NationStates Jolt Archive

The Greg Egan Sci Fi book has a hypothetical country Stateless that exists as an anarchic society built in the pacific using stolen bio tech.


In the book this society works outside formal government, yet a mate of mine has built stateless here in nationstates and ended up with a sprawling government bureaucracy. Since I have been on this site for a couple of weeks only - can someone tell me has this been discussed before? How is the back end of the game working?

Could you clarify what you mean by 'back end?'

If it's what I think it is...

The way the nation descriptions work is that the various parts (i.e. sprawling government bureaucracy vs. corporate conglomorate vs. what have you) are all determined by what I assume are hidden stats, or maybe by past choices. The problem is that you end up with odd controdictions (like your friends anarchy with a sprawling bureuacracy). If he wants to change that line of the description, he will have to choose issues that reduce government size as well as maintain the stats neccissary for anarchy.

Naleth is correct. An extensive set of hidden numbers is used to track the current status of each nation. Decisions on domestic issues push the values of these numbers around. UN resolutions that are passed also push these numbers around (if you're a UN member).

--The Democratic States of Cogitation
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