Military Gameplay and Game Mechanics - A Primer

University of the East Pacific Bachtendekuppen Memorial Library
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Military Gameplay and Game Mechanics - A Primer
by Naivetry

Posted May 06, 2009.
About This Thread

This thread is meant as an explanation of the military game in NationStates (NS) - the one based in the game code, not in Role Play (RP). There are many excellent threads on how to RP wars - this is not one of them. This is about the phenomenon known as region crashing or invading. It covers the distinction between raiders and defenders, how they each work within the game code to accomplish their goals, and what difference this makes for the players who care about this side of the game.

If you are new to NS and all this sounds very confusing, I recommend reading this first.
The sections on the WA and Regions in this thread are particularly important: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=286
And for RP, you can try here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=310 (NS) or here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12342 (II)
More info on RP here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=753

Vaguely Polemical Introduction

Region crashing/invading was not included in the original design concept of NS. Invasions were an invention of the players, who discovered that by moving their nations from one region to another, they could, in effect, make war on another region. Because other players objected to being invaded, they teamed up in order to retaliate, to defend their home region, or to protect other regions. Over time, this led to the development of many “off-site” regional forums, created and controlled by the players, so that they could better organize their activities. Governments, embassies, and alliances sprang up between these regional forums, and very soon a large portion of the NS world consisted of a far more complicated political simulation than anyone could have anticipated. This is the world referred to as “Gameplay.”

I am speaking as someone with command experience in the NS military as a defender (see definitions below), although it is not my primary focus in the game. I am a proponent of preserving the military element because it was the origin and remains the underlying source for all NationStates power politics - by which I mean the rise and fall and interrelationship of regional communities, not the passage of World Assembly (WA) legislation. These, then, are the basics, and they are absolutely foundational to military and political life in the sphere of Gameplay. I hope that this overview will help to remove some of the fundamental misunderstandings and misleading assumptions about the military game that generally plague people who have not participated in it themselves.

A. Definitions

  1. Invasion - nations moving into a region in order to control the WA Delegacy
  2. Liberation - an invasion that aims to return the WA Delegacy to the “natives”
  3. Raider - someone who invades in order to exert their own control over a region
  4. Defender - someone who invades in order to preserve or return “native” control
  5. Native - someone who resides in a region and considers it home (highly contested definition)

B. Mechanics

  1. Update - NS updates twice during the day. The major update usually occurs from 2-4 am EST, depending on the region. This is the only time when the WA Delegacy changes, and so all military activity leads up to this hour. The updates occur 12 hours apart, beginning at approximately 04:00 and 16:00 GMT. These are the only times when the WA Delegacy changes, and so all military activity leads up to these hours.

  2. The Numbers Game - Who controls the WA Delegacy is determined only by who has the most endorsements at update. This is the biggest reason why WA multying (having more than one nation in the WA) is illegal. Because WA multying is illegal, success in the military game depends upon cooperation, planning, and coordination. Well-developed military organizations have complete ranking systems, a chain of command, special awards and conditions of promotion, training materials, scheduling, and division of labor within the army itself. Even given these elements, the essential thing is, in the end, simply to outnumber your opponent. The drop in NS population has therefore had a devastating effect on the excitement of the military game as battles that were formerly orchestrated nightly on the scale of hundreds of players have dropped to encounters with 5-10 people - on a really good evening.

  3. Influence - Each WA Delegate has an amount of Influence to spend. Influence is gained primarily by gathering endorsements, and secondarily by remaining in the same region for a long time. Nations gather Influence much more slowly in a large region than in a small region. If you move to a new region, you will very quickly lose all of the Influence you had accumulated in your old region. Influence allows you to eject or banject (eject and ban) nations, and institute passwords. You can never be certain exactly how much Influence you have left to spend.

  4. Eject, banject, passwords - It costs the Delegate more Influence to banject nations than simply to eject them. It costs the Delegate more Influence to eject a nation the more Influence that nation has. It costs more Influence to set an invisible password than to set one that is visible to nations in the region. Once the Delegate runs out of Influence, he is out of Influence until after the next update. If an attack is launched on the region while the Delegate is out of Influence, the Delegate can do nothing to stop it. Any region is safe, however, so long as it has an active Founder. The Founder can eject and ban nations without cost, and so for as long as the Founder remains, no community is ever in danger of total annihilation.

C. Tactics

  1. Time is of the essence - If you are a raider, you will have the greatest chance of not being spotted and prevented from taking a region if you move into a region very close to update. If you are a defender, you will have the greatest chance of succeeding in a liberation if you move into a region very close to update. If the raider delegate is awake during update, he will be watching for movement into the region and will banject new nations before their endorsements can be counted.

  2. Switchers - Because of the possibility of being banned by an active raider delegate, defenders have developed a tactic that allows them to switch between WA nations almost instantaneously (rather than waiting for 24 hours), without ever having more than one in the WA at the same time. This is a vital tactic for defenders who are attempting to liberate a region, so that they can have a second chance during the same night if their first attempt to liberate a region fails.

  3. Puppets - Defenders quickly figured out that raids could be spotted and prevented by tracking raider nations. Raiders responded by creating dozens of puppets and using them as “clean,” disposable nations. Once a puppet has participated in a raid, it is “dirty,” and is typically not used again. These puppets drop WA status (so that WA status may be shifted to another puppet) and are normally left to CTE. Some may, in fact, never be used. If absence of nation activity is a good sign of such puppets, approximately 30-60% of the nations 4-7 days old and still residing in the Pacifics consist of puppets of this kind.

  4. Mobility - Due to a desire to conceal one’s identity as a raider or defender from the other side, the vast majority of raider/defender WA nations never reside in their home regions. Raider organizations sometimes retain ties to on-site regions, and sometimes they do not. It should be stressed that, aside from advertising their organization more easily, there is no real reason why raiders should base themselves out of a region at all.

  5. Intel - Because of this deadlock over tactics on-site, a complicated spy-game developed. Since the advent of Influence and the drastic depopulation of the military gameplay community, this Intel game is practically dead. From the defender side, it consisted of multiple levels - anything from tracking suspected raider puppets to adopting a false identity under which to join a raider forum. Once defender agents had worked themselves into positions of trust within the raider hierarchy, the organization’s raids could be subtly undermined, their members identified in any attempts to counter-infiltrate, and eventually the whole raiding group might be dismantled.

D. What’s the Big Deal?

  1. Raiders - I assume raiders enjoy raiding for the thrill of transgression/power, the challenge, and the bragging rights. A raid that is not advertised on the World Factbook Entry (WFE) is pointless. A raid conducted where no one else cares to control the region is also pointless. And finally, a raid that doesn’t have the potential to shock is pointless… in fact, the bigger the shock value, the better. Raiding pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable; raids are about seeing what you can get away with. This is why Influence killed the raiding game - it said that anything raiders could do, they would now by default get away with. And so many of the raiders who liked the momentary thrill of transgression left, and the griefers - the people who played for permanent control and the total destruction of regions - remained, with a guarantee that no mod would interfere with them again.

  2. Defenders - Until the advent of Influence, defenders almost universally saw themselves as the protectors of NationStates in a very black-and-white world. Raiders took away a nation’s right to live in peace, and a region’s right to self-determination. This was morally unacceptable, and raiders were often ostracized from the larger political world where peace was the primary desire. Still today, defenders fight because raiders fight first. They have no raison d’etre except to prevent raiders from wielding power over others. Defenders do not, and never have, fought competitively with raiders as if conflict were an end in itself. They fight as protectors. They fight for ideals. Therefore, it is impossible to maintain the raiding/defending game in a designated “war is okay here” area - witness the epic failure of the warzones. If war is okay, the defenders have no motivation to stop it (and then the raiders have no reason to raid if they’re not going to get a rise out of people, and so on in a vicious cycle). This is why Influence killed the defending game - it declared the moral argument meaningless. Might makes right in NS. The defenders still around are simply in denial of the very clear game rules, that anything you can do to a region, goes.

  3. Politics - At the most basic level, politics between regions are conducted with the threat of military force or promise of military aid in the background. Most regions, regardless of their “defender” or “raider” stance, reserve for themselves the right to participate in war with other regions. In the age of the major military alliances, formally announced declarations of war were considered a separate phenomenon from the ordinary background of raiding and defending. So, for example, the ADN (Alliance Defense Network), back in the very early days, declared war on Ireland after Ireland invaded one of their member regions, and presumably would’ve invaded had a peace treaty not been signed.* Defenders usually recognized official declarations of war between regions, and would take sides according to their political commitments rather than in their capacity as “defenders”… or would spin what they were doing as a defense or liberation, and not a raid at all (as in the ADN vs. The Pacific). Modern day defenders have gotten into trouble politically for not showing similar discrimination.

In those days, if you participated in any military offensive aside from one that had been justified by political spin or by a declaration of war, you were considered a raider. That meant that the most hardcore defenders considered any group that “switched” between raiding and defending to be raiders, pure and simple. Defenders were/are ideologically divided about whether or not it was okay for “defenders” to raid raider home regions, as TITO is in the habit of doing with DEN. The answer to that question might depend on whether or not you consider yourself as a defender to have a standing declaration of war against raiders.

In-game politics become far more complex, but the potential for military action, direct or indirect, still underlies every major conflict; this can be seen especially in the various conflicts over the WA Delegacy in the feeders. For a variety of reasons, the feeders have become and will always remain the biggest political stage in NS; but that’s a story for another epic post.

  • The President of the ADN, Vazquez, ended up invading anyway with nations from Alcatraz after the peace treaty was signed; Prosecutor General Westwind investigated and found evidence of the planning on the ADN boards; Vazquez resigned, Vice President Democratic Donkeys revealed he was an invader spy, and shortly afterward Pope Hope declared Martial Law to break a gridlock in the House and Senate and inaugurated the ADN Reloaded. As they say, those were the days…