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Hello all!

As many of you older players know, eRepublik has changed a lot over the past three years. For some, these changes may have been good. For the rest, the changes may have made your game experience worse, then there's those who quit altogether. Here is an overview of the different stages that eRepublik has change😛

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-eRepublik is released - The great journey begins!

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-I start playing for the first time around February 2008 - Around this time, the battle system is pretty basic but kind of fun with some strategy required. The economic module is just right. Dependence on gold is pretty low and even those who don't pay have a chance. eWorld economy is pretty strong at this point.


The V1 Battle System

The basics of the V1 war module were that its basically just a wall - this was my personal favourite!

The only changes around this stage for awhile were basically bug fixes. The thing people complained about most was the speed and the amount of bugs.

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eRepublik V2 Comes! - We had been waiting for V2 for a few months. Admin (As Plato was formerly) released a new article about it every couple of weeks, and then it was finally unveiled.

It brought a few interesting changes, especially the war module.


As you can see, its kind of like a Civilization 5 style battle. Hexagons for moving about, Civilization 4 style with the 'stack of death' over the city and hospital, and anybody within the hospital radius can be healed. The aim was to dominate the map in order to win the region.

There were also new units introduced, you could be any of the following:
-Tank -
-Helicopter
-Infantry
-Artilery
Each had a different amount of moves per turn and a lot of people complained that tanks were too powerful. (I myself was an air unit)

There were also boosters you could choose from to do extra damage and what not:


The following is a sample of the V2 market place:

And your weapons..:


The economic module also brought about a few changes. There were now new economic skills. Company owners could customise their product any way they like:


Summary of all skills you could choose from in V2:
Harvester:

Jut this skill for all raw-companies (Grain, Iron, Titanium, Stone, Oil)
Producer:

Needed by Food- an Ticketcompanies for Wellness
Marketing-Manager:

Needed by Food- an Ticketcompanies for Happiness
Project-Manager:

Needed by Ticketcompanies for Range/Zones
Carpenter:

Needed by Housecompanies for Wellness
Architect:

Needed by Housecompanies for Happiness
Builder:

Needed by Housecompanies for Durability
Engineer:

Needed by Weaponfactories for the Durability
Fitter:

Needed by Weaponfactories fort he Defense
Mechanic:

Needed by Weaponcompanies for Endurance
Technician:

Needed by Weaponcompanies for Damage

However, V2 could be described as the apocolypse of eRepublik - It was something many people quit over. For every person that quit, 5-10 newly developed bots were created, one memorable case was a battle between Canada and eUK for wales, somebody deployed hundreds of level one fighters to defend the region (though some speculated that it was done to give eCanada easy kills for training)

Here is a user-run poll on what people thought of the game after V2:
[img]http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR9RTdzkPXeT06D0KQWV7k2X0Tfa1nSF1rua6PzI_08IuNDlc2-8A&t=1[/img]

The main protests by the players was that eRepublik began to require too much gold. (As evident by the boosters) This would be were a lot of today's protests stemmed from. The V2 War module was all good - If you were a level 25+ guy with hundreds of gold and very high strength. If you were just a normal noob like I was, kills were very rare. My kill:death ratio must have been around 0.05 or something. At least at this point hospitals were still semi useful.

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The Role-backs from V2 Begin: - After the eRepublik population fell by a lot (If I remember correctly it went from 450,000 users to 150,000) the admins decided it was for the best to lose the new changes - they finally admitted that the changes were a mistake.

Customisation of companies began to fade, the basis of our current war module came, companies could no longer customise their products, all of the various economy skills were now merged into one - 'Economy Skill'. The many war skills were converted back to strength, yes gold dependence to use all game features properly still rose?

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Hospitals are Made Almost Useless - Long gone are the days where hospitals could refill your health to 100 after you fight once a day, or refill 50 health. In V2 the limits for hospitals began, this didn't change one bit for the new V1/V2 hybrid (Which from this point I will refer to 'V3') The V3 hospitals still had a limit on uses, buying a Q5 hospital for each region was no longer viable. A BIG disappointment for the majority of players. However, those who owned hospital companies could (for a short period) benefit. Defence systems still kind of kept their usefulness at this point, but were a lot less attractive to countries such as eAustralia who didn't have the money to buy one for their regions every time they're attacked. (Same as hospitals now I think about it!)

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Raw Materials and What Not Change Again - V3 bought what we're currently having to put up with now; pointless raw materials. You could now no longer set any company up in any region, you were severely limited by the raw materials such as grain which would prevent you from setting companies up in various places. Done to encourage international trade maybe? Very few people liked this change. Bonus raw materials gave an incentive to occupy regions though.

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But Wait, Occupation Sucks Now Too! - The developers recently implement a rule meaning you cannot take advantage of a region with no 'route to the capital'. This made war almost completely pointless. War is now only good for bragging rights, another mistake on the developers part.

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Over Production Begins - Developers make it so that everybody produces a lot more than they used to. Prices of things crash, which in my personal opinion is a good thing as you can afford to do more, while at the same time however, economies are failing already due to other changes. This is slowly prevailing to counter out the positives from lower prices. Prices may be lower, but everybody's currency can now buy less - mega inflation!

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'Donations Accepted!' Not Anymore! - Remember those times you could donate all of your gold and money if you wanted? Well, not any more! That 10 gold limit was really a sting for people who tank. Developers likely did this so they have to buy gold instead, but guess what, instead of buying gold, they just sink less of it for you! At this point, gold dependence shot up.

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Disorganisation (lol) - Organisations are now rendered completely useless. They can't buy companies, they don't receieve the 25% production bonus, they can't 'org vote' (Sorry asshole who bought 1,000 organisations last year just to sell votes, subscriptions and make all your articles #1!), donations mean they're no longer good for storing currency, just what can they do!? - Nothing. Admins are now waiting for national organisations to stop functioning before deleting them all. R.I.P Organisations!

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Economies Begin To Collapse - For those lucky few who were around back in the gold ol' days, remember when you could work for 25 AUD a day, then buy gold for 50 AUD? AUD is now four times weaker than it used to be. Instead of working for around 0.65 gold a day, we're now working for on average, 0.18 per day. This is a big fall that is mostly beyond the control of governments.

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Players Lose Control of How Their World Works - Governments can now no longer properly control their countries. For small countries like eAustralia, the new battle thing means we stand no chance the next time eIndonesia get bored. (Much less chance than before anyway) small countries have no support. Control of currency value is lost. Inflation rises but tax is greatly decreasing. In the old days, every time you withdrew money from your company, x% of that withdrawal went to the treasury as income tax. Not anymore! Tax revenues fall, inflation rises, economies shrink and war raging means too much gold is sinking and not enough being generated.

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Sorry admins, but it appears your changes have begun what is now the seconod apocolypse of eRepublik! Time will only tell just how much economies will suffer. Hopefully not only has this informed you of the changes to eRepublik, but it has opened your eyes to a crises that not even the richest of players can avert. Sure we can fix our economy by buying tonnes of gold, but what's to say some idiot won't come along and even it back out again with the rest of eRepublik by taking advantage of exchange rates?

If I missed anything you feel should be in here or got something wrong, let me know! Please vote and subscribe for more. I'll be posting stats soon of just how much things cost now compared to V1, and an attempted calculation of the inflation rate in eAustralia.

Thanks for reading