as "v2", not as successfully which in its turn was replaced in several months time. Since 2011 the only major change to the military module has been the divisional distribution of soldiers that has occurred on two occasions so far, summer 2012 and early 2014.

For 5 years military strategists have been finding different ways to organise their militias:

- IRC rooms
- IRC bots
- Skype
- TeamSpeak
- WhatsApp
- other instant messaging programs
- Google Spreadsheets/Docs
- Websites
- Browser scripts

Creativity at its best! People would always find the way to operate at the highest efficiency allowed. The admins, however, would take their time and would first implement the Military Unit feature (with a very contradictional rule of captains being able to override commanders' orders) and Campaign of the Day feature which would allow for easier damage coordination, a year after they would add political titles and implement alliances in the game (all of which don't influence mechanics in any way) and finally we would get the Combat Orders that allow commanders to fund their soldiers for their damage contribution.

What exactly are Combat Orders?

Any Commander of a Military Unit is allowed to set COs. They can set it only for their own MU, for citizen of their own state, or for all eRepublik players. COs must be specified for a specific campaign, side and division. COs are given a specific budget, an amount of cc per a million of damage dealt to be distributed after each hit, while the wall is below a specified percentage. This is how the CO settings panel looks like:





After a CO has been set, the commander can pause it (there is a cool down time of 15 minutes, before you can start it again), stop it or edit its budget or price per 1 Mio. damage.
All a citizen has to do is tick the box and start hitting, when the wall is below the said percentage 😛 They will be given the money after every kill, proportionate to the amount of damage they've done. It is also very easy to identify campaigns that offer COs. Just open the wars page (Ctrl + C) and look for this symbol:


There are two Combat Order offers for the side of Hungary in this RW.


There is set CO for USA in this campaign

Quite a nice gadget to have, isn't it?

Yes, it is nice. Soldiers get paid directly, Commanders don't wonder if soldiers are using the weapons they've received in the correct battles (or if they are using them at all..), everybody is happy. Also, MoDs don't have to mass-call and slap everyone in dozens of IRC channels twice each minute in order to get people to fight. They just have to increase their offer 😛 By using COs, military strategists can direct damage quite quickly and effortlessly. Difficult campaigns can be won simply by putting a Combat Order in the end of a battle - people now have an incentive to spend their EBs 😉 And to win the campaign for you, of course 😁

So, what kind of disadvantages could this thing have? It does look pretty awesome indeed..

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

So, we've seen how cool this option is, this can only mean that it can be just as bad. The first thing that comes into my mind are costs. Noone can really predict how much a single CO could cost. There are simply too many variables:
- division
- average q7 hit
- cost of tanks, needed to make 1 Mio. damage
- amount of soldiers on both sides
- other COs in other campaigns or set COs on the other side of the same campaign
- total damage dealt in the battle on both sides also influences the budget to be set. It on its part varies based on the importance of the campaign; the result of the other battles in the same campaign; time of the day and day in the week/month/year and others.

The best way to estimate the "right" amount of price per Mio. damage and budget for COs is to have a feeling for that. Above I outlined the main factors that may influence it. And as you could see, if a battle is about to need hundreds of thousands of currency, there is nothing you can do about it - you either spend the money, or lose the battle. No negotiations, no middle ground. Some empires put CO on each RW in order to keep their territories. Then they don't spend more than a four-digit sum on the whole campaign. In other scenarios the resistance puts a larger than usual CO in order to attract mercenaries to move and fight for them. Here the sum is larger, especially if the occupiers aren't happy with letting the region go. Even some MPP campaigns may cost less - when the outcome is pretty much predictable and you put a CO in order to just make sure you don't get surprised, for example. But what about a MPP campaign, in its final, 15th battle, in which the CH Top5 has more than a dozen of billion damage in it? They tend to go in the 6-digit price tags per battle and, if there is enough cash to support the whole campaign - at least a 7-digit for the campaign itself.

But cash isn't all of it, is it? Yes, there is one more disadvantage to using global COs. They don't simply cost a lot in cash, but they also addict. With time, they take away "free" damage and bring it under the CO cap, thus making it even more expensive. If a country is known to be often putting COs on its campaigns, so it is more and more likely that people won't fight (for this country), until the country puts a CO. So, first, the country loses from damage that it would normally receive for free and, second, the country needs to pay for that damage that until now has been for free. And third, soldiers may refrain from hitting, believing a country will put COs on, and in this way lose food fights. In this way the soldier's country loses in total damage output as well.

All in all, COs were introduced into the game in order to take off some of the pressure from military commanders in organising their armies. They brought in some decent advantages, making it possible for campaigns to be won with the use of igm features, instead of purely meta as we were used to. Another advantage I didn't outline in the article was that cash went flowing around in the economy - leaving countries and entering citizen accounts. On the other hand, there are some serious disadvantages too: (1) as COs awards soldiers for real damage done, its costs are very real too - cost of a CO-supported campaign could vary from $10,000 to even $1,000,000; and (2) making people used to fighting under CO offers leads to diminishing returns of the CO. And this is what exactly the title means - under the influence of this powerful motivator, soldiers "forget" to do what they do best - fight.

Thank you for your attention!

The Mike
P.S. If you are new to eUSA, make sure to read Gnilraps' 10-step guide in
HOW TO SUCCEED IN USA: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
You can find more guides on the DoE's website and in DoE's newspaper.



886