Importance of Gold and USD for a Soldier

Spending Gold and USD wisely in eRepublik

The game creators have devised a system whereby you can own two types of currency. Gold and whatever currency applies to the nation of your Citizenship (let's say USD). There are certain things that ONLY Gold can purchase, and certain things that only USD can purchase. In order to sustain their game as a business, and to encourage players to want to purchase Gold for Real Life (RL) money, the most desirable items are available ONLY for Gold.

So do not spend Gold unwisely. Ever.

The advice in this post is designed very to turn SHIELD members into the best possible soldiers on the battlefield.

This is not advice on the economics module, only how to maximize you gold and USD for doing the most damage on the battlefield.

Gold Income

Aside from purchasing Gold for RL money, the best source for Gold income comes through Strength Training and working daily for your employer.

Working for your employer yields 5 Gold every 30 days (which is called a "Hard Worker" medal).

In other words, 5÷30=0.167 Gold per day income for working.

There are four Training Grounds that are available once per day for you to train up your strength.
Name                Cost to train Strength Benefit per Q
Weights Room FREE                5 Strength
Climbing Center 0.19 Gold        2.5 Strength
Shooting Range 0.89 Gold        5 Strength
Special Forces 1.79 Gold        10 Strength

*There is an additional strength bonus each day if you work and train and collect your bonus from your home page. This bonus amounts to 9 additional Strength every 5 days. Assuming you log in daily to at least work, train, and collect the bonus, you will gain an additional 1.8 strength/day over time.

Every time you accumulate 250 strength points, you are awarded 5 Gold (which is also called a "Super Soldier" medal).

If you never upgrade any of your Training Grounds, and if you only ever train in the Weights Room, you will accumulate 6.8 Strength per day yielding 5 Gold every 37 days or 0.135 Gold/day.

In other words, your BASE INCOME of Gold (provided you play daily) is about .3 Gold. This will not get you anywhere in this game.

So in order to increase your Gold income, you must upgrade your Training Centers.

From your Training Grounds page, you will see a small green arrow pointing upward. Clicking that enables the upgrade screen. Clicking the upward green arrow next to your Weights Room will show you the following dialogue:

As you see, it takes Gold to upgrade your Training Grounds.

BUT WAIT.

On a fairly regular cycle of approximately once per month, the game administrators offer a discount of 44% on Training Grounds upgrades.

So that first upgrade to Q2 (the option with 2 gold stars) is not 20 Gold but 11.2.

That amount of Gold can be easily earned by saving your Gold income for 38 days (or sooner depending on how much Gold you already have.)

This upgrade to Q2 Weight Training should be the first thing you ever spend Gold on. If you haven't done so yet, you've been doing it wrong.

By upgrading that training center to Q2, you increase your daily strenth gain to 11.8 and you increase your Gold Income to .4 Gold/day.

The goal is to upgrade the Weights Room (of course only upgrading during a 44% sale) to Q4. At Q4 you gain 21.8 Strength per day and your Gold income increases to .6 Gold/day.

Once you've upgraded all of that (and you can always expedite the process by purchasing Gold for RL money - something which should also be done during an Admin sale), it is time to upgrade your Climbing Center.

However, you are cautioned that spending .19 Gold/day on training in your Climbing Center will decrease your daily Gold Income unless you've upgraded it all the way to Q4. In other words, you will be upgrading, but not clicking it until it is Q4.

With a Q4 Climbing Center, the additional 10 Strength/day (2.5 x 4) actually yields an increase in your Gold Income of .01 Gold/day.

All other Gold spent on Training will REDUCE your daily Gold Income. However, increasing your strength is the most important dynamic of battlefield success in this game, and it is far more important than increased Rank.

So it is important to get over the fact of spending Gold on Training. If you want to rise above the average player, you must spend Gold on training.

Most importantly, increased Strength influences how much damage you will do on the Battlefield. And there is additional Gold to be won by flexing your Strength in a battle. Each battle includes a running total of the top-damage-producing citizens, and at the end of each mini-battle a Gold award is given to the citizen with the highest damage done in each Division. This is called Battle Hero (BH) Gold and it is pointless to chase it unless you can achieve it by spending less than the Gold awarded to get it.

All of this is a long way of emphasizing the importance of increasing your Strength.

If you are willing and able to make the commitment to upgrading all four of your Training Grounds to Q4, you can very easily maintain a positive Gold Income in this game, FAR MORE than by investing in manufacturing and raw materials buildings.

The total cost of upgrading all four centers to Q4 (assuming you upgrade during a 44% Sale) is 381 Gold. Yes that is a lot of Gold. But if you are willing to spend about $135 of RL money, and if you purchase the "best value" Gold pack from the Purchase Gold page (especially during a 50% bonus sale), you will enter the following scenario:

Strength Gain per day: 91.8

Gold Cost per day: 2.87

...but wait. eRepublik offers a "Training Contract" every 35 days or so. The 90% Training Contract costs 53Gold, but it reduces the daily Gold cost to .287. Subract from that your .167/day Gold Income from working and you can see your daily cost is reduced to .12 Gold/day.
In order to recover .12 Gold/day you must earn a BH medal according to the following chart:

Division BH Award BH needed every:_
D I        2 Gold 16 days
D II        3 Gold 25 days
D III        4 Gold 33 Days
D IV        5 Gold 41 days

Any experienced eRepublik player will tell you that it is entirely possible to achieve a BH medal in the frequency indicated in this chart. And what is better yet, the stronger you are, the easier it is to achieve the BH medal.

Here is a testimonial from one of our members The Joshua Tree:

But the most important thing you will have learned from this article is to SAVE EVERY OUNCE OF GOLD. Do not liquidate your Gold for USD. If you need a few extra weapons or food, ask a fellow SHIELD member by shouting your request on our MU Shout feed on your home page.

And that brings us to the last item for this article: spending USD.

USD Income

If you are working for an SHIELD commune, you are probably only earning about 1 USD/day. (You are obviously receiving a far greater value in Q7 tanks, but this article is only considering your actual cash income).

Generally speaking, an SHIELD soldier will need approximately 750 Energy (more or less) to complete his Daily Order of 25 Kills.

Your QM will gladly supply you with 1000 Energy if you request it. If your communing and participating you should never need to purchase food.

Save your USD for deployments, other missions, a rainy day, etc...


Thanks to Gnilraps for letting me use his material.

good reading