Social:ERepublik

eRepublik

Type of site	Website, Massively multiplayer online game, Simulation
Available in	English, Spanish, Korean, French, German, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Albanian, Arabic, Indonesian, Bulgarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Croatian, Farsi, Greek, Georgian, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish, Belarusian
Owner	eRepublik Labs
Created by	CEO Alexis Bonte CTO George Lemnaru
Revenue	Sale of virtual gold
Website	www.erepublik.com/en
Alexa rank	14,021 ((As of December 2016))
Commercial	yes
Registration	Required
Launched	October 21, 2008 (ingame time starts from November 20, 2007)
Current status	Online

eRepublik is a free-to-play, web browser-based massively multiplayer online game developed by Irish studio eRepublik Labs which was launched on October 21, 2008 and is accessible via the Internet. The game is set in a mirror world (called the New World) where players, referred to as citizens, join in local and national politics where they can help formulate national economic and social policies as well as initiating wars with their neighbours and/or tread the path of a private citizen working, fighting and voting for their state. It was developed by Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru. eRepublik is programmed in PHP using Symfony framework, and runs in most modern browsers. eRepublik has spawned a number of similar games due to the commercial success.

Funding

eRepublik has raised a total of 3.25 million euros in four rounds:

• Seed – February 2007 – 200,000 euros
• Angel – June 2008 – 550,000 euros
• Series A – June 2009 – 2,000,000 euros
• Fall – July 2012 – 500,000 euros

Overview

eRepublik is a global massively multiplayer online game where players can participate in a variety of daily activities. Citizens of the New World can be employees, own businesses, form political parties, vote in elections, become party presidents, members of Congress or country presidents, write newspaper articles and even go to war as citizens of virtual versions of real life countries. The game has very few visual elements and is primarily text-based in nature.

Upon joining, a citizen picks which virtual country he or she wishes to join. Each of these countries is named after an actual country in the real world, and is generally located similarly (warfare may cause certain regional displacements). The citizen then seeks employment at a company within that country, and is allowed the opportunity to train as a soldier for that country. Training, and working at a company is done on a daily basis. One of the main drawing points of the website is that it takes a mere "14 minutes a day" to participate.

eRepublik Gold is a fictional currency used in the eRepublik World. It is the main reference point for all the local virtual currencies (examples: USD, GBP) and it is used to buy additional features (such as companies) within the New World. It can be obtained freely by reaching certain levels or achievements, or purchased with real life currency. Many users have expressed dislike over the changes to the game which requires gold to use.

Modules

My Land

A citizen has a patch of land where they can construct various buildings, such as farms, mines, factories, storage and training grounds. Those buildings can be used once a day to produce raw materials, finished products, store materials and products, and increase the citizen's strength, a value determining how much damage is done in battles. Buildings can be constructed with local currency or gold, and upgraded with only gold. To upgrade a level 4 factory to level 5 requires 350 gold for example, and 300 gold costs 99.9 euros.

The effectiveness of economy buildings depends on the natural resources that a nation has. There are 10 different natural resources, each boosting production by 20% for either Food Raw Resource and Food, or Weapon Raw Resource and Weapon. Duplicate natural resources does not give any bonus, and the map is arranged in a way so that countries with a high amount of natural regions in real life does not have an advantage over countries with fewer regions.

Politics Module

As simple citizens, players can join a party by reaching a certain level. Once they have joined a party, they can run for party presidency. If they campaign successfully and can convince their party colleagues to choose them over a more established name then they become the leaders of the party and they can choose their party candidates for congress (if party is ranked in the top 5 nationally) or presidency.

On the fifth of every month eRepublik holds presidential elections, on the fifteenth the party presidential elections and on the twenty-fifth the congressional elections. Days before the presidential vote the top five parties will select a person to run for president, and then it is decided by a vote by the populace. The congress elections are more complicated than the rest.

The party presidents of the top 5 parties select a number of persons from their party to run in each region against other parties' representatives, after which people living in that region vote. The percentage of people voting for a party determines the number of congressional seats the party gets, a total of 40 for a country if it has at least four regions. Larger countries such as the United States have more seats because each state will receive at least one congress member no matter how small its population. If there is a tie eRepublik automatically chooses by referring to experience tokens.

War Module

To declare war on other countries, the president or congress of the country proposes a Natural enemy law. If the vote passes, the two countries are at war and each region is attacked either by order of the president or automatically by the game every 24 hours. In wars, the citizens of the respective countries fight independently, each one fighting a player of the target country whose health varies, after defeating the opponent influence is gained on, which shows the current percentage of influence the countries at war have over that region. Eight battles, between one and a half to two hours long, must be won by either side before the region is declared conquered or secure. The battles will continue until one side has won eight battles.

Wars are potentially essential to the power of a country in eRepublik because they allow citizens of the countries that are a part of the wars to become stronger and obtain higher military ranks, thus enabling them to do more damage in fights. Theoretically a nation that has experienced and battle hardened citizens can become a global power.

In reality the changes to unlimited gold purchasing means that one older and stronger player can conquer any medium-sized nation by continually fighting (tanking) via using their gold to purchase wellness packs. Many of the existing 'empires' of the new world consist of nations that have significant numbers of these types of players.

News Module

Any citizen can create a newspaper in which he can publish articles. Other citizens of his/her can read these articles, vote on them, comment on them or even subscribe to the newspapers of other citizens. Every 1000 subscribers a newspaper gets, the owner receives gold and the "Media Mogul" medal.

This once active module has become largely obsolete with the advent of the recent changes that restricted publications to one nation and further split the media up into 7 categories. This has however freed up server load and eased the workload of the moderators.

Gameplay

The role play of the New World consists of combining the capabilities of the above modules to reach goals and become leader in one or more domains. Citizens can use newspapers to promote themselves, their companies, parties, or even countries. The congress of a country sets taxes to enforce economic policies. To wage successful wars, the economy of a country has to sustain it and citizens have to be motivated.

Other features

Functionalities include a Twitter-like shoutbox system. Gold can also be purchased in unlimited amounts. Game developers, noting the use of IRC channels and forums outside of the main eRepublik site, and the importance of social interaction in the game, released a new module, the Chat Module, allowing users to create their own chat rooms, and interact with other citizens while remaining on the main site.

The user-maintained forums and IRC channels, however, remained more popular and this little used feature has since been removed.

Community

eRepublik, being a massively multiplayer online social game, encourages communication between players, and creates social communities usually organized around nations of the game. Players create IRC chat rooms, forums for each nation, and creates fictional entities such as a militias, political take overs, as well as discussing social events dealing with players of the game.

Awards

• December 12, 2007 – LeWeb3 2007 The honorable mention company
• October 9, 2008 – The Future of Web Apps conference winner

External links

• eRepublik official website