Let's Chat #6: What are the Effects of Gold on eRepublik?

Day 2,173, 15:59 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Jimbobfrey


Gold is an important eRepublik commodity which can be bought with real-life (RL) money or earned in-game. Gold is extremely useful for making money; upgrading companies and training grounds; unlocking better armour, weapons and equipment in Guerrilla Fights and for purchasing ‘special items’ like energy centers, energy bars and the war stash.

Note to admins: this article is just an informative one. I personally have never bought gold but I am not opposed to it. This is not an anti-plato article and it is solely a discussion of how gold affects eRepublik. It is not intended to cause any controversy.



Gold can be obtained in a number of ways. The easiest way to get gold is to buy it from the gold and extras page. It ranges from 3 to 450 gold and can be purchased with either US Dollars or Euros. Gold can also be earned through in-game activities though. You get a sum of gold whenever you earn a medal (True Patriot, Mercenary, Super Soldier, Hard Worker, etc.) and the amount of gold earned depends on which medal you have achieved (3-5 gold). Gold can be bought and sold on the Monetary Market and, finally, gold can be earned whenever anyone you invited to eRepublik buys any gold or earns any gold rewards (you get 10% of the gold they do).

So, gold can be relatively easy to get hold of but it takes a lot of gold to be able to purchase anything particularly useful. For instance, take a look at this screenshot:


As you can see, the cost of upgrading a food factory is very high!

To put it to you in another way, gold is (as of 12:00 PM eRepublik time on Day 2173) worth approximately 209.9 CC (CC stands for local currency, by the way). It’s not a problem if you have a spare 210,000 CC to spend…

Since the cost of upgrading companies is so high, it is often hard to afford them. Players who do not wish to buy gold must obtain a lot of gold through in-game methods but these take a long time and they often rely on other people helping you to get them (like the CP, Congress and Battle Hero medals for example).

To make money and get rich, production of food, weapons, food raw materials (FRM) and weapon raw materials (WRM) are very important. In order to fully utilise these without investing years of playing time, players are forced to buy gold or to stay ‘poor’ for longer.



To upgrade the free training ground from Q1 (+5 strength) to Q4 (+20 strength) costs 170 gold. It’s more expensive if you choose to upgrade from Q1 to Q2 or Q3 first. Again, as with upgrading companies, this figure is very expensive and it requires players to buy gold in order to afford this. Alternatively, in some countries (I know the eUK does it but I recall some others doing this too), players can apply for a gold loan to help them afford it. That’s really great but it might still take some time to pay back if the loan is large.



There are plenty of gold offers. The one pictured above is the current one (as of writing this article) and it offers a discount on training using the gold training grounds. These offers always say ‘limited offer’ because they come and go but they are always back again, if you’re patient enough to wait for them.

That’s useful because it enables players to use gold more efficiently or to buy gold at a discounted price. These offers help to make gold more affordable for more players but these offers are generally very unpopular in eRepublik.

Why are they unpopular? Well, they are highly visible with their bright colours and they are found at the top of the homepage so you can never miss them when you log in to eRepublik. It can be annoying to constantly hear about gold when players are trying to save up or simply aren’t interested in buying gold! The fact that eRepublik advertises itself as a ‘free-to-play’ game also clashes with the idea of gold buying - if gold is so useful and some eRepublik features are limited if players don’t buy gold, then is eRepublik a ‘pay-to-play’ game in reality? Well, it’s all just a matter of opinion, I suppose.



Hold your horses! Gold is not necessarily a bad thing as such! I’ve already talked about the uses of gold (which there are quite a lot of) and gold is actually an important and helpful thing to have.

From the special items screen, there are a number of things to buy with gold.

To help with fighting, there are energy bars (+200 energy when consumed) and energy bar sets (either 5 or 10 energy bars) and there are also energy centres (+50 or +100 energy on your total energy, not just recovered energy). These can be extremely useful when fighting, particularly when trying to obtain a Battle Hero or Campaign Hero medal! However, they are one-time use only and they have only a small effect. It requires a lot of these in order to make a notable difference to campaign damage dealt but, still, it can help…

There’s also a ‘war stash’ with a variety of things such as gold, damage boosters, small bombs, bazookas, etc. which can be extremely helpful! The war stash changes roughly every month and can only be bought using RL money. It’s pretty expensive and, again, has only a one-time use.

In fact, much of the equipment, armour and weapons in Guerrilla Fights which require gold to buy are also temporary or have one-time uses.



So, what’s the general consensus? Well, gold certainly has its uses and it definitely does help. However, it is very difficult to get without paying RL money for it.

The high prices of upgrades makes them largely unaffordable for most players and it limits production of food, weapons, FRM and WRM. This reduces the levels of overproduction and it concentrates wealth in the hands of old players and players who buy gold. Although gold can be used to earn more strength through using the gold training grounds, the cost of these over time adds up and eventually it does cost a lot. This slows down the rate at which players earn super soldier medals and it limits the rate at which strength can be increased.

Special items can be bought and they allow players to more easily obtain BH or CH medals if they spend their gold (or use RL money to buy more gold to afford them).

Since there are so many gold offers, many players in eRepublik get quite annoyed and articles are regularly published which criticise gold buying and which mock Plato, the eRepublik admin god.

In conclusion, gold is very useful and does have some positive effects for the economy but it can also have negative consequences and can be unpopular.

Tl:dr version: Gold can be good, gold can be bad, it depends on your own opinion.

Happy Diwali!
-Jimbobfrey