Join the new world

Hello! Do you want to know how to play this game? Do you scratch your head wondering, “wtf”? Are you also an anarchist suckered into playing a game that seems to be mainly fueled by nationalistic tendencies feeling ethically dubious about your participation in an exploitative skinner box? You came to the right place! I’m Elaine of the Snowy Forest, Secretary of Absolutely Nothing, and I'm here to tell you how to play Erepublik.

What the Hell am I Doing Here?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Erepublik is, essentially, an idle game on life support with social gameplay elements. You have an energy bar that fills up over time. Whenever the energy bar is full enough, you fight in a battle, and do damage in that battle. Your damage is determined by your strength stat. Your strength goes up every time you train. You train by spending energy once per day in your various training facilities. Strength is the largest determinant of the damage you are capable of doing in ground battles.

- Every 10 energy spent in a battle earns 1 experience point.
- Experience points enable you to level up, which gives you 1 gold and 50% of your maximum energy as a free boost.
- Levels unlock additional erepublik features. You should hit level 25 fairly quickly, which is the threshold at which point leveling stops giving you major feature

Why Did Elaine Just Hand Me A Kalashnikov?

So, comrade, you may have noticed I said battle. The key gameplay feature of erepublik is clicking a button and watching a number go up on your screen next to some mediocre animations. Sounds fun, right? Anyway, when you decided to play this game, you chose your country. That means you’re locked into being a part of a nation-state, which means the least uncool option available to you is to fight for like, a really socialist nation state. So, Kalashnikov. Here’s how the battles work:

- There are four ground divisions and one air division. Players fight in ground divisions based on their levels, and share the air division. The air division is unaffected by strength stats, so it’s where your energy is worth the most most of the time.
- Each division has a bar that compares the total influence accumulated by each side. Influence is a function of damage multiplied by your military rank. You won’t generate much influence to start with even if you do a lot of damage until you rank up.
- Whenever one side has more influence than the other side, that side accumulates domination points. When a side gets 1800 domination points, that division’s battle is over!
- Each division has a point value associated with it for winning a battle. Divisions 1-3 are worth their division number in points. Division 4 is worth 5 points, Aircraft is worth 7 points.
- When every division hits 1800 points, the division points are tallied up and the side with more division points wins the battle!
- A campaign is a fight for a piece of territory that consists of between 8 and 17 battles, each lasting between 90 and 120 minutes depending on how close it is. The campaign ends when a side earns 150 division points total
- Simple, right?

Ignore guerilla battles, I don’t understand them or want to learn about them. It’s like a more involved pvp that boils down to rock-paper-scissors with matchmaking for a marginal damage increase if you win.

Congratulations! You just tried to defend or expand borders! Everyone knows cool people advocate for borders, right?

The Eeconomy

It’s just fucked. You have a national currency (USD for us colonial bastards) and a premium currency, gold. You can spend your energy to work for someone else’s factory system for a salary, as well as work your own factories as a manager. You can purchase resource-producing factories with USD or gold, and you can purchase resource refining factories with gold. Different regions have different bonuses for factories. Just move to Kentucky. You cannot work in housing or aircraft factories of any sort yourself as a manager. There is a marketplace where people buy and sell produced goods, as well as gold (with a limit of purchasing 10 gold per day).

No, Actually, How Do I Play This Game Though?

Gameplay in erepublik centers around trying to maximize the amount of energy you can expend, the strength you develop, and the amount of goods you can produce (to a lesser extent). There are daily challenges, login rewards, and a weekly challenge system. Progressing through the weekly challenge system gives two important rewards, increased energy regeneration, and energy bars (energy you can store outside of your energy pool). Your goal as a noob is to spend as much energy as you can in the first part of the week, in order to maximize your energy regeneration from the weekly challenge. Then in the second half of the week, your goal is to accumulate energy bars to assist in increasing your energy regeneration in the following week. The barebones gameplay loop is something as follows:

- Train
- Work
- Fight

Pay attention to the social feeds in the game to know if there’s a really important fight, but otherwise, your goal is to acquire medals by dealing the highest amount of damage in ground and air campaigns. Spend energy and weapons thoughtfully to acquire these medals, as they provide you with gold. Other people are also trying to acquire these medals, play nice with them. You want to spend gold on upgrading your training centers, buying energy centers, and building factories that refine goods. You want to spend your USD on food, weapons, and housing (temporary energy centers that expire). There are a lot of social programs posted in the national feed (and hopefully your party feed if you’re a socialist) that will help you accumulate money. This is good, because you want to buy the maximum of 10 gold a day, every day in the monetary markets. You can fight 70 times a week (limited by a resource called oil), plus a little extra depending on oil from the VIP shop you can buy with gold and the 7 weekly oil provided by the daily challenges. Spend your energy when it fills up, fight about 10 times a day, and you’re done.

Other Gameplay Elements or When Do I Get To Have Fun?

Do not try to make a profit producing goods and services. It’s just not going to happen. This is actually pretty based and is absolutely a metaphor for the doomed nature of neoliberal capitalism. Also you’re not going to matter much in fights. People who spend real money on this game (help your comrades pay rent instead!) can fight in any division they want regardless of level. So even the little impact the 6 points the lower 3 divisions have is mostly out of your hands. Additionally, since people have been playing this game for fifteen years, it will take a long time for you to generate enough strength to make a difference in an important battle. Erepublik is a game that caters to whales, which means that they want individuals to be able to impact gameplay elements by spending money. While one day you can make an impact by fighting, consider this mostly an idle game you play to watch numbers go up on your screen for a few years.

Journalism is cool though! You don’t make money, but you should write zines unrelated to erepublik about doing mutual aid and post them here. I’ll give you ten thousand internet dollars if you do. In fact, forget everything else. This is actually an exclusive secret microblogging platform with idle RPG side elements. The mechanics don’t really matter outside of the captive audience it provides your platform here. I mean, look at you, you’re reading this right now you silly goose! You wouldn’t be if I posted on my actual blog!

Political Activism

I don’t really understand the whole geopolitical power struggle foreign policy stuff. You’re an American. America is in an alliance called Asteria (Romania, Ukraine, Portugal, Lithuania, etc). Members of that alliance are our friends. Some group of politicians decided we’re enemies with an alliance called CODE (France, Russia, Croatia, Albania, I dunno like 7 more). Make sure you stop liking them etc. Vote if you believe in electoralism’s ability to mitigate worst-outcome scenarios , don’t vote if you think voting makes you less cool. There are offices you can run for if you’d like. Some people like having offices. If you get an office, you can tell people to die for land and resources or something. You know, politician stuff.

There are a handful of political parties! Join one so you have some friends that keep you engaged with my microblogging platform! Here they are with some brief descriptions:

Socialist Freedom Party: I’m in this one, so obviously it’s the best. If you’re on a different team, you pretty clearly suck. Easy, right?

Rough Riders: The biggest party, so you can’t be a cool underdog if you join them. They’ve all been pretty nice to me though, so I guess they’re okay.

Federalist Party: Normally I’d never trust a fed, but given that we’re all required to be feds of some sort to play this game, they’re alright. Their president has a Scott Pilgrim profile pic which is cool!

We The People: I’m pretty sure they do stuff! Their Secretary General has a confederate flag profile pic and is named "Lee The Rebel" so that's pretty gross!

The Black Sheep:


This is Too Long To Read and I Still Don’t Know When I Get To Have Fun

To summarize,

Click buttons to get strong, click buttons to work, click buttons to fight. Numbers go up, but don’t mean anything. Shitpost. Wonder why you’re here. Wonder why any of us are here. Drink whiskey at night. Drink scotch during the day. Disband your local police department. Start a community garden. Name every bird you see. Don’t do school, stay in drugs, eat your vegetables. Comment with any questions you have or any observed inaccuracies in my representation of gameplay mechanics.

Yours in love,
Elaine