The Failures of eWar
Nemo Mobilis
Wars have come and gone now in eRepublik, but this current war is showing many of the design flaws of these virtual conflicts. To start, we shall ignore the inherent silliness of trivia, as we all know few people truly know the governmental workings of every country on the face of the earth, let alone the minutiae of 3rd century pottery in Samaria. So ignoring the actual combat we can look at the rest of the unbalanced levels to fighting.
MPP's, the only available military treaty in this game. It ensures an unlimited supply of soldiers to a defender, so long as they have a few allies with the pact with them. It allows for France to get help fro Indonesia, without a single citizen leaving his home country. So the defenders have a bonus for defending, and then they have a bonus for having a number of allies.
Territories, it is quite clear that MPP's are not activated by invading another nations territorial holdings from previous conflicts or mergers. This means that the reason that many nations were absorbed early on (protection from bullying larger nations) is completely inoperable.
Resistance wars, these can be started IN any territory not under control of its original owner, and can be started when a region is already under attack, meaning in the case of a defender holding a territory under the their protection can be assaulted on another front by soldiers inside the country starting resistance wars, splitting the defenders forces.
This all shows that there are a number of ways to lose conquered territories, on all sides of the conflict. The next problem then is what about after the wars are over? If France takes Belgium, they can either suffer through resistance wars, or free the country and install a puppet government, and if anyone actual Belgium tries to stop it, they can activate their MPP's with their fellow conquerors.
War needs to be sorted out, the idea that a nation cannot possibly commit its forces in an offensive strategy the same way as a defender can have all of their allies fight from home is ludicrous. It is the equivalent of a magical leap of logic. In this case "ATLANTIS would like to jointly attack France, however we will all be paying for moving tickets and arranging to shift all of our forces all over the map to allow us to attack." to which PEACE can simply reply "Oh, well everyone we have a MPP with will simply get to attack from their home region anywhere they like, and then after the fact we can keep going as long as we like with this." Attackers need an offensive alliance treaty!
Comments
Well, one of the admins is French, so this is no use sadly.
However, almost all the people use the trivia decoder created by annihilator in the game.
Regardless of nationality it is an inherently flawed aspect of the game, the ideas are all good ones. I'm sure in the planning stages they realized all these things would be necessary, but neglected that sometimes aggressors needed a fair shake too.
One of the admins is FRENCH! no wonder we are losing this war!
Come on admins let's see some impartiality please.
Nice article Nemo. Voted and subscribed. 😃
I have had a couple of emails back and forth with the admins, in which I contested the sensibility of the French MPP still standing for their attack, but to be honest, the admin have failed woefully to even recognise the problem, which is a shame. If they could just see and admit that it is flawed, and commit to working on it, we wouldn't have this situation again. Unfortunately, I am having my doubts the admins will bother to fix it, or even acknowledge the flaws in the MPP debacle!
Good article
Acknowledge flaws in a game that is raking in tons of money for them.... that'll be the day