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CTW - I14 - August 6th, 2012


After an interesting Country President election season we have a new president, GloveisLove, who I have a short interview with later on.

Also in the past week Canada has declined a peace offering, well actually they want to accept it but they were bribed to wait until Glove gets into office to accept it, or at least that's what the rumors are. This conflict has been a mess but it’s set up to make Glove look like a hero on the first day in office.

And that’s about it for headlines, no major war news in the past week, the admins didn’t do any sales or introduce anything in the past week, the market acted as expected this past week. Yep, besides the CP election it was a pretty boring week.


Starting in Central America and Argentina continues to control Chile and keep them wiped, and Argentina. Spain who had been dominating Venezuela has come to an agreement with them as peace was reached between the two countries. Colombia continues to remain the same and Uruguay and Bolivia continue to hold onto one region.


Brazil was a bit pissed off at Indonesia for taking over Australia, so the Brazilians moved into Australia to push around Indonesia and give the aussies their regions back. The Aussies have had a bit of success while Indonesia is concentrated on Brazil and have won two resistance wars. New Zealand and Argentina continue to fight as well with the Argentines controlling one of New Zealand's regions right now. Moving north and Indonesia appears to be struggling a bit as Brazil beats them up and Malaysia and the Philippines hit them from the side as well.

The war between India and Thailand came to an end, so no change there. Pakistan continues to struggle against China, who is doing surprisingly well and have wiped the North Koreans. The South Koreans continue to struggle against Tiawan, though they may have some help since the president of South Korea proposed a MPP with the US even though the two countries have not been allies recently. It should be voted down but right now it would pass if voting ended now, though there is still time for the rest of congress to vote no.

Russia and Ukraine appear to have sort of ended their hostilities as Ukraine has moved on to the Republic of Moldova as their Natural Enemy, and so far things are going good for Ukraine. Moving to the Mideast and Iran has wiped U.A.E. from the map while Cyprus and greece have pushed back against Saudi Arabia who had some recent success but is now down to just one region. Greece continues to control most of Egypt as well.


Moving up into Europe and Turkey has won a bunch of resistance wars against Bulgaria with the help of Greece pushing the Bulgarians back to just 6 regions. Italy has struggled lately as F.Y.R.O.M. has pushed way up into Northern Italy. Our allies in Romania have struggled lately as Serbia and Hungary double team them, they have lost 3 regions recently. Moving north a bit and Finland and Estonia continue their little war but things have been going well for Finland lately. And Denmark is back on the map for the first time in a while.


Poland continues to remain very strong but the French have had a little bit of success against them gaining back a couple regions. Over in England, after being helped by Poland the English have gained some momentum and have started to take some territories from Ireland. Moving further south and Spain continues to push around Portugal, though they went after and conquered a lot of Venezuela but the two countries are not at peace (not sure exactly what the terms are though, sorry)

Moving up into North America and Mexico is back on the map with one region they managed to gain from the US in a resistance war. The war was pushed by ONE (before it recently collapsed) and Spain who for some odd reason wants Mexico on the map (perhaps they want to attack them and take some of their territory). Further up north and the skirmish between Canada and America continues...for now. Though it appears things may be over as right now both countries are trying to pass peace proposals. Will this actually succeed though? A lot of Americans are pissed at Canada for dragging this war on for a very long time (though Canadians will say they wanted their regions back before ending the war) so the American congress is putting up quite a few no votes in the peace proposal, based on this it appears the leaders Glove and jacobi have some work to do to get their congress on board with their ideas.


Congrats to GloveisLove, our new President here in eUS. It was a very close election, with glove gaining a decent lead early on and Civil Anarchy closing the lead down late. I was asleep so I don’t have the exact count at the end of the night before the admins did their 6 hour coffee and donut break election verification. However, at that point the margin was so close it was too close to call and we really had to wait until the admins gave us the final numbers and in the end Glove won with 1393 votes compared to Civil Anarchy’s 1352 votes. A total of 3146 votes were cast this month, up from the 3023 total votes the previous month.

A quick analysis on how it happened. Early in the campaign season Glove was not even in the running since he hadn’t said anything publicly about wanting to be President. It looked like there were two real candidates, Civil Anarchy and Haliman, and a couple random candidates that didn’t expect to get much support (Dan Wang who could not find a party to run him, Kathee93 who upped her vote total from the previous month and resita2009 running under the FrienShip and honoR Party.

There were some primaries in certain parties and when it became clear that Civil Anarchy was getting more support among the large parties Haliman eventually dropped out. This was expected because even though GloveisLove had not said anything publicly, everyone who was paying attention knew he was going to run at the last minute. The reason for doing this was to screw with AMP’s support, since Haliman probably would not officially drop out until Glove enters the race, so Glove entered the race as late as possible giving AMP very little time to adjust their support for an official candidate in game. It worked, sort of. It’s hard to tell whether the strategy actually led to AMP not officially supporting a candidate in game or whether the game itself which many party presidents were struggling to make their party officially support a candidate.

How many votes this accounted for we will never know, but it might have been more than the 41 vote difference that actually decided the election.

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Now what will Glove actually do this term? It appears he is going to get off to a good start as he has been working behind the scenes with the expected eCan president Jacobi who won the Canadian Presidential election 215 to 185 for a peace deal between the two former bros. However, the news was leaked a bit early (before the end of the election) and news of how it was arranged has already been exposed. Well, they are just rumors, but the evidence is pretty damning that they might be factual.

As you know, eCanada and eUS have been in a really stupid skirmish lately. It was sort of started by eUS but was also pushed by Canada. Militarily, it started off with a bang and then it quickly fizzled to Canada actually caring and America pretty much ignoring our northern neighbors. Shortly after the war started the Americans under the direction of the president at the time, Evry voted to change their NE from Canada to nobody, effectively ending the war from our point of view. Canada did not follow through in doing the same so the war continued (though most Americans were not fighting in it), then Canada went as far as proposing a Trade Embargo on the US, which can’t really hurt the US at all but can hurt Canada. America followed suit but ended up voting their law down while the Canadians passed their law.

Throughout most of this time lots of discussions were taking place about how to solve this conflict. Canada wanted all of their regions back in their possession before anything was done, however this was extremely difficult since the Canadian MUs only do about 225 Million damage per day while the eUS MU’s do just under 2 Billion damage per day, or about 10X as much. So in order for Canada to win a war they had to have less than 10% of the eUS MU members fighting against them, and even though the military and all major MUs were instructed not to fight against Canada the US still had some random stragglers who decided to fight against them. This made it very hard for Canada to win a war without help from allies or from sympathetic Americans which ended up dragging the war on a bit.


Finally Canada managed to regain all of their regions and then agreed to change their NE from the US to nobody. But before they did this they attempted to negotiate a region swap with the US in which Canada would gain Alaska and then use it to go attack Japan (who are an American ally). The response from the US congress at the time was basically “$&%# NO, change your damn Natural Enemy or we will have to wipe you to end this”. This apparently worked since Canada immediately proposed to change their NE to nobody and passed the law 30-2. The next step in peace was an actual peace agreement between the two countries which was proposed by Evry fairly soon after Canada changed their NE, but was voted down. It appears that Dan Wang, one of Gloves supporters, bribed some Canadian congressman to vote it down, since Dan really likes the war and wanted it to continue. There are other rumors that the Canadians decided to vote it down since they don’t like Evry but they love Glove and wanted to have the peace deal be completed under his term instead of Evrys term. Who knows the truth but it's now set up so that Glove can come in and on the first day look like a hero who rekindled the brolliance. This also has the same sort of set up with the Canadian President Jacobi, who steps in looking like a hero on the first day.

It’s nicely set up for Glove. But he has other problems to worry about as well, like this whole Mexico thing which was very close to being resolved by Evry and Congress until it was put on hold due to the new Presidential elections which may put people into office who didn’t want to follow through with the deal made in which Mexico gains back 5 of their regions in return they give eUS 100 gold (50 actual gold and 50 USD worth of gold) per month. Glove also has the issue of a majority of congress who doesn’t necessarily like him or his cabinet members that much, currently one of gloves cabinet members is Chickenguys who recently made 3 proposals which cost the US about 1.2 million dollars, and now he's working for Glove.

I don’t know what will happen, but I do know it will be an interesting month.


A pretty boring week for the market. As expected with the past release of Q7, prices shot way up and have continued to fall. WRM was once at $0.40 per unit but fell to around $0.25 per unit earlier in the week but has settled at $0.21 per unit the past day or two. Expect this to continue to fall ever so slightly. Weapons have also continued their slight fall as Q7 is now close to $47 per weapon (still not sure what to call this weapon). Other weapons have continued to fall steadily.

FRM shot up from $0.03 to $0.08 for a while and has continued to stay at around $0.07 per unit, the theory is that as people are expecting a new candy bar factory to come out (much like the rocket factory) that some people are buying up and hoarding FRM in anticipation of a major jump when the Candy Bar factories come out. Though it does not appear to have affected the actual price of food, which has stayed fairly steady or dropped slightly across the board (well Q7 has dropped a lot but that was expected).

The Job Market continued its fall and is now hovering at just over $100 dollars for a days worth of work, a far cry from its peak of close to $400 for days work right before Q7 was introduced. Gold continues to drop as well and is now hovering at around $1230 USD for 1 gold.

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One more quick note which you may or may not know already. The Q7 is basically the Q10 weapon for the game, if you take all the weapons and look at them you will notice patterns. Damage wise the Q1 weapon does 20 damage, Q2 does 40, Q3 does 60, Q4 does 80, Q5 does 100, Q6 does 120 and Q7 should do 140 but instead it does 200 which is the number Q10 should do. Looking at the pattern for Durability of the weapons, Q1 does 1 hit, Q2 does 2 hits, Q3 does 3 hits, Q4 does 4 hits, Q5 does 5 hits, Q6 does 6 hits and Q7 should do 7 hits but it does 10 hits which is what Q10 should do. So in these patterns it lines up very very well with Q10. However, the major discrepancy in the patterns is the amount of WRM to produce the actual weapons. Since we here in America have basically had 100% bonuses for the last couple months (minus a couple days before we attacked Mexico) you are probably used to the 100% bonus numbers so I will use those.


So at 100% production bonus producing 20 Q1 requires 200 WRM, 20 Q2 requires 400 WRM, 20 Q3 requires 600 WRM, 20 Q4 requires 800 WRM, 20 Q5 requires 1000 WRM, and 20 Q6 requires 1200 WRM. Now Q7 should take 1400 WRM, but since it's really Q10 you should expect it to require 2000 WRM, but it doesn’t. In reality, it requires 4000 WRM to produce 20 Q7 weapons, double what you would expect the game mechanics to require. Now this may have been done on purpose to help with the overproduction of raw materials in the game, but it had an effect of driving the cost of WRM through the roof and forcing MU’s and countries to rethink their supplies in order to get a hold of a massive amount of WRM needed to produce Q7.

Is this a fair thing for the admins to do? Not really but they did it and currently if you go off of 100% production bonus (for both the weapons and raws needed) it takes 9 people to produce 20 Q7 tanks (8 working in a rubber plantation and 1 working in the Q7 factory). Previously to produce 20 Q6 tanks you only needed 3.4 workers (2.4 workers in a rubber plantation and 1 in a Q6 factory). A bit harsh, and its forcing a lot of people to change around their companies and buy more WRM buildings. It also sort of hints at what might be released into the game sometime soon, which is Q6 WRM buildings. Well, at least a bunch of us hope thats coming.


This week a short interview with new President GloveisLove. though I have done an interview with him in the past (the glove interview starts about halfway down the page) so go read that to get a better idea of who the man is. However, I wanted to ask a couple questions to give you a better idea on Glove’s plans this month.

(e5) - First of all, how does it feel to win?
(Glove) - It feels good, bro.

(e5) - What are your plans for the very first day or two?
(Glove) - Canada & I already agreed to end the war. Im currently getting situated and trying to get access on the forums and whatnot.

(e5) - It appears that the alliance structure in eRep is crumbling and new alliances will probably be created, what are your plans as CP?
(Glove) - I am committed all of our Terra friends. But for the others, we will analyze the situation and determine the best outcome.

(e5) - How close are you going to let one of the most loved and hated people in the game, Ronald Gipper Reagan, get to the eWhite House?
(Glove) - RGR was never close, nor will he be.

(e5) - Can you explain the Dan Wang situation and what your plans are for him this month?
(Glove) - Prior to my announcement, I declared myself as Dan Wang's vice president, hence the "Glove your Wang" Slogan. Currently I have no place for him yet.

(e5) - Do you expect to run into any problems with congress as some of your major supporters were messing up with Evry's last couple days in office?
(Glove) - I expect Congress will be difficult this month..

(e5) - Any long term goals? (like running again next month?)
(Glove) - I'm not running again, so enjoy my reign of terr.....terrific leadership while you can!


This week's word of the week is Curiosity!

An emotion related to the natural trait of humans (and other animals) being inquisitive and wanting to explore, investigate and learn about various things. Ok, I think we all know what the word means, so #&$% that, lets talk about the Martian Rover named Curiosity that just landed on Mars earlier today!

The journey started about eight and a half months ago, on November 26, 2011 when Curiosity left earth on a 350+ Million mile one way trip. The rover which cost about $2.6 billion dollars made the most sophisticated landing ever attempted on Mars. Going through what NASA calls “seven minutes of terror’ the rover flew like a plane or space shuttle through the atmosphere until it eventually deployed the largest supersonic parachute ever created to slow it down. Towards the end of its landing, the parachute was dropped and a jet propelled sky crane started up which lowered the rover slowly to the ground.


The one ton rover, which is the size of a small SUV is equipped with various science instruments including 17 cameras and a laser that melts rocks so another instrument can analyze the composition of those rocks. The goal of the rover is to "to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms" according to NASA.


Staying on the topic of Mars Rovers for a little bit, most people know about Curiosity and may recognize the names Spirit and Opportunity, but most people don’t know that 7 different rovers have been sent to mars.

In the early 1970s the old USSR sent two small rovers to Mars, one crashed on impact, the other did manage to land but communication was lost with the rover 20 seconds after landing. In 1997 the US sent their first rover, sojourner to mars, it landed successfully and lasted about two and a half months before communication was lost. In 2003 a British led mission (supported by other European countries) was launched but unfortunately contact was never made with the rover.


In early 2004 the US sent a pair of twin rovers named Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, both were successful in landing and communicating. Originally intended to last for only about 3 months, Spirit managed to continue moving/communicating for nearly 6 years before getting stuck in sand in January 2010. NASA converted it into a stationary science platform but eventually lost communication with the rover after two months. Opportunity amazingly is still operational after spending 8 years on Mars! Both Spirit and Opportunity are solar powered, but our new rover, Curiosity is Nuclear Powered and should be able to do experiments at night where Spirit and Opportunity had to sort of shut down when the sun went away.


If you have been paying attention to my articles a lot you have probably noticed that I like animals! And one of the animals I want to get a hold of one day is this really cool but really tiny and expensive fish, the Flaming Prawn Goby.


Growing to just over 1 inch long as an adult these very shy and timid fish are very brightly colored. They can be hard to maintain since they are so small and have tiny little mouths to eat from (though in an established aquarium they will eat mostly existing copepods within the aquarium, so no real feeding is necessary) and are so shy many owners never actually see their fish. However with the right set up (a smaller tank with lots of hiding places) and good tank mates (other really small fish/shrimp) these fish can be more adventurous and explore a tank more. So one day I want to get a pair of these tiny little fish, though the pair would cost around $300, not including the whole tank set up (which might cost another 300-500.






Naughty Rover...


Every week I will be doing a giveaway to one of my subscribers and for this week the winner is CryingLightningPt who wins 50 Q6 Tanks.

Each week I will be doing this, prizes will change from week to week depending on what I have in my storage (may be weapons, food, gold, usd or a combination), and all you have to do to win is be a subscriber! Unfortunately the game does not allow us to see who our subscribers are so I am doing my best to make a list of subscribers. If you do subscribe just say something in the comments below, if you have said something about subscribing to my paper in the past then you are on the list. But if you clicked subscribe and did not say anything there is no way for me to know, so feel free to say something below. If you are not sure whether or not you are on the list you can PM me and I can let you know.


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