The Economist ~ Why the admins should hire me – Part 1

Day 1,445, 09:52 • Published in Sweden United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,

It’s my habit every few months to make a brief stab at offering a better vision of the game. Over time I’ve waited for the admins to respond, to adopt or at least to acknowledge that the widely supported changes proposed are better than their own plans, and need not cost them the profits they need to keep the angry debtors at bay. Even as a game mod, when I could explain things to the admins face-to-face (at least in theory) it was incredibly difficult to get them to understand the motivations players had, and why they weren’t happy with this or that change. Thus I’m not really writing this in the expectation the admins will actually adopt any of my changes (or even reply) never mind hire me, but I figure if I am persistent enough eventually some iota of sense will leak through all the sand their heads are buried in.

Today I’m going to (briefly) talk about two ideas linked by the concept of population and citizenship, and how they can add another dimension to gameplay. With eRepublik being fairly two dimensional, we don’t have a lot of concepts to work with. At the minute, population and citizenship is one of the few, and yet it remains an unexploited opening for the admins.

Changes to resource bonuses

My first proposal is to change the way that resources are calculated. At the moment, each resource your country produces increases the baseline productivity of your companies by 20%. A full set of bonuses (for example) produces 20 Q5 weapons per worker. Whilst easy to understand, this robs the game of a lot of strategy. I can see potential for huge expansion of this area. Yes it involves complexification, but the game was somewhat complex in the past, and the community responded with tools, calculators and so forth. I am sure it would be a matter of minutes for someone like aVie to bash together a tool which calculates the most complex bonus complications, given formulas and so forth.

So my first proposal is to introduce three additional factors to bonuses.

First we will talk about the unifying theme here- population. In the real world, more people means more productivity. I don’t see why it should be any different here. A small country in an advantageous position can get resources quite easily. Let’s compare two countries- Macedonia and China. China has the advantage of being a fairly important power, in its own timezone, completely surrounded by weak countries. Any direction it strikes in, it can win, and so it has the full set of bonuses most of the time. It also has a huge amount of regions. Macedonia on the other hand has three regions and is bordered on all sides by superpowers. Getting any regions means first defeating a country as strong as China, and getting all ten is basically impossible. Yet Macedonia is one of the most populous nations in the game, both in terms of raw figures and in terms of activity.


Machines don't run themselves

What we need here is a reflection of that in bonuses. Regions with more population should be more productive. A bonus linked to population is also a reward for baby booms, and a challenge for would-be conquerors. Having taken the elusive rubber region, populating it could give you (for example) another 5%. Manufacturers would encourage workers to move there. Countries would fight hard to defend them. And what if you lost your stronghold- not only do you lose the direct bonus, someone else steals your workers’ productivity- just like in the real world. I could go into proposed formulas, but I promised to keep this theorising as brief as possible.

Secondly we will talk about my long term request for national projects. The idea has been kicking around for a while, and with the “market”, “training ground” and so on added to our “Land” page I don’t see what’s so difficult about adding a national project too. The project would be set by the CP in much the same way as the Campaign of the Day. Work would be carried out by citizens- it would cost a certain amount of health- maybe 20 or 30. Each citizen would contribute towards either constructing or upgrading a national project. Each region would be capable of building one. The projects (call them Railroads, Ports, Airports, Space Stations, Manufactories or whatever) would provide production increase to the bonus affected by the region. For example, you might construct a port in a fish region, it might give a 1% boost to food raw material/food production. Each upgrade would increase it by 1%. It might take a few months to get a Q5 fish port, even for a big country. But the 5% would be a big bonus and one attached to the region forever- again making the idea of regional strategy more central.


Your slave labour can bring us space travel!


Finally I want to talk about the idea of market dominance. If you have one grain region, you get a bonus. But what advantage for having 5 or 10? There are none. I propose that if you have over 3 of each resource and at least one of those is not from an original region, you should get an additional bonus to represent a monopoly of trade. This will encourage countries to hold onto more regions- and give enemies a good way to hamstring them. All those useless French regions? Poland now has a reason to own them. This still doesn’t give a massive advantage to countries like the USA- although personally I think their number of regions should be drastically reduced. 50 regions might be historical, but it’s not practical. It makes conquering the USA one of the most difficult tasks of the game, and gives them the ability to sacrifice and reclaim regions other countries don’t really have. I’d gladly merge a couple of UK regions on the map if it meant limiting countries to a maximum of 10 core regions.


All your rubber doth belong to me


Changes to Resistance Wars

I think that everyone agrees the current resistance war system is a poor one. The cheapness of a resistance war takes away the strategy involved. In the past, resistance wars were carefully planned and executed. Now, we see dozens every day- most doomed to fail and started mainly as an irritation or distraction. In the real world, an occupied people were often inclined to resist the rule of their masters. One of the ways this was prevented was to occupy soldiers in the conquered territory, and even to bring citizens in to occupy and hold the new land.

I propose that we adopt a similar situation in erep. The base cost of a RW will remain at 10,000 currency, but there will be a cost of an additional 50 currency per citizen of the occupying country present in the region. So for example, if 800 citizens moved to the region, it would cost 50,000 currency to RW. Why do I propose this? Firstly because it will give the conqueror an element of protection. At the minute game is too fluid- gains are too easily lost. Making it more expensive is something we’ve always had, the main twist being to associate the increase in cost with citizenship rather than population- after all your own population wouldn’t be opposed to the resistance.


La Clichéd image


These two changes, to production and to resistance wars, are easy to make. The admins could design and implement them in a month at most. It wouldn’t challenge their profit making, it would make the game (slightly) better by introducing some actual strategy. At the minute we’re all doing a mass impression of a woodpecker, bashing our heads against walls and calling it strategy. We need to introduce some actual thought into the game again, because right now countries gain and lose very little from war other than pride. And frankly, pride isn’t enough to keep me in the game.

Next time I am going to post some more ideas regarding the war module.


Iain