Join the new world

-This is meant to be a guide to both younger and older players. Those who already know what they are doing, and those who are still new to the game. Please vote or comment if you find this article helpful in maintaining a high wellness. (Skip down a bit if you aren't new around here.)

What is wellness, and why is it important?
In the eWorld there are few things as important as maintaining a high wellness. Your wellness is a sort of life-meter, if you will. The higher your wellness number is, the healthier you are as a citizen. The maximum attainable wellness is 100, and the minimum zero. The latter would mean that you have died, while wellness 100 means you are at your maximum potential.

Your wellness number determines several things. Firstly, at level one and above, whenever you work at a job it is a factor in your productivity. Productivity is basically how much work you have accomplished in your workday. The more you produce, the more your company can pay you; and everybody knows that more money is a good thing.

Wellness also factors into damage in battle, for those who are level five and up. The higher your wellness, the more damage you will do to the enemy of the battlefield. The more damage you do in battle, the faster you will rank up; and the more times you fight the faster you will level.

Another element that is affected by wellness is the effectiveness of food. This is a bit less straightforward. Basically, the higher your wellness already is, the less you will gain from food. The lower your wellness level, the more you will gain from consuming the same quality of food. This will be discussed in more detail later.

Why does my wellness always go down?
Citizens lose wellness every day. Working, training, fighting, and not eating food each day will all reduce your wellness (Moving can also reduce your wellness, depending on the quality of moving ticket). While starving your self is avoidable, working, training and fighting each day are essentially necessary in the eWorld. Working and training each reduce your wellness by one point. Fighting in a battle will reduce your wellness by 10 for each fight. It is important that if you fight, you heal at the hospital. Always make sure that you are in a region with a hospital before you fight, and do not fight more times than the quality of the hospital. Otherwise you will not be able to recover the wellness you sacrificed in battle.

Ok, so wellness is important, but how do i get it up?
In eRepublik there are a few ways to gain wellness. These are food, gifts, houses, hospitals and the aptly named "Wellness Boxes." Each of these affect wellness in different ways.

Food is crucial in maintaining wellness. Your citizen will lose health if they do not have food to eat at the end of each day. When you do have food to eat, however, it gives you points to your wellness. There are five ranks of foo😛 Quality 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. The higher the quality of the food, the more wellness you will gain as a result of consuming it. The higher your wellness, the less bonus you will receive. This is determined by a formula: WPb😞1.5-(WPc/100))*Q. I will go into this in more detail further down.

Gifts are another way that wellness can be increased. Gifts also come in Quality rankings from 1 to 5. If another player (or organization) gives you a gift, you will receive one whole point of wellness per quality of the gift. A quality one gift will give you +1 wellness, and a quality five gift +5. The downside of gifts is that you cannot "give" them to yourself; they must be given to you by another citizen or org. A common strategy is to buy a gift, donate it to a trustworthy individual, and then have them offer it back as a gift. It's important to know that the person you give them to is trustworthy, otherwise they might not send them back!

Houses give a wellness bonus daily. If you own a house (these also come in quality 1-5) you will receive one point of wellness per quality at the end of the day. This is a good boost for your wellness, but houses are notoriously expensive. The cost of a house is not necessarily too high for citizens to afford, but the incremental wellness gain is almost not worth the high price.

Hospitals also heal wellness, but only after you have fought in a battle. The quality of the hospital in the region you reside in determines the amount of wellness you will receive. Each quality rating (again 1-5) will heal you by 10 wellness per quality. This means if you live in a region with a quality five hospital, you can fight up to five times per day!

Another wellness bonus item is the "wellness box." These can be purchased in the "gold and extras" area of the game's navigation bar, and give you ten wellness each. The cost of a wellness box is a whopping 2 gold. Allow me to repeat; TWO WHOLE GOLD. This option is entirely not cost-worthy to the average player, and is usually reserved for higher level players who wish to fight many multiple times in a day. Along with houses, i would recommend to stay away from these unless you have money to burn.

THE IMPORTANT STUFF (read at your own risk(or reward))
It is very important that you are able to replenish your lost wellness points each day, or you will slowly die. "So what is/are the best way(s) to maintain your wellness?" you might ask. This is where this article gets good. So back to the food we go; and the formula stated above. [WPb😞1.5-(WPc/100))*Q] WPb=wellness point bonus, or wellness points received from eating food. WPc=your current wellness, or wellness at the time of consuming the food. Q=quality of the food. So; Wellness point bonus is equal to one-point-five minus current wellness divisible by 100 times quality. This means that higher quality food will always give more wellness, and you will always receive more wellness if your wellness is low. Here is a chart of wellness gain at different wellness and qualities of foo😛

Based on this information it would seem that higher quality food would always be better for your wellness. While this is true, higher quality food also comes at a steeper price. The higher the quality, the more you should expect to pay. If you buy a quality one food and it gives you X number of wellness points; buying quality three food will give you three times X number of wellness. But what if you are having to pay four times the price for the food? Is it really worth it?

In order to determine if a wellness item is worth the money you paid for it, you must divide the wellness bonus by cost of the item. This can be a time consuming and confusing process. To aid in the task, i created a spreadsheet file which can calculate wellness efficiency based on market price input. I will link the spreadsheet file at the end of the article if you wish to download it.

Using the tables in the spreadsheet, and inputting prices of food and gifts from the marketplace each day, i have noticed a trend in efficiency. Recently, Quality 2 food has given the most wellness per dollar spent in the eUS market. Currently, q2 food is only about $1.20. This is affordable for almost anyone who works a job each day, and offers at least 1 wellness point (at 100 wellness). Instead of spending inordinate amounts of cash on high quality foods, i would encourage buying quality two, or even q one foods. You will spend less overall on your wellness.
(by the time you see this, it will be outdated)

Using the same method with the prices of gifts, a similar trend emerges. While one quality five gift gives five whole wellness points, five quality one gifts give the same amount of wellness for a fraction of the cost. Currently, a q1 gift is about $1.90 in the eUS marketplace. Since you may only consume one unit of food each day, it would be wise to supplement your diet with gifts.

One q2 food and one q1 gift can recover 2 points of wellness when you are at/near 100, and even more when you are lower. This is enough to recover wellness lost from working and training each day, at a cost of just over 3USD. If you have a job where you earn over three dollars a day, this would be the optimal way to spend your money on wellness. You will spend less, save more, and potentially have more money to spend on additional gifts or weapons.

I encourage all eAmerican citizens to spend their money wisely on wellness. It is a precious commodity, and all too many new players do not understand how to properly maintain it. It is important to understand how to get the most of it for less, and to share that insight with newer players in this game. Thank you for reading if you got this far, and dont forget to vote/comment if you found this helpful.

(P.S. I have updated the wellness spreadsheet to include efficiency of houses per quality as well as how many days of q1 gifting they are equivalent to. New link is below. Enjoy.)
Useful links:
-Wellness Efficiency Spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tf3Yytmmut0-RLsFLnHnq6A&output=xls
-Message this org if you are new and/or in need of a job in the eUSA:
http://www.erepublik.com/en/organization/3014811