I'm an old eRepublik player. I often come back to the game to check how things are compared to the time when I was most active when the game was young.
The thing that made me stop playing and keeps me from coming back permanently, same as every nation simulator, is the lack of a civilian economy.
Right now, there are very few benefits of being at peace compared to being a war.
The eRepublik economy is mostly a war economy. Everything directly or indirectly revolves around war in a way that makes the economy oversimplified and a secondary aspect of the game. Having a civilian economy would create a more dynamic and interesting layer to the economic part of the game.
This would involve creating new products and the demand for these products.
What would be the goal of more products? Same as real life: creating more welfare for citizens. And what would welfare translate into? Better conditions of personal improvement.
These products would be a requirement for the optimal functioning of the eCitizen: What now can be achieved with just food and weapons, would require many other products. But not just for fighting: for training, for leveling, for anything.
A rich citizen (Either a citizen of a rich country or a rich citizen in an unequal country) would be a citizen that has full access to all the goods necessary to have a "100% efficiency". Peace would then become a good moment to improve your citizen, while war, to expand your country's territories.
Let me make a rough, simplified example:
Suppose we create a few more goods:
Clothing, Electronics and Furniture
All of them would have the same 5 star quality differences.
And let's create a new stat: Productivity. This reflects how much a citizen is able to produce when working. It would be trained in a new training center called "University"
Each citizen would have these 4 base stats which can only grow. Consumption of civilian goods would cause them to have non-permanent bonuses or deficits to the base stats, and to the rate of which these stats can grow through training.
So, to be a "normal" citizen, as the game works right now, each citizen would have to consume Food, Clothing, Electronics and Furniture in a certain amount and quality "X"
Failing to consume a certain good (Or consuming one of lower quality) would result in a debuff to a certain stat. For example, not consuming a standard-quality Electronics would result in lower training rate for that day. Not consuming food would reduce maximum energy for that day, and consuming higher quality furniture would increase daily productivity and etc.
Being at war would force citizens to buy weapons instead of civilian goods. Or factories to produce more war goods instead of civilian goods. This would reduce the quality and speed of training of citizens on the long term. Long wars would, therefore, be bad.
Having a myriad of new civilian goods could also add new dynamics to international and internal politics: Protectionism, trade wars, divergence on economic models, and whatnot.
It should be hard for a country to produce all high quality goods in high volume and cheap prices.
I'm open to describe the idea further, but I'd like to leave this simplified suggestion right here and have some feedback.
Edited by PedroV, 18 November 2018 - 06:35 PM.
