Join the new world

This is a cross-post of my blog post from my site.

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I play Erepublik and have been playing consistently for quite some time now.

Okay, playing is probably an overstatement. It’s more accurately described as I’ve-been-logging-in-and-clicking-around-10-times-before-logging-out. It’s an exercise in patience.

After doing the usual routine (which takes me probably a minute), I always stop and think what exactly this game is missing. It’s got a very engaged community, decent UI and I would presume sustainable enough sales.

It’s not fun.

Trading effort for progress

There’s only trade a lot of money for a little bit of progress.There’s no mechanism for me to put in effort to gain a little bit more of progress ahead of everyone else that does the bare minimum (login, work + train). This kind of reminds me of Neopets at the other extreme, where there’s just so many things to do that you can easily sink a whole day in it and not be done with everything you can do daily.

Some of my ideas here are:

Side stories / side quests
Make training much more interactive
Make working much more interactive

Predictability
One other thing that makes it not-fun is that everything is predictable. There’s absolutely no chance involved. The larger a country is, the more population it has, the more resources it produces, the more territory it can conquer. This is a 100% sure thing.

On the other hand, small countries’ (like ePH) resistance wars is an exercise in futility.

What a huge thing a +- (1-10)% random bonus per war could give both sides. It would make war strategy much more exciting other than “I need to have more people/energy bars than the other side have.”

Some of my ideas here:

War module: random bonus/penalty (based on RL weather?)
Economy module: production bonuses/penalty (based on RL stock market?)

Simplicity

Erep’s simplicity undermines its potential.

The economy sucks because it’s too simple. There’s not enough room for players to turn a profit. The only ways to turn a profit is either build Q6-Q7 weapons factory and hire other people or buy from major markets and sell in smaller markets.

The war module kind of sucks because it’s too simple. There’s not much strategy further than “we need to find more high str players with lots of bars/weapons than the other side”.

Daily activities suck because it’s too simple. I just need to go work for the highest bidder and work everyday (rea😛 click the work button). I just need to level up my training grounds and train everyday (rea😛 click the train button).

The political system sucks because it’s too simple. Everything is entirely subjective and lawmakers are not given insight to country data to effectively address macro-level issues. Analytics over time would be a huge boon to proper lawmaking.

“Make it as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”

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Erepublik is kind of enviable in a way that despite the game’s deficiencies, people still stick to it. It’s community finds fun within its own meta-game. For a game developer however, I think that’s a pretty pathetic state to be in.

Hopefully, there’s no other way to go but up. Unless Plato suddenly gets one of his bright ideas.