I know that this is covered in the FAQ, but that only served to confuse me more, and I did a search of the boards, but came up with nothing.
Anyway, My Newb question is how does one keep track of one's Economy? I just found the GUSTO calculator. To change some of the totals therein, I'd just vote specific ways on certain issues? And, if I were to 'spend' money, I'd just keep track of that myself, for use with the RPs, no?
Again, Newb. I mostly play D&D, where everything is pretty much codified, so I'm still figuring this out.
Thanks!
Cheers,
Sitae
Uhmmm .... not exactly.
As you've said, unlike D&D, NationStates has no hard rules governing everything from combat to commerce, and no DMs to dictate character actions and emotions.
In order to change how your nation's government orders its priorities, you have to respond to issues appropriately. A militaristic government would always act to raise the military budget, for example, and this would be reflected both in your nation's economy [high weapons manufacturing rankings] and in your nation's budget [huge defense spending and probably high tax rates]. Most issues aren't as straightforward as they seem, and it's very difficult for one nation to get every possible issue, since some require a nation meet certain criteria. A hard-fisted dictatorship, for example, would probably not get an issue banning elections.
NationStates calculators (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Calculators) all attempt to take the NationStates XML Feed (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/XML_feed) for any given nation and turn it into hard figures. All calculators make certain assumptions, and all calculators reflect the biases of their creators. As far as I'm aware, calculators are usually used as guidelines or are ignored completely. It wouldn't make much sense for a pre-industrial nation to have the same GDP as a space-faring civilization, after all. Calculator numbers tell little about the nation's character, and may not reflect reality. For example, the Weyrean government spends little on transportation, but has an sizeable private mass transit system run by competing corporations. The Weyrean government spends a trillion and a half on defense, but its military has such low morale that it would quickly surrender in a serious conflict.
On a side note, there's no universal agreement on how to convert between real-life and in-game time, so it's completely up to you when one year for your nation ends and the next one begins. The NSWiki article on Game Time (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Game_time) explains it quite nicely. As a result, how long it would take your government to 'spend' money also depends completely on you.
To make a tie to D&D, think of yourself as a DM playing with other DMs. Each person has ultimate control over their nation(s). There's absolutely nothing stopping a player from populating their nation with sentient telepathic mushrooms. I heard someone did make a nation based on the Mushroom Kingdom from the Super Mario universe. Likewise there's nothing stopping a player from choosing to interact only with nations set in the arly twenty-first century. To take the example further, there's nothing to stop a player from declaring that each soldier in his nation's army is a Fighter20/Wizard20/Cleric20/Spellsword20 with a Full Plate +5 and multiple Rods containing Level 10 spells. We call such claims wank (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Wank) when they're not backed up by solid role play. Consistent and blatant wankage tends to eventually lead to ignores (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Ignore).
I'll stop now before going completely off track. The stickies in both the Nation States and the International Incidents subforums are quite helpful, as are many folk at #NationStates on irc.esper.net . Welcome to NationStates and happy RP-ing ^.^