Join the new world

Dear friends

Further to my last few articles, which have had a focus on guiding new players through the more advanced parts of the game, I have decided to write today about how to buy and manage companies. Companies are a key part of the eRepublik world- all of the food, weapons, houses, air weapons and raw materials used in the game are produced by players in companies. These are then sold on open markets which operate by laws of supply and demand. This makes the economy module, and company ownership, of interest to anyone who has a passing interest in business.

Now as discussed in previous articles (1, 2) companies are not always (in fact rarely) the best choice for new players. But it is a choice which is open to you. I warn you now, unlike other modules, the economy module requires a great deal of saving money, hordeing resources and acting like Scrooge in order to actually get anywhere. You can speed all this up by buying gold from the game administrators of course, if that’s how you roll.

Firstly you have to decide what type of company you want to buy.


Buying Raw Materials Companies

Raw materials companies can be created from the “My Places” menu, under “Companies”.




You can build both raw materials and factories in this area. However I would only use this option to build raw materials companies.



Here are the 5 weapons raw materials companies. I would advise building Q4 or Q5 companies as they give the greatest benefits. Q5 is generally always profitable to some extent, and Q4 has a good return on investment time (under a year anyway).

All raw materials companies cost the same, so a Q3 Weapons Raw Materials company costs the same as a Q3 Housing Raw Materials company. Weapons and Food RM are only for “working as manager” (WAM) whereas Housing and Aircraft Weapon RM companies use workers and you cannot WAM in those.

Working as Manager (or WAM) allows you as the owner to work in your own company. You produce the same as a worker would, but of course you do not have to pay yourself a wage. This means that products produced by WAM are usually much, much cheaper than those produced by workers. Today the vast majority of products in the world (excepting House RM, Aircraft Weapon RM, Housing and Aircraft Weapon factories) are made using WAM. As a new player, it is likely that you will be using WAM only.


Buying Factories

Factories, unlike raw materials companies, can be sold to other players. You can buy companies from other players by going to “Market” and selecting “Companies for Sale”. Each type of factory is listed, along with the quality level.



Buying companies from the market is usually cheaper than upgrading them yourself. For example, a Q7 weapons company costs 1230 gold to build yourself, but you can buy one on the market for 1107 gold. You will notice if you click on the Q7 weapons list that there are many companies listed at 1107 gold. This is because the admins set a minimum and maximum price for each quality of company (+/- 10% of cost of creation). Be sure when you do buy companies that they are cheaper than the upgrade cost, or you could lose money:


From the eRepublik wiki
With regards to the downgrade reimbursements, Weapons and Food factories are as above (50% of creation cost) but House and Air Weapons companies only return 30% of the creation cost


Holding companies

You will notice that you can’t buy most companies. This is because you can only buy companies based in a region where you have a holding company. We will talk more about holding companies next.



To create a holding company you need to first move to the region where you want your companies to be based. To decide where you will build your companies, you need to consider some things:

1. How much bonus is available in the region? As discussed previously each country has bonuses which apply to each industry. In addition, regions also have specific bonuses. This article explains how these bonuses work.

2. How much pollution is present in the region? Usually the best regions have a lot of other people there already with companies. With Q7 gun and Q5 housing companies in particular, pollution can quickly reach the maximum (25😵 in the “best” regions. For this reason it can sometimes be smart to accept a lower bonus (For example 200% instead of 206😵 and choose a less populated region in a country.

3. How stable is the region politically? Some regions frequently change hands due to training wars, weakness of the owning country, or position on the map. You can check how long a country has held a region on the residence page (“My Places”, “Residence” then use “city search” in the top right of the screen).

Once you have decided where to build your holding company, go to “My Places” then “Companies” and select “Create New Holding”




This screen will show you all the details about the region, so that you can confirm these before you decide to build your holding company. When you’re satisfied, click “create holding company”. Your first one will be free, and subsequent ones cost money.

Once you have created your holding company, you can then buy companies in the region it is in. You can also move companies from other regions into your holding company, although that costs money. “Unassigned” companies without a holding company do not cost money to move into a holding company.


Managing your companies

All of your companies can be managed from the “My Places” menu, under “Companies”. The companies you own will be subdivided under any holding companies you have.


Working as a manager

With your WRM and FRM companies you will be mostly working as manager (WAM). You will see something like this:



Along the left of the screen is your company. The square box (which you can tick) is the WAM selection. Tick all the companies you want to work in and select “start production” (green box at the bottom of the page) to produce goods.

The second, person shaped selection box should not be used. This is for assigning workers and you should never do this with WRM or FRM as you will lose a lot of money. The number on the far right is how much you will produce when you work.


Factories

Factories (as well as House and Aircraft raw materials) can employ workers. Food and Weapons factories allow you to work as manager (as above). Housing and Aircraft Weapons only allow workers (no WAM).

To begin with, you need to advertise for workers. You can do this by clicking “Manage Employees” on your Companies screen.



By clicking the little pen symbols you open up some additional options. Firstly how many job offers you wish to offer (this defaults to the maximum you can possibly hire based on how many employment slots you have in your companies). Change this to the number of people you want to hire.

The second box is the salary you wish to offer. Most players, when looking for a job, will pick the highest one on the market. You can see what other players are offering by going to “Market” and then clicking “Job Market”.

Finally you will see a box called “Maximum daily payment per employee”. All your workers can work once as a default. However, those with active houses gain 1 “Overtime Point” per hour that their house is active. Someone with a single house active will get 24 Overtime Points each day. Someone with a Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and Q5 house will get 120 Overtime Points per day. This means they could work six times, and take six salaries. This is probably a good thing for you, and you should leave this section blank. You can limit salaries using it, but honestly consistent workers are hard to come by so if you get someone who works more than once you shouldn’t encourage them to leave for another job.



Once you have some workers, each time they work you get a “work ticket”. These can then be used like the image above to create production in your factories.

With workers, always make sure you have several days worth of wages in your account. If you run out of money, your workers will not be able to work and likely they will quit to get a new job immediately. It can take weeks to get good workers, so you should try to take care of them and make sure they get paid on time. You should also consider giving them a raise to match the market, or they might leave for another job.

You can edit salaries, view working histories and other stats from the “manage employees” page described above.


Selling your products

Once you’ve made your products, they will appear in your storage (My Places -> Storage). You will see here the total amount of storage you have. Once this is full, you will not be able to produce any more, so make sure it never gets full. You can buy additional storage and it is also a fairly frequent reward in the weekly challenges in the war module.

Beware that due to some rather bizarre changes the admins made, all raw material products use 100 storage each rather than 1. This is not a bug, it is a “feature”.

At the bottom of the screen you can see there are two tabs for “Sell” and “Buy”. For the most part you’ll be buying from the marketplace, so you won’t need the buy option.

Under “Sell” you will see something like this:



You can click on the image of the bread to select the product you want to sell. Once you select it, type in the quantity you wish to sell. The “Price/Unit” box will default to show the cheapest price currently on the market. At this point you can either put the price as 0.01 currency less (this will make your offer the top offer), or you can go to the marketplace yourself and check first.

Why check? Sometimes there is a small number of products at a much lower price than everything else. For example, say someone posts five Q7 weapons for 35 currency. The next offer is at 39 currency. When you go to post your offer it will default to 35.00 currency. Really you would be better to post at 38.99 and wait for those 5 products to sell. If the price looks cheaper than you would expect, always check.


Licences

You will also see a market option. You can buy licenses for (I believe) 20 gold ingame. Normally you get an automatic licence for the country you are born in, but after that if you want to sell to other markets you will need a licence for that market. This can be useful if you live in a small country where products sell slowly.

Be aware that countries will charge an import tax if you sell in their country. You can check the import taxes by going to “Community” -> “My Country” and then changing the country to the one you are interested in. Under the economy tab, at the bottom, it will show all the current taxes. As a seller the ones which affect you are VAT and import tax. The lower these are the better. You will see here the tax page for the UK ingame:



As you can see import taxes are 1%, which means you can export goods there with the minimum amount of taxes being applied to you.

Generally as a new business person you would not need to buy any licences. If you do, I would pick a very big country with low import taxes, as these are most likely the best place to sell. Don’t be tempted by small countries with high prices- often products here will not sell.


When to sell?

There is no obligation for you to sell products every day. However some people need to do this to pay for workers and expenses (such as raw materials). If you can, some goods are worth storing until prices rise. The following events usually trigger price rises:

Major wars
Game organised competitions
Big Sales/events

Usually during these times global stocks of products are depleted and prices rise. For example, currently the war and occupation of the eUSA has led to price rises in WRM globally from around 4.5 currency to around 7.9 currency. If you had 1000 in your storage, this would be a difference of 3400 currency. Of course it is not always possible to wait, and prices do not always rise, but it can be something to consider.


How to get gold

Most of your new player income will be gold through medals and levelling up. Older players often have a lot of currency. Currency can be turned into gold through the money markets, accessed via “Market”->”Money Market”. You can only buy 10 gold a day.

Occasionally the admins sell a “Tycoon Pack” for 10 euros. This allows you to buy 50 gold a day, and also increases the productivity of your companies by 20%, as well as giving you 150 work tickets. In pure financial terms, it is only worth getting if you have a lot of companies. But your euros are your money, so it’s up to you.


Conclusions

I hope this guide helps anyone who is thinking about buying or making a company. It is not meant for more advanced players, but don’t worry, I will be back with more interesting writing for you guys later.

It has been a long time (almost 10 years) since I was a noob buying my first company. So if I have made any mistakes, or you can think of any information that would be helpful to include, please do tell me in the comments or by PM.

Iain



Thank you’s

Thank you to all the old wizened players who endorsed and voted my last article. It is important that these new player guides get made, even if they’re not as exciting for us dinosaurs. Thank you to:

Bastovan
Surcinski
Kravennn
Evmjbmti
Simust2
Rodney Mckay
Lordsrbin
Niemand
Old 7
Wigol
Bogi
N0s3 (sorry for catching you napping)
Alexander Atlantis
PuzIk
Murdersas
Amokkel
Bulletz4Breakfast
S.Baileys
Vettige Swa
Patriote1837
Perry Rhodan
Perilouspanther
Quinctilius Varus
Web Carioca

See you next time!