Let's Examine Hospitals and Retention

Day 790, 18:34 • Published in USA USA • by Woxan

Die superfluous hospitals! Die!

Today, we have 439 new citizens, according to the American society page. That's 439 new soldiers ready to take it to PHOENIX! Right? No, that number and the amount of citizens that stick around are misleading. Let's start with what I call the trickle. America does not baby boom as Poland or Spain do, with thousands of new citizens in a day. We have a steady influx of new accounts being created every day. This is effectively a baby boom over time. Other countries would kill for this many new citizens a day. But in America, the vast majority of these accounts do not work or train for the first time. Most of the remaining minority is gone in 2 or 3 days. I'd wager over 95%, if not more, of these guys are gone by level 5, the time they can fight. So we have ~25 (which is still a high estimate), of these 439 citizens still around. Pretty pathetic, isn't it?

Some people would argue that "these citizens quit because they didn't have a hospital!" Let's be honest here, most of these guys didn't even know what a hospital is in this game is, or what it does. The ones that do realize there's no hospital (the ones who would use the Q2, or whatever we put down), will move to a Q5 state.

The biggest problem behind American citizen retention is that this game is stale at this point in time. Can you blame the new citizens, and even us older guys? We more or less have a training war in Greece every day between EDEN and PHOENIX for us. The Spanish and Polish babies flourish because they see that Poland or Spain have attacked something every day since the day they joined. They get curious, and decide to stick around. Action and goals retain citizens, not hospitals.

The height of our activity was just after we kicked Hungary out of Canada. We fought fresh battles almost daily and had a goal: reclaim the United States and Canada in their entirety. After that, our uniting goal was gone, and we have begun to lose active population (the bulk of our 24k citizens are dead Americans, Chinese, and Indonesian citizens).

"What if we get a Polish style baby boom?"

Aeros discussed a hypothetical 100,000 new citizens. While this is improbable, let's say this we do get a big boom, and our population explodes to such a number. In our hypothetical, let's say Texas has gotten relatively more citizens compared to the rl proportions. These babies would not be able to fight for 5 days, and in that time, we can place down and acquire new infrastructure, as we'd reach the point to expand our hospitals. We have time to react IF such an event occurs. In the meantime, it is best not to shell out hundreds of GOLD for WHAT COULD happen. We have the ability to lay it down IF IT DOES.

The Entire Argument is Moot Until v2

Regardless of the outcome of this argument, we should not take a different course of action until v2 comes out or we know about stuff that will change. Fortress strategy could become invalid, or it could become the pinnacle of infrastructure strategy.

One last thing. This argument makes us look like idiots on the world stage. I remember when we did nothing, sat around, and were a half-assed ally until we finally got invaded. Our enemies AND our allies are looking at us now and laughing. We should focus on taking out PHOENIX with our allies in EDEN, not this.