When I started out playing this game the question we as players constantly asked ourself is what move will our enemies take next and how can we dodge that and take advantage of the situation. We played the game country vs country, community vs community and used the game mechanics as well as role playing as tools. It was great fun.
That competition made us active players to seek up other potential players and invite them to a game we enjoyed and thought they would enjoy as well. The eSwedish military forum had 80+ players signing up for each order. Only by working together could we be successful. If a tactic really failed it did hurt, if a tactig worked out well we got rewared accordingly.
From there on the developers of this game have more and more removed the fight between countries and communitys and replaced with challenges against 'Plato'. The role playing aspect of the game have more or less been totally removed.
Let me take a few examples.
- ePakistan was in the early stage of this game in the hands of players from the 4Chan forums. The created an eReligion based on a planned economy and used intense role playing to find support for their sake.
Once ePakistan decided to hurt their sworn enemy eSweden by interfer in a war between eSweden and eGermany. ePakistan send their Mobile Forces to eGermany to fight. The swedish Supreme Commander Kape realised that the eGerman market was in very bad shape and sent Swedish Paratroopers to eGermany with the simple task to buy all availed moving tickets there and then get back home again.
If I remomber correct you could only have 20 items at this time. And you could not donate Moving Tickets from one player to another. The result, was that the whole ePakistani Mobile Forces where stranded and soon without weapons or health. All in all ePakistan lost 2-3 days of crucial time and the Swedish Army rolled over eGermany and ePoland.
Today the develeopers have decided that weapons, houses, food and what not can be sent insantly all over the world. And no army will ever run out of resources. Every tank on the battle field will always have full tank and loads of ammo. Just aim and shoot.
The part where players did plan an offensive campaign against another country and stocked up accordingly has been lost. Economy and logistics are no longer part of military and by that a great part of strategy has been lost.
So, when we players no longer play against each other and therefore have stopped the strategies and the role playing. What challenges does 'Plato' provide us with? What is the feeling built up, The New World? Does 'Plato' change the environment, throw in weather as a factor making our crops grop with a different pace or cause trouble against all oil rigs with earh quakes? No. This is what 'Plato' do.
"As suggested by many of you, overproduction is an issue in the New World. We’ll try to tackle this problem and to get rid of some stacked inventory by introducing Boost the Economy Days!
Between today and the end of Day 2,582, all food and weapon consumption will be doubled."
Yeah! Nice role playing there! Great feeling to pass on to new and old players. There is absolutely no simulator thought into this at all, none, period.
Instead of implementing features to the game which make the players interact with each other and find solutions to the problems at hand the challenges for the last three four years have been to put the cursor on the red button and press it. Thats it.
What could be done about this? Well here are some suggestions.
- Remove all the challenges in the shape they are in now, no more batzookas, Ice giants, flying carrots and such.
- Add storms, vulcanos, frost, working so that they affect all kind of productions.
For example Frost has appeared in USA causing all US-based Grain Farms to stop working and 10 percent of the FRM on the US-market to be destroyed every day (remove your offer or it will be gone after 10 days). From there you can go to Mad Cow disease, crashed oil rigs which soon also cause problems for the Fish in the same area and so on.
Continue to combine this so that a Typhoon is striking the Philippines making it impossible to produce anything there for 10 days and also send things there, including soldiers. So any Resistance wars must be fought between players already in the ePhilippnes. Of course this Typhoon should be warned for before, that it is approching and the effect it might cause.
-----------------------
All of the above should be easy to implement and would send a whold different feeling to the community. This would give 'Plato' several tools to interfere in the eEconomy without act as a programmer informing us of a change in the code.
-----------------------
Empires and Alliances.
One of the absolute biggest mistakes done by the developers was to connect production bonuses to CS. Add the True Patriot medal to that and you end up killing the communites. For example, eSwedes who has build up the eSwedish community are now spread all over the eWorld and the eSwedish communtiy has been killed. Same goes with many many other countries and communites. Valnad (8th time President of eSweden and Admin of erepublik.se are in ePoland and myself 9xMoD of eSweden are locked for eEver in eSerbia with all game mechanics telling me to fight for Serbia and not for Sweden causing new Swedish players to ask why their Admin fight for Poland and the former MOD for Serbia!? Answer, cause we have to unless we want to be severly punished by Plato.
Suggestions:
- Remove the True Patriot feature.
- Introduce Trade Alliances.
- Introduce EDEN.
- Make Empires count.
Small eCountries have been drained from their playerbase for the last years by the features introduced which constantly favour countries with lots of players. This in turn has killed the communities in these countries and stopped the players from recruting new players. This should have been dealt with a long time ago.
In order to protect small countries they should be allowed to form trade alliances giving them access to each others raw materials, working the same ways as todays 'Regions without a Trade Route' but giving +15% instaed of +10.
Introduce EDEN, as a kind of eRep verison of United Nations. An organisation with the purpose to protect the small countries and help them evolve. Members of EDEN automatically gain trade agreements with each other. EDEN countries can not declare war against each other without first leaving the organisation. Joining EDEN takes 30 days after a 66% congress majority decision. Leaving EDEN takes 1 day / 24 hours after a 66% congress majority decision.
Being an Empire today is just for show. It doesn't give any direct in-game advantages. I would like to see a change here so that only two countries at the same time can reach Empire status. Rest of the world should hide, run or point at her neighbour suggestiong to the Empire to eat her instead. 'Look how fat she is, I'm just skin and bone.. take her instead..'.
Suggestions:
- Empires gain a 50 per cent bonus when fighting their Natural Enemy.
- An Empire may sign a Most Favoured State trade-treaty with any non aligned country giving that country access to its resources and vice versa giving the normal trade route bonus of +10%.
--------------------------
Introduce Nukes and shields.
Nuclear weapons play a role in global politics, economy and military strategy, even if not mentioned they are always 'on the table'.
In eRepublik nuclear weapons should demand the raw material uranium and be built just like players today build houses. Although take the time to build a palace.
Shileds are constructed the same way but demand the raw material Silicon. Yes, some players might complain for a while that they should never have invested in Silicon mining and Shield production, it seem to be so useless. At least until some one decide to launch a nuclear attack..
Only a President can launch a Nuke and if member of EDEN the presidents country or another EDEN country must have been attacked with nuclear weapons within the last 48 hours, they may not strike first without first leaving the organisation.
When the President decide to launch a Nuclear Attack on country NN he or she push the Red Button and by doing so all citizens in the Presidents country are notified that a Nuclear Attack will be lauched. A 24 hour count down clock starts during which time the president is buying Nuclear Weapons from the market. Only citizens with the same CS as the president may sell their 'nukes' to the President.
When the President push the red button he or she must also chose which country will be attacked by the nuclear weapons. The targeted country now has 24 hours to gather a Missile Shield. The process is similar for the defender. Funds are used to buy missiles in order to shoot down the nukes.
Rumours:
- Funds are collected similar as todays 'air strike funds'.
- A Legendar must be available to actually fire the Nuke.
- Not all missiles manage to take out a Nuke.
- In game the effekt of a Nuke are just the same as the 'Big Bomb' and only effect the battle field.
- Another rumour says though that the effects are terrible and also severly destroy production in the country, some says it also destroy houses.
) but it was fun REAL fun.
