Join the new world

Ah, and so it begins. Another rookie, fresh off of whatever weird place we keep finding links to ten year old social experiment games. (TVTropes in my case, if you're curious)

And with another rookie comes another host of the usual questions that are likely asked so often that they've probably just become white noise to the established veterans capable of answering them at this point. (With the possible exception of those seeking our votes and/or to exploit us. Social games: They brutal)

So since the game forced me to set up a newspaper anyway for... Some reason... I've decided to do something a little different to the usual. I'm going to document the process of figuring out the answers to the immediate questions. The ones that actually matter in the opening days.

Sure, it'll probably be dull, but who'd read these silly online blogs anyway?

So let's get straight to it.


What should my first goal be?
This one's subjective AF and I doubt it'd ever get a solid answer from most (With the exception of the above-mentioned 'I want something from you' types that'd point you in whatever direction advances their own best interests. I know, cynical but nyeh~), but after fiddling around for a few hours, It became pretty clear that quite a lot of the game's features are locked off until you 'become an adult'.

You become an adult by weightlifting. Yeah, don't think about that one too hard. It may be a passing play on conscription, but whatever.

To become an adult, you need to reach 50 Strength. Strength is an attribute used for ground combat in the game: Pretty much everyone I've seen has a Strength somewhere above the high tens of thousands or even higher. Some have millions! It's amazing how hard people will grind in P2W games, but nyeh~

So, how do you reach 50 Strength? It's simple enough, you Train, or you Work. Likely both.

Training involves using the Training facilities to get a small boost to Strength every day. There's one 'free' facility and three increasingly expensive 'fee' facilities that require gold to function, and the four offer varied cost-reward ratios that I'm not going to bother analysing because honestly the best option is probably just to spam all four until you hit 50 Strength.

No, seriously. Turns out that Gold isn't that expensive as a premium currency (More on that below), and since you can only do one or two things without 'Adult' status, just spam to reach that goal. The alternative is waiting a week logging in every day to do precisely Bugger and All and who in the scuttling fuck has time for that?

Once you reach Adulthood, you can start trading commodities, do currency stuff and... Actually, why are most of the FINANCIAL elements locked behind an attribute barrier based on the COMBAT attribute? Christ above...

Anyway yeah, reach adulthood. Good first step.

Try not to think about how the game insists that your explicitly non-adult arse marches off to war to be meatgrinder’d by far older, more experienced and better equipped players. Sure, it may be endorsing child soldiers (Which does beg the question why most of Africa is missing from the World Map, you think they'd be totally into that), but that's just semantics! Just give a toddler an anti-tank shell and send them tottering towards a quadruped tank-mech, what's the worst that could happen~?

...Sorry, got distracted there. Where were we?

So Gold Isn't Valuable?
What? Of course it's fucking valuable, what're you smoking? It's just not as valuable as it would be in other games.

Y'see, usually premium currencies in these free-to-play (pay-to-win) games are locked off from the regular currency, so the value of both wildly fluctuates and results in the Diablo problem where we end up trading stacks of devil-butts and barrels of demon oil back and forth because the regular currency has all the economic viability of mandatory lobotomies for lawyers (Which, while a fun idea, is probably not a great political move. Y'know, if anyone from the various parties is reading)... But in eRepublik (That name physically hurts to type. The 'K' is so early 90's it genuinely hurts) Gold and currency can be traded back and forth pretty much whenever. At time of writing, GBP and Gold have an exchange rate of about 500 GBP for 1 gold. Which... I mean, genuinely impressive how 1 gold doesn't cost an entire year's worth of grinding for people not buying the premium currency, so hats off.

This exchange rate can trip us rookies up a bit though. Y'see, the first reaction to seeing something with a premium currency cost attached to it, rather than the regular currency is to write it off completely, since... I mean, seriously, who buys the basic tier-1 shit in a freemium-shakedown game with the scraps of premium currency the game gives to them? Like... No, you hoard that shit, that's how gamer-brains work.

But in this case, you can buy like 5 gold with one work day (More on THAT in a bit), so those premium-currency items and options are actually viable choices. Y'know, provided you have a calculator handy.

Oh, you also need to be a 50-strength Adult to trade gold, so... Yeah. Rush that shit. Because toddlers don't get to use cash-for-gold.

The conclusion to this is that you shouldn't immediately write-off the cool gold-based stuff. It's probably a lot cheaper than you think it is... Or actively vital in some cases. I mean, the upper-tier stuff is probably gilded in the stuff: Haven't gotten that far yet, so I dunno!

Gold. Bling, y'all.

You mentioned Jobs?
Yes. Yes I did. So as far as I can tell, the only real option for us toddler-rookies to get ahold of 'dem fat stacks' (Technical term) is to sell our souls and time to our evil overlords. That's right boys and girls! Wageslavery is alive and well and it's name is ARMS MANUFACTURING. Or... Possibly house-building. I haven't finished analysing the factory cost-profit benefits yet, so I'll get to that in the next one of these things.

Either way, the game quite helpfully prompts us to stop gnawing on our umbilical cords, get out of the house we don't actually own because they're expensive AF and get our lazy butts a job. Fortunately there's none of that 'CV/Interview/Carpet burns on your knees and mouthwash taste for the rest of the day' malarkey HERE! Instead, we get a list of employers, helpfully sorted by whoever's offering the most for an honest day's labour (Read as: A mouse click and 10 energy. Fucking slave-drivers, I tell'ya). Just go for whoever's offering the most, it probably doesn't matter-

Disclaimer: I fully expect to be angrily informed that it does in fact matter and that blah blah blargh. If it does, I'll add an update later on~

-And it's in your own best interests to wring all the cash you can out of the labour market anyway. Let's face it, you're probably being exploited somehow! I just haven't figured out how yet.

...Where were we? Oh yeah, right. Jobs. So at time of writing, wages are hovering around 2500 GBP a day. You can do it every day (Resets at 8am GMT, so far as I can tell) alongside training and... Honestly, why wouldn't you? Get to work.

Oh! But before we move on entirely, we should talk about houses.

No, seriously, ask the question.

Huh? Oh, uh... What about Houses?
I'm glad you asked, me! Y'see, houses are a thing in eRepublik (Uck) that ups your earning potential by quite a wide margin. Houses generate something called 'Overtime Points', which... Well, they let you work more than once a day. A single tier 1 house generates one overtime point every hour and you need 24 points to work overtime. So one house equals one overtime a day. Handy, huh?

Houses cost 10k for some fucking reason (I found a guide that implied they cost the same as a day's wages but apparently inflation has kicked in there. Way to go, assholes, you're making me feel like a millenial all over again. At least we don't have to do credit ratings), so you'll have to work 4 days of Overtime before you break even.

...Makes me wonder if making houses is worthwhile. Gotta check the factory prices~

Anyway, yeah. Save up and buy a house. Or hell, get a sugar-daddy to buy you a house.

Oh don't give me that look. It's 2021, try to be a little more open-minded.

-

And on that wonderful mental image, we should probably stop. This is what I discovered today, and these have been Petty Ramblings.

Wash your hands, motherfuckers.