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An eAmerican's patriotic duty is to add to the wall.

Why you should live in a non-fortress state:

The short answer: there's no good reason.

The benefits of living in a non-fortress state can be reduced to this:
1. You don't have to spend 14 USD on two moving tickets once every month to vote in a non-fortress-state Congressional election.
2. You get pretty little words on your profile that don't say Karnataka, California, or Florida.

And that's it.

Wow.

That really doesn't seem like a whole lot of cold, hard actual benefits to me. Cos 14 USD is not a lotta cheddar, especially if you factor into it that you'd only spend it once a month. And it only takes 7 USD to move to a fortress state; you don't even have to quit your job to move!

So I don't know about you, but I feel like these Q2 Hospitals are really just a waste. If we engage our newbies and get them involved in the community, in what really matters, it really won't matter which set of pretty little words they have on their profiles, will it...?

So why should you live in a fortress state?

There's been a lot said about hospitals and infrastructure and new player retention and real life population and the fortress strategy, both at home and abroad.

Others have said it a lot better than I care to, with knowledgeable individuals weighing in on their respective fields of study, so I'm going to try to put a new angle on this for people.

The Fortress Strategy, for those who don't know or have forgotten, was designed to protect the things that matter greatly but cannot be move😛 high resources and companies. A strategic position on our borders is a nice side benefit, too, but it's not enough by itself to determine what should be a new fortress state.

So where do people factor into this? How does a state's real life population factor into it? Ideally, it really shouldn't. And the people, all of us, are here to help eUSA in the best way that we physically can: by living in fortress states to contribute to the wall. Help your community, your nation, survive and move to a fortress state if you haven't already. By living in a fortress state, you can boost your strength and wellness better and faster by fighting five times a day. In turn, this will increase your economic productivity to your employer, helping to make this nation great.

Not convinced by the patriotic spiel? Well, let me say this: every person contributes to their region's wall and the walls are what we need to survive in times of invasion (that, and massive gold piles for emergency tanking, but the government's already working on that). So if you don't want to live in a fortress state to do the patriotic thing that benefits us all, maybe you should live in a fortress state because of self-preservation. Seems like a pretty good reason to me.

You've probably heard a lot about "the wall" at this point, but you may not know what it is, exactly. Well, it's basically a bunch of defense points that our enemies need to bring down in their attack in order to conquer the region.

The in-game formula for the wall goes like this:

Defensive Wall Value = 100 * population of the state * (1 + DS/10), where DS is the quality of that state's Defense System, such as 5 for a Q5.

If we want a million point wall (which was about how high Florida's wall was when PEACE GC declined to attack it) for each fortress, that's going to take 6667 people in each fortress state, which we don't currently have. And you know what? Nowadays, million point walls are being tanked, by both EDEN and by our enemies. Even scarier is the fact that while the offense tanking capabilities of former PEACE GC (now Phoenix) nations are ever-increasing our Defense System infrastructure is stuck in the past!

Do you really want to weaken the fortress strategy we already have with only three Q5 Hospitals+DSs with even MORE Q5 Hospitals? Does it make you a little nervous to think of what would happen if we were invaded? You should be nervous and that's the primary reason you might see some less-than-friendly responses from people who don't want to see any more Hospitals in eUSA. For my own part, I apologize if I was snippy with you at some point in the past few days.

The silver lining here is that our own offensive/defensive tanking capabilities are ever-increasing, too. Which is why the "old guard" or "elite" players, as you may see them, want our time and resources to go into increasing our fighting ability and not into an old, stale infrastructure system of Hospitals and Defense Systems that won't be nearly as useful if the critical moment comes to defend our states.

Now what the wall formula says to me is that all the hundreds of dead citizens living in non-fortress states can contribute to the wall enough to maybe build some lower quality Defense Systems in various parts of the nation -- the last economic estimate I heard was that it'd take at least 2000 people to justify the cost of a Q5 DS.

However, new defense system and hospital infrastructure are really irrelevant and a waste of time and money until we learn about the changes to the game in V2, which I hear is coming in February (we'll see if they're actually on schedule this time). If, in V2, Hospitals and Defense Systems have some real worth, we might want to build more, but starting to build more now, before we know their benefits, isn't wise.

Hospitals only benefit the living and the living, in my opinion, should all be living in places with Q5 Hospitals to receive maximum daily benefits and contribute to the wall. And, like I said, you only want to put Q5 Hospitals down where things that are important but can't move exist. For instance, having a Q5 Hospital in one of our two High Wood regions (Pennsylvania and Tennessee) at some point might be a good idea, to protect that sector of our economy (jobs and profit).

Some of you might be under the impression that your government has never considered lower quality hospitals in non-fortress states, even as a test, but to that, I say that your impression is wrong.

As a three-time member of Congress's Infrastructure Committee, serving in my last term as Chair of the Infrastructure Committee, I can tell you that we brought up the debate once every term just so the new people in Congress could raise their voices to the debate and contribute and decide for themselves.

Here are just a couple of relevant discussions from the archives; for more, I encourage you to check out the Infrastructure & Citizen Affairs archives of the Library of Congress.

1. Lower-Level DSs and Hospitals

2. Q2 Economic Boost Test

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Hospitals and Player Retention: A Small Note



First of all, I don't think hospitals matter a bit to player retention and what we should really be doing to increase player retention is get more volunteers to mass-mail every newbie. Would you quit because of something called a Hospital, which you don't fully understand anyway, or because you're bored and feel left out?

There are a few different organized efforts dedicated to contacting newbies, from USA Welcoming Committee to the Salvation Army. A full list of programs that help people is available here.

But if you'd like to start contacting newbies now, I suggest visiting this Daily Report of New Citizens or this Demography website and start mailing newbies with this mass-mailer. The Community Development Program is a relatively new effort that will give you a list of players to contact, or so I hear; that might be a good way to start!

Why not give them some newbie guides while you're at it? There are many great guides out there but for brevity's sake, I suggest these two: Your First Six Days and Miscellaneous Tips and Your First 45 Days for more extensive information. What's the harm in including them both? They've both got different styles, so one or the other will be better for your newb.

Thank you to system0101 for writing the article that finally caused me to break my silence, article-wise on this issue. I was kind of hoping the hospital debate would just go away, but now I see some education on the issues will be necessary before that can happen. I hope what I've had to say helps towards that goal.

And thank you to Josh Frost for saying much of the same of what I've said, but with a larger reader base. And ice cream. Click for ice cream.

*UPDATE* Before I wrote this article, I was asked my opinion on the whole hospital issue... you can see my responses (as well as many others', including President Jewitt's) here.

*UPDATE: Day 797* Putting this here because I don't want to lose it. Thanks again, fingerguns! It's cute!

*UPDATE: Day 799* Was on the Arjay Phoenician IRC Show last night. Leaving a note here for anyone wanting to know more about the partial PTO eUSA suffered Jan. 25th.

From Fortress Karnataka, America,
~ Katherine "Astra" Gallagher