NationStates Jolt Archive

How do UN resolutions actually affect UN members? I have been in the UN for some time, but I haven't actually seen my nation change as a result of the resolutions passed. My country is completely under my thumb, even though there are human rights resolutions. Does the UN actually do something?

There is an effect, but it can be quite small (particularly for repeals or Mild resolutions). Further, as I understand it, the bigger one's country (and the more issues one's answered) the less impact resolutions have.

The effect can usually be judged by the description ('A resolution to...'): so Environmental resolutions decrease economy and increase environmental spending, Moral Decency resolutions reduce civil liberties, and International Security resolutions increase tax rates and Defence/Law & Order spending.

(Presumably there are some subtler effects it's harder for players to guess: for example, it seems Social Justice resolutions can decrease crime, but whether they always do, or whether Free Trade ones increase it, remains to be seen.)

Has anybody actually looked at their stats through the XML source code to incrementally quantify these impacts?

Has anybody actually looked at their stats through the XML source code to incrementally quantify these impacts?

Not everything is in the XMLs.

Not everything is in the XMLs.

Pretending I'm being honest when I claim not to be hacker/programmer type, where else could that info be stored? ;)

In zOMG s3cr1t places that we've never revealed, and don't plan to.

Seriously, there's much more to this game than we've released. If the code and all the factors were public, some clever programmer-fanboiz would have long since analyzed the formulæ and figured out how to make their nations 'the bestest in the wurld!1!'. We prefer for effects and such to remain somewhat mysterious.

Plus, even where we have looked at XML, the effects haven't always been predictable. Some people have UN puppets for which they don't answer issues - Sovereign UN Territory is one of the oldest examples - and these can be used to 'track' resolutions, but it's quite crude. There was a time (resolutions #148-163) when a lot of Free Trade resolutions passed, and over this period UN puppets mostly had high economic freedoms and decreasing tax rates. But the increase wasn't exactly the same time each time a resolution of equal strength passed.

No idea if the code works like this, but let's say you have a score somewhere between -100 and 100 for particular things. A score of 20 on Civil Rights equates to a ranking of Good; a score of 35 is Very Good. If a Significant Human Rights resolution gives you an increase of 10, and you had a score of 14, you would see an increase from Average to Good. But if another then passed, the score would only increase to 34, and there would be no observable change.

The other thing is population clearly makes some difference. When a Social Justice, Strong resolution passed, a very new UN puppet had its tax rate more than double. But SUNT's only went up by a proportionally small amount.

Safalra and others worked out some guestimations about Influence based on careful observation, and you could probably do the same with resolutions; I'm just not sure it's worth it, because we know what the basic impact is.

Safalra and others worked out some guestimations about Influence based on careful observation, and you could probably do the same with resolutions; I'm just not sure it's worth it, because we know what the basic impact is.

Thank you both. I agree it isn't worth my time ... I'd much rather document what we do know and get it into more useful places (resolutions, issues, etc.), but it is still interesting to think about the details we haven't had confirmed. :)

What I'd really like to see is another script run to collect the distribution of government types in NationStates and then a comparison of the frequency of each type to the age of governments. Is there a trend perhaps that older nations tend to slip into more central UN Classifications? I would think that for those of us in the UN that this is the case. Naturally I'd also like to see how the overall frequency distribution compares to the older government type surveys.

Pretending I'm being honest when I claim not to be hacker/programmer type, where else could that info be stored? ;)

We actually know that the data isn't saved in the XML files because we know that there's numeric values for everything we can't see. What it means is there's a line in the (most likely) database with all the numeric values for our individual nations. Then, at update, the numbers are modified and the XML files are generated from this updated data - most likely at request of the file since generating 100,000 XML files at the same moment would take a while.