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Greetings citizens of eRepublik

In this article I’m just throwing my thoughts about the recent events which have affected the global alliances. I will start with the economic and war modules that are at the root of this topic.

Countries in order to succeed economically need economic bonuses, but they don’t hold all of them to reach the optimal situation of 100% productivity and usually those bonuses are located in the regions of neighbouring countries, so no matter what soon or later war is inevitable. Differently from the V1 “declare war” votation which needed gold in order to be approved the natural enemy proposal costs nothing to the country account but also provides a nice bonus to the influence done by the fighters against the country which was declared as a natural enemy.

So essentially wars cost nothing to start, you can obtain the bonuses in the regions you manage to conquer in order to develop the country economy and they also provide an opportunity to earn golds with the True Patriot medals.

This factors encourage a perpetual state of war where some countries are fighting in wars to conquer the bonuses or in RWs to maintain those that they managed to conquer and the other countries, the weaker ones, defend itself all the time or try to free some of their regions just in time for the congress elections.

In which way this affect the alliances? Well it’s simply a fact of distributing the damage of the alliance or of who should get most of the support. In this perpetual state of warfare and bonus race the countries try to output as most damage they can through many means (funding of the MUs, mercenaries and MPPs) but usually it isn’t enough so they encourage their allies to fight in their battles with their full strength but for their allies this means neglecting their wars.

Recently we have learned about the intention of some countries to create a new anti-Balkan alliance and the fundamental reason was that they didn’t wanted anymore to fight with their full strength in the so called “Balkan Wars”, we can understand this by the fact that the Balkans is filled with strong countries which they don’t have a clear advantage against their opponents so the Balkan wars end in a endless ping-pong where the balance can be broken only thanks to external factors (mercenaries and allies).

In the end alliances, MPPs and the foreign relations in general have become only a big market of the damage where the countries are trying to collect as much military support they can.

Eventually from this market of the damage somebody has made a good profit while others are making losses.

Some wars are categorized as holy wars, which can shape the fate of the whole alliance, while other wars are seen as useless or drain wars according to the different perspective.

In the end this situation cannot stand forever. Sooner or later the countries that are donating their damage to their allies will begin to question how much the alliance is benefiting them and how well they are supported.

We have already seen this in EDEN when Ukraine attacked Russia: despite the fact Russia wasn’t an EDEN member, the alliance asked to stop this war effectively supporting Russia instead of rushing to support Ukraine. In this case EDEN wasn’t ready to lose the support of Russia, TERRA, and US because ONE/Fellowship is still the strongest alliance, and EDEN needs as much external help as they can get. As a result, part of the Ukrainian population is less supportive of EDEN and eventually this is the beginning for more incoming issues and questions to be solved.

Anyway, this only shows that global alliances are less effective as they were used to be, ONE/Fellowship and EDEN.

On the other hand inside those global alliances there are exclusive “clubs” of countries that have closer relations. They tend to support each other more than the rest of the alliance (ATU and Cromania in EDEN, Spoland and SerHun in ONE/Fellowship) while other countries tend to develop good relations with members of different alliances (Russia-Bulgaria, US-Spain-Brazil).

So, I think that for the future the big alliances will tend to dissolve and they will be replaced by smaller alliances with common MPPs stack, but with different priorities and a more independent foreign policy.

Nevertheless, the Balkans will be the most unstable war theatre while countries like Poland, US, Brazil, and China are completely dominating their geographic areas. They tend to sit on their bonuses, limiting themselves to fight in small wars and RWs. They make NAPs with each other in order to avoid risky wars where they have everything to lose and little to gain.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day