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Easy Peace is prohibited. Hasty War is a game feature

I’ve been playing this game a few years, yet I must confess that I am still a bit wet behind the ears when it comes to the mechanics of warfare. It’s the last bastion of eRep that I need to conquer after venturing through the media module, military unit management, constitutional play, then finally Congress and Cabinet affairs.

The military module is a hard one to figure out…or I may be a bit slow in catching on. Possibly both.

Why? Well, I can click on button to add points against a wall, and choose from a fine assortment of sleekly designed quasi-futuristic weaponry…but for the life of me, I can’t make sense of how establishing peace officially works. In most situations, the two sides in a fight agree at some point that they’d rather call it quits and simply go their separate ways. Now, if you’re married, an easy break is quite impossible unless a lawyer drafter a rock-solid pre-nup. But if it’s between Bros or even two hockey teams in a bench-clearing brawl, those involved know it’s clearly over at some point, even if a grudge still lingers.

In eRepublik, it’s an entirely different story for those that are not well versed in the Natural Enemy pre-nup drafted by none other than the foremost legal expect of antiquity, Plato.

I’m going to use the current open war between eCanada and eUSA to illustrate this point. It should be clearly noted that the war began essentially because of a lulz Natural Enemy proposal that was paid for by a member of eUSA’s current government. I can’t recall what potato’s position was and won’t bother investigating because it’s all quite ridiculous to understand how a war could start between two former/current/sworn allies (there was even an official pre-nup bromance contract!) because of a goofy gesture of greed by a well-known joker.

Basically, wars between any two nations (no matter their relationship) can start at the drop of the wrong hat. It can be that easy. But it helps when you have button-itchy players leading the flock. That part may, in fact, be a necessity.

Once a single Natural Enemy proposal has been approved by 66% of one country’s Congress, you now have an open war that will take a lot of effort to stop. There is no calling it quits with a shake and walking away to plot one’s naïve revenge for another day. Only a complete wipe of a country or the loss of a mutually shared border will end a war in eRep. If you want a genuine peace treaty proces, a few not-so-simple steps must first be complete😛


Vncle SѦm learns that Peace Talks with the Canuckistanis requires plenty of patience

Step 1) You need to convince a Congressmen/CP to propose No Natural Enemy and then get 66% of Congress to vote in favour of it. This may sound like the same process as declaring a real NE, yet I can tell it involves much more behind the scenes wrangling. You couldn’t drop a wad of CC on the IRC table or play up a lulz idea in order to get Congress to approve peace. War comes easier than No Natural Enemy.

Step 2) Once you get one Congressmen and his team to vote up a No Natural Enemy proposal, you then need to get the other country’s Congress to do the same. Again, you’d think this involves the same process as Step #1 or the original Natural Enemy proposal. Strangely enough, it does not. The remaining NE holders may be wary of their ‘opponent.’ Or, they may have certain conditions on the table that must be met before a No NE will be proposed. This may involve a battle of the wills similar to the actual territory battles that preceded the peace negotiations. The victor will be the side that plays better hardball, or in this case, has a whopping 29 teams in the MLB compared to the other’s single baseball team.

Step 3) Eventually, the two belligerents will have both passed a No Natural Enemy proposal, or found another hapless whelp to beat on. ‘Naturally,’ one would think the war was over. After all, an agreement was reached after much IRC wrangling and hardball batting, with the sole intent of ending the war. But no, auto-battles will still be popping up to make the two sides continue to have at’er over nothing, confusing many a new player about why war is still raging when we are no longer “Natural Enemies.” This is because another 2 steps must be completed. So for this Step #3, a CP must officially propose peace ~ Congress cannot. Then, Congress must ratify the peace offering with a majority vote in favour.

Step 4) So now we have peace, right? No Natural Enemy x2 and a Peace Proposal x1. Nope, not enough. Both Congresses must approve the peace deal. That means that another peace proposal must be approved by the opponent's Congress, too. But what if your CP is AWOL? Okay then, you have to wait an extra day for peace. Why? Because a CP can only propose 1 such proposal every 24 hours, not two at once. “Ah so be it, an extra day is not that much trouble”…is what you are probably thinking. By this time both sides must be starving for an end to the war because, heck, they’ve gone through several weeks of hammering out a deal and have endured multiple rounds of votes.

But nope, it ain’t that easy because now here come the wildcards.


Alerts for peace proposals go straight to the eRecycle Bin in eRep

Wilcard #1) Plato skips the step of sending alerts to all of eCanada’s Congressmen that they must vote up the final step of the peace treaty. That’s right. Plato offers us a simple one-sided proposal that can start a war. Then requires a series of steps to end it. But then he decides not to let Congress know that the all important final vote is waiting to be voted on. Funny how that worked. It’s not that serious, you think, because it’s not a quorum vote at all. If not enough Congressmen show up, that’s okay because the few that do are the active ones, the ones really on the ball, the ones that care about the game and really want to see eCanada and eUSA get ahead, move on to bigger, better wars on the horizon.

Ha, nope. That’s not necessarily how it goes. See here:


That’s right. A rather large majority of aware and active Congressmen vote “No” to the peace treaty. Surely, they were mistaken somehow. Perhaps a glitch in the button, similar to the glitch that prevented the alert from going out.

Nope, it gets better than that:

Wildcard #2) A foreign player offers a bribe to Congress in order to delay/prevent the peace process ~ in other words, a reverse hot potato.



“Surely, that wouldn’t skew the results,” you think, “1 Gold couldn’t be enough to delay peace deal in the making for a couple weeks.” You may be right. At this point, I have no idea. All I know for sure is one thing:

War comes easy. Peace does not.
Why you make it so hard to shake hands and walk away from a fight, Plato? Is there something to be gained from making us have it for longer? Would people actually buy more Gold if the Can-Am war lingers on? Is it just fun watching us fumble our way through international relations?

But what could those 5 Congressmen have been thinking? "Hmmm, well the True Patriot points are rather nice. eCanada will likely go back to peace for a time until Jacobi can work his magic. 1 Gold per failed peace proposal could add up…tanks don’t come cheap, especially now that Q7s are all the inflated rage."

Except for that person who anonymously set my name up for Q7s in a European IRC channel (thank you, whoever you are), I haven’t had any Q7s come my way, not until the CoI supply kicks in next week (a reliable group for anyone interested, no contract required to sign up). So thank you Dan Wang, for your Q7 treat. Perhaps other hungry Congressmen hungry for True Patriot points, hungry for a landswap, or hungry for 1 Gold, will find your offer tasty. I found it rather tasteless. The Q7 still went to good use in the Yukon today.



There’s a lot stacked against improved relations between eCanada and eUSA. I’m not talking about the rumoured backroom deals somehow supported by terribly photo shopped screencaps. I’m just talking about basic game mechanics, the typical game bugs, and the ever-common lulzers with a stack of cash at their disposable to sucker in the Congress junkies ready for a fix.

That’s the game folks. Peace has a half-dozen hurdles because it sells more Gold for Plato and peace is for sale to the highest bidder or best lulzer. Maybe the rational side of this game will prevail and the hard work of hashing through IRC negotiations will pay off. Otherwise, it’s nothing more than clicking because we have little control over the wars we wage and the peace deals we seek.

Vote wisely, eCan Congressmen:

http://www.erepublik.com/en/main/law/Canada/113172