How to Win in Erep

Day 491, 09:33 • Published in USA USA • by One Eye

It's been a while since I've written an article. Congress is more work than I had anticipated, and IRL I've had more work than I anticipated. So here is hopefully the first in a series of articles about the economy in the US and Atlantis, and about how that ties in with winning the game.

I'll start with winning the game. How do you win in Erep? You win by not losing. You lose by having your country taken over. So as long as we can keep the US from being overrun we win. I suppose it's possible to win by overrunning Indonesia, but I don't really see that happening anytime soon so I'll stick with we win by not losing. Of course we really win when we have fun with the game, but that's winning in the philosophical sense as in "you win in life if you have a good time." I'll stay away from philosophy here and stick with winning [abbr=with respect to]wrt[/abbr] game mechanics.

So, how do we keep from being overrun? Well, to win wars you need a few things:

Weapons
Skill
Rank
Population
Organization
Strategy and Tactics

In the US we have the population, and I think we do skill training pretty well.

Organization
Our Marines and our tank division are very well organized.

Our Army and NG could use better results. Is it a problem with organization? funding? IDK. But there is definitely a problem with these two branches. Maybe the command structure is failing because of atrophy. How can you expect people to stay active in an organization if nothing happens for months on end. Do we need a major shake up in the leadership, the lieutenants, the quartermasters? Maybe. This is a task that needs to be undertaken in the halls of Congress and in the Pentagon.

Rank
For every rank a soldier attains they fight 20% better. This is a phenomenal improvement and the first couple ranks are really easy to get. Just think about that for a second. Fighting as a sergeant instead of a private is like fighting with Q5 weapons instead of Q1 every time.

As such, we need to do a better job giving our young players a chance to fight with a gun. Fighting with a gun in just two battles is often enough to get the first rank. The keys to ranking up are organization and weapons.

OK, I covered a bunch of organizational stuff here today and that's enough for one article. Besides it's lunchtime. Look for more articles to come to flesh out the rest of the keys to winning in the near future.