NationStates Jolt Archive

I was playing around with numbers and derived a formula that calculates your defense budget by your defense ranking. It does mean that you should keep track of your defense ranking, and hey your population too but otherwise, it's nice and clean. No mucking around with GDP or budget percentages, just taking the NS reflection of how much priority and funding you give defense.

Defense Spending = (M-[R/(W/M)])*pop

Where M is the maximum amount any nation can possibly spend on defense (I assume $5000)
R is your last UN defense ranking,
pop is your nations population,
W is how many nations are in the world as of the last UN defense ranking.

Now the biggest variable, is how much does the highest defense spending in the game (M) come out to? That's a somewhat arbitrary number, see. It could be $1458 like RL Israel.

But I think because NS is more heavily militarized, and because everyone has huuuuge budgets and if this is too below that they're gonna just ignore this and stick with their huuuuuge budgets anyway. So I'm gonna stick with $5000 as the maximum.

Incidentally, the last UN ranking on defense was on January 22, and there were 110,317 nations in the world at that time (thanks to Sunset's very handy UN Rankings Chart! (http://www.pacifier.com/~cziller/unrankings.txt)).

Now because I know W already from the last chart, here's the final formula, including my assumed $5000 max.

------------------------
Defense Spending by UN Ranking and Population (from January 22)

Defense Spending = (5000-[R/(22.0634)])*pop

Where R is your last UN defense ranking,
pop is your nations population.

-------
So, example.

Nation A is 105,675th in the world for this ranking and has 1.443 billion population.

(5000-4789.6063163)*1443000000

Equals defense budget of $303,598,085,579, or about 300 billion. (Nation A is Knootoss, btw... how close to the mark am I?)

Nation B is 16th in the world and has 2.295 billion.

(5000-.72518288206)*2295000000

Equals defense budget of $11,473,335,705,300 or about 11 trillion. (Guess who Nation B is!)

Now, some errors in that few if any people remember or can look up their populations as of last defense ranking. Oh well. Just use your current population, I think it works okay.

Thoughts, anyone?

More testing. I looked on Menelmacar's factbook and found she spends about $5,775,750,000,000 on defense.

Now let's look at her ranking and see if it's close.

Her ranking is 1,967th. Her population is 2.401 billion.

Soooo, (5000-[1967/22.0634])*2401000000


4910.848*2401000000

Equals $11,790,946,048,000, more than twice as much as she figured by GDP. So Siri actually UNDERESTIMATED how much she can spend on defense. (I admit I thought it would be the opposite.)

Hrmm... well, it's not perfect and its almost certainly not coincident with the GDP calculators... however it reflects the difference in defense rankings, which in turn reflect how each nation prioritizes the military in the game...

<bump>

Now, if I did this right....

[5000-1536/(110,317/5000)] * 2,358,000,000

(5000-1536/22.0634) * 2,358,000,000

(5000-69.6175) * 2,358,000,000

4930.3825 * 2,358,000,000

11,625,841,935,000


Quite a bit higher then I had been using too, but *shrug*, at least it is a better system.

Maybe the M variable should be lowered?

seriously too much time on your hands

Interesting...

And I must admit, I hate looking into GDP and I wouldn't touch most GDP Calulators with a barge pole, so I'll keep an eye on this method of working out spending.

The M variable is the most arbitrary. I imagine, for modern tech nations, you might wanna keep it at say 1500, which is close to the RL maximum defense per capita.

But for future nations with all those high tech gear, high tech production, uber spaceships, etc etc, this is what works.

Maybe a medium area of about 2500-3000 would work.

However, 11 trillion for me is only 1 trillion above what I had calculated it out by GDP and hand some months ago. So IMO 5000 works and isn't too godmoddery. But seriously, put in whatever number you want there...


a standard that could be agreed upon by all would be best. But I doubt everyone can agree on one thing.

wow, this is good.

Works all right, but the final figure is roughly 3 times my actual military budget.

Part of the problem is built into the game itself. The game automatically assumes that every nation in the game is the same tech level, with the same national currency value. Spending 20 trillion Turkish lira will not get the same result as spending 20 trillion British pounds. Neither will spending 20 trillion pre-1849 US Dollars compare to spending 20 trillion Federation Credits in a Star Trek setting.

As good as this method is, I think the very nature of NationStates is going to defeat any attempt to quantify the variables (many of them intangibles) of budgets and military equivalence- the more so since military prestige is linked to writing ability to the exclusion of all other factors (if someone attacked me, for example, I'd bore them to death with endless demands for explanations of their logistics train and threaten to bludgeon them with my copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War).

:P

I have worked out my own method for generating the national and military budget for my country, which I check against of the various calculators available (this method will now be added to that list). Many countries interested in what they can spend do much the same thing or use the calculators as their primary resource.

I like the fact that these calculators are available as a resource, but I only use them to "reality check" my own calculations. That's my brace of small copper coins.


TEO

True, and some stick really close with the writing-ability-pwnz-all thing. But hey this doesn't measure prestige, just the budget, based on the (admittedly flawed) NS mechanics.

Still I'd like this to be useful, maybe like a spreadsheet where you can select tech level. Then, depending on tech level the M factor changes. So for you, since you're not as future tech as I am at this point (sadly on my part.. I meant to stick with near-future but at some point after purchasing gravitic technology and before building a massive fleet of spaceships I had to abandon that paradigm) the maximum wouldn't be 5000. It would be more like, 5000/3. :D

And bear in mind that not everyone does their budget at all or even has a good idea of where it should be, in relation to other nations of the same tech level. That's where this comes in.

(And yes, I do have way too much time, although this only took about an hour this morning. )

Tag.

Gotta check this when the report comes again.

Heck, I don't use any calculators - I don't spend anywhere near what I can afford.

Wow. 11,686,956,521,739. Nearly three times what I had been using.

I'm inclined to agree largely with TEO, adding that there's no reason for nation #296 and nation #624 to be spending the same, is there? In theory, at least.

Personally I'm hardly interested in the national profile. It is quite arbitrary when one consideres that, as with BG, a wealthy if corrupt capitalist nation may undergo a communist revolution almost over night, utterly changing its manner, its budget priorities, and potentially collapsing its economy only for the national profile to react by stating that.. Hooters has gone out of business.

YOU DON'T KNOW MY BUDGET! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA! :shock:

I'm inclined to agree largely with TEO, adding that there's no reason for nation #296 and nation #624 to be spending the same, is there? In theory, at least.


296 and 624 don't spend the same, though, unless 624 has a bigger population to offset the difference. I mean they'll differ by only a small amount, but out of 100k+ nations the difference IS a small amount so..

But what if from the hundred-odd thousand nation states a couple of hundred happen to spend the same? They have to be ranked in some order, don't they?

Well, yeah. That's why the UN ranking is per capita. It's not perfect, this is just a perfect measure of an imperfect system. Or something. :wink:

Heh, alright.. I'll stick with my quickly-worked-out-in-my-head US$6trillion+ military budget, most of which is never spent and ends up going on a spiffy new year party. Em..I mean, cultural development programmes and foreign aid.


Plus we brew a new ale each year and dispense it free for so long as the military surplus will allow.. which next year shall not be long since the damnable UN has shown no interest in preventing the conquest of Madagascar and we're having to do it ourselves.

But I digress..

I'll just leave, actually.

[quote="Santa Barbara"]I was playing around with numbers and derived a formula that calculates your defense budget by your defense ranking. It does mean that you should keep track of your defense ranking, and hey your population too but otherwise, it's nice and clean. No mucking around with GDP or budget percentages, just taking the NS reflection of how much priority and funding you give defense.

Defense Spending = (M-[R/(W/M)])*pop

I did not see my nation listed in the UN Defense Ranking even though it was in existence for a coupleof months when the ranking you describe came out. If I did not find my nation's name in the list at that link. how else migh I go about finding out my nations' UN defense ranking? Thanks

let me see...the last time i was ranked, i came around 5000th out of about 80000...so let's see:

5000-[5000/(80000/5000)]*1,016,000,000=4,762,500,000,000$
looks good 'nuff to me.
of course, statistically it is unrealistic since it assumes a direct correlation between ranking and spending, and theyre are probably some exceptional cases where the results while be aberrant, but if it gets everyone to agree ...

*Thelas Millitary Intellegence Tag*

Graustark, you really just have to wait til the UN ranking for defense shows up. Your position and the total number of nations is listed at the bottom of your nation description page. (Today it's for lowest crime rates, for example.)