NationStates Jolt Archive

Alrighty, time to discuss individual nations. I'll start from the beginning, when you create the nation.

Now, WWRD? There are a couple ways that you can take control of a nation in real life, so I'll list those and see how they would affect the status of the nation.

* Exploration and Colonization -- You and your loyal band of followers and their families follow you out into the wilderness, ocean, or other unexplored areas and claim some land, with you as the leader. This makes the freshest start as far as creating your nation however you want. The disadvantage is that you basically have a no economy, a very small population, and no technology or infrastructure.
* Split an existing nation -- A nation torn by civil war has finally split into two, leaving a newly liberated people but the economy in shambles. Your mission is to rebuild the nation and defend against opportunistic attacks. Again here, you can do whatever you want with the nation, but you start with a larger population and an existing infrastructure. The economy is struggling because the nation just put it's entire effort into breaking free, then chose you to lead it. Note that some people may not like you or the fact that the nation split, so there may be some resistance in whatever you do.
* Gain independence -- Your colony nation was just granted independence from another country and you're in charge. The people still mostly believe in whatever the mother country's beliefs are, so changing their ideas is a bit harder. Your population is relatively small, but the economy and infrastructure is in decent shape.
* Rig an election! -- Your elite force of undercover henchmen rigged a small third world country's election. You're now the president, but there is civil unrest. The economy has some issues and the population is getting out of hand. Will you be able to pull the country together and gain the support of the people? Or will you have to outlaw democracy?
* Win a first world election -- Through careful planning, marketing, and spin doctoring you and your electioneers were able to get you elected as the president of a powerful first world nation. The problem is you only have four years, the nation's been running on deficit spending, and the population won't do everything you tell them to. If you don't gain their support and boost the economy, you won't be able to remain in office. Play it right and you might be able to turn it into a dictatorship, but the consequences are many, and the people won't like it.
* Be born into the ruling class -- Lucky thing, you were born into the royal family and are heir to the thrown of a powerful nation. You have absolute power, but the lower classes are definately being oppressed. They threaten to revolt. Your can either appease their needs, or oppress them even more.
* Revolution! -- You just led a revolution against the previous government. You inherit the country, but it's a confused time. The streets are chaotic, and the citizens only stop looting to hear your first public address. What will you say?

Ok, so I started to get a little colorful with my descriptions, but hey, this is fun! Of course the details of each scenario are up for debate, but those are the essential ones. Each start has advantages and disadvantages, and some are harder than others. The more difficult ones have higher payoffs though.

Side note: remind anyone of Oregon Trail? Are you a Banker, Carpenter, or Farmer? ;)

Other options when you start your nation might include the initial laws or government type, and of course all of the things like flag, motto, description, and whatever else you want. Some of the starts you can pick where on the map you want to start, and some it is random. You could 'request' landlocked, ocean front, or island, though ocean front and island may be limited.

My suggestions for picking are:
Explore, Gain Independence, Rig Election, and Revolution
These would be random:
Explore, Split a nation, Win a Big Election, Royal Family

For explore, you could just ask for a random location too, no problem. That way both options have easier and harder scenarios.

The starting scenario doesn't necessarily mean like in SimCity you have to solve this problem or gain this much money or else you lose. It just means you start with certain problems or challenges and go from there. Every scenario (and every country!) has different problems.

Though...there is the implication that if you screw up enough you could be kicked out. Also, war is no fun if you can't ever take over other countries. hehe That should be *very* hard though, and only if the other country is really messed up (weak economy, no defense, low population morale, etc...) . I think that at a certain point if you screw up stuff enough, it would either be impossible or really hard to recover, so you'd want to start over anyway. So...I guess in certain situations like if you are in a democratic country with a lot of freedom and the people hate you, you should be elected out of office, and would have to start over. Of course it'd all be in one account, you only get one nation per world. (World discussion coming soon to a future post near you!)

OK, I was going to write more about my thoughts on the actual nation gameplay, but this post is long enough and has enough for people to think about. :)

Any responses, thoughts about these?

Hmm, well, you already know my feelings on losing control of your nation. I, like Wazzu (and Max, for that matter), really don't think you should ever be able to 'lose' the game. That implies there's a solid way to win, too, which I don't think should be the case. There should just be pros and cons to each way of governing. Even if you 'mess up' your country, and it goes into a recession and the people are rioting and so on, it should just be a challenge to bring it back around. Sure you can quit if you really want to, but I don't think you should ever be forced to.

Then again, since we're talking about having 'War' and 'Peace' servers, separate from one another, maybe we could further subdivide the 'War' server into 'Occupation' and 'Regime Change' servers, or something. That way the game caters for everyone. Who knows.

I like the idea of starting differently depending on how your country has come into existence, though. That would be fun. I imagine that in the end it really wouldn't matter, because over time you'd just engineer your nation into whatever end result you wanted it to be. But for starting out, it'd be a lot of fun.

I can see a few possible problems with it, as with every idea, but they're probably quite minor. I mean, for example, if your nation follows the Split A Nation route, and thus you start with a larger population than normal, would your country still grow at the same rate as a country that Gained Independence, and thus started with a smaller population than normal? If so, the former country would always have a larger population than the latter, which seems a little unfair. Whereas you can relatively easily change your economy and political freedoms with the click of a few buttons and a little patience, at present there's no way to increase the birth rate in your country. So I guess for countries to start with bigger and smaller populations, the growth rate would also have to be easily changable (perhaps you can ban birth control, for religious reasons, and thus your population increases. or, conversely, since huge populations presumably present their own problems, you could restrict each family to one child, and shoot those who disobey. Huzzah!).

But yes, things like that are probably quite easily solved.

Yeah, I think since I wrote JT2 we've discussed in other threads about being occupied instead of losing control, which I like better, and losing all of your morale points if you don't allow elections.

Then again, since we're talking about having 'War' and 'Peace' servers, separate from one another, maybe we could further subdivide the 'War' server into 'Occupation' and 'Regime Change' servers, or something. That way the game caters for everyone. Who knows.

YES!

I mean, for example, if your nation follows the Split A Nation route, and thus you start with a larger population than normal, would your country still grow at the same rate as a country that Gained Independence, and thus started with a smaller population than normal? If so, the former country would always have a larger population than the latter, which seems a little unfair.

That's the point -- in this example, if you can manage to overcome the difficulties of feeding a large population with the economy in shambles and your support questionable, then you would deserve the extra population and/or land. It's a harder starting scenario, so it's a bigger bonus.

Population controls though are a good idea that I had vaguely thought about...it could just be an option within the Law system.

Population naturally grows, depending upon your health, the average age, and other factors. I'm sure there are formulas, I don't have them on me at the moment, but they can all be computed for the population aggregate growth rate, and if you have laws that affect one or more of those variables, then it'll work.

YES!

Oh, sorry, had you already suggested that? Sorry, I hadn't seen it.

That's the point -- in this example, if you can manage to overcome the difficulties of feeding a large population with the economy in shambles and your support questionable, then you would deserve the extra population and/or land. It's a harder starting scenario, so it's a bigger bonus.

Hmmmmmmmm. Man, that really doesn't sit right with me. As a game developer, the idea that a player would have a constant advantage for the rest of the game because of something they did very early on just seems atrocious to me. That's, like, Game Design No-Nos 101. Heh. But if the advantage is only short term, then that's fine. I mean, if
A) maintaining a large population puts a constant strain on the country, so the player has to regularly juggle the budget to make sure all his citizens have power and food and adequate police and so on, and so therefore having an enormously huge population isn't automatically a good thing;
and B) it's possible for smaller countries to, essentially, embark on a long-term initiative to increase the population;
then I'm all in favour of the idea. If the game features both of those things, then I think it'll be okay. But otherwise, it'll just be unbalanced for the rest of the game, and that's a terrible, terrible thing. If having a huge population puts a stress on your country, and that stress continues until the population goes down, then it'll work. Otherwise I really don't think it will.

Hmmmmmmmm. Man, that really doesn't sit right with me. As a game developer, the idea that a player would have a constant advantage for the rest of the game because of something they did very early on just seems atrocious to me. That's, like, Game Design No-Nos 101. Heh. But if the advantage is only short term, then that's fine.

Yes, I didn't mean that they would solve the problem in a week then have a massive population and economy advantage...it'd take a bit longer at least to bring the countries to order, and would continue to be a problem at times.

I mean, if
A) maintaining a large population puts a constant strain on the country, so the player has to regularly juggle the budget to make sure all his citizens have power and food and adequate police and so on, and so therefore having an enormously huge population isn't automatically a good thing;
and B) it's possible for smaller countries to, essentially, embark on a long-term initiative to increase the population;
then I'm all in favour of the idea. If the game features both of those things, then I think it'll be okay. But otherwise, it'll just be unbalanced for the rest of the game, and that's a terrible, terrible thing. If having a huge population puts a stress on your country, and that stress continues until the population goes down, then it'll work. Otherwise I really don't think it will.

Well, I think here we have to compromise from the WWRD concept for the sake of game design, like you said. I don't think that large population countries should necessarily be forced to decrease their population; however, look at China -- over a Billion citizens, and their economy is definately strained, logistics are hard to manage, they're practically a third world country based upon the Standard of Living for a lot of the population, but the advantage is that they have a huge potential and are a large player in many international conflicts/discussions/whatever. For the purposes of NS2, we'd have to build into the economy formulas a function of diminishing returns... Basically, increasing your population to infinity doesn't mean that your economy will grow to infinity. As you reach a certain point, adding more population doesn't increase the economy as much as it did when the nation has 3 mega-citizens. (Mega = 1,000,004 +- 1.5.) This means that each country will have an ideal population size if you're trying to maximize your economy. The ideal population size would be dependent upon other things like resources, technology possibly (general levels of tech... like iron age vs. industrialization vs. genetic cyber humans), and land, etc... A player may only be able to increase the ideal size by changing these.... finding more resources (which related to tech research if we're talking about energy from sun, fusion, asteroid mining?), increasing tech, adding land. This doesn't necessarily mean one player will have a game-long advantage.

One country or alliance may discover some new resource first, but other countries won't be far behind if they are keeping pace and not slacking in playing the game. (Of course if all countries except one alliance don't do any research and don't play except to make internal laws...basically act as isolationist quakers, they won't keep up and the one alliance would be able to conquer them...that doesn't mean they "win" they...just that they are occupying and annexed the entire world, if that option is enabled.) Resources I'm talking about aren't like a massive mineral deposit under on country, or something geographically centric. Starting resources would be randomly and evenly distributed upon game start. I'm talking about new ways of getting resources that everyone can do, given the tech, for example turning trash into power, or solar energy, things that everyone already has access to, just needs to research or buy the tech to do it. Again, one country or alliance may discover this first, and get a head start, but that just means they'll reach the point of diminishing returns quicker for their population-economy max.

As far as land, the more land a country has, the more borders they have to defend, which means the more armies and more economy they need. The US could try to take over Africa, but then the US economy would be poured into maintaining control, both internal and external, and might eventually collapse or lose control. This type of thing happened to the USSR, except slightly different. Too much land, too much population, badly allocated money (arms race).

We should talk about zero-sum and variable-sum games. Quick summary:

Zero-sum games: For one person to gain, another has to lose. Land is an example...if I annex part of Christmas Day's country, he has to lose it. As a part of the game design, any zero-sum games (games really means scenarios) within NS2 should have diminishing returns built in, like I mentioned above.

Variable-sum games: If everyone cooperates, everyone can win. Globalized economy is an example. If countries work together and share certain aspects of their economy through trade, etc..., both economies will benefit. These don't necessarily have to be limited, because everyone could find someone to ally with or at least trade with. That means everyone's economies can grow to a certain point. Players that isolate themselves would be at a disadvantage, but they can still have an idealistic alliance with other isolationists (if that doesn't seem like too much of an oxy-moron) for a common defence, but don't trade with them or something. Here, like in the Real World, globalization helps in general, and everyone can globalize.

Ha, yes, I know all about games theory. This is beginning to remind me of my Economics A-level several years ago. I absolutely despised that class, I really did. Almost as much as I despise Economics itself. Hehe, you're even talking to me with the same air of condescension that my lecturer took. :P

As for the advantages and disadvantages of all these factors we're talking about, I guess they're all things that would just have to be ironed out through play-testing. So I'll shut up. :)

Haha, don't take offense now, I talk like that to everyone. :wink: kidding ... I was explaining things for the benefit of the people who read and say "I'm lost." (Notice how I referred to you in the third person, hence not talking directly...hehe)

Anyway, yes. Econ and PoliSci are evil.

And play-testing should work things out -- definately will need beta testers.

Oh, and as far as Game Design Nonos, isn't not having a winning or losing condition a nono? Is it then a simulation or a game? hehe, just throwing a wrench in the monkey-works. :P

Reminds me of the scenarios from SimCity, actually. Though I see what you're talking about with Oregon Trail. This just pushes my point foward that Maxis and Blizzard (Simply for their support of Macs and great interfaces and good 'story and game' intergration) should get together and make a game based on this. Maybe even playable with different "Worlds" so you can have your nationon the main server and interact with everyone else, or play with someone on a small server on a DSL with a few friends for a small RPing group. Someone has to like the idea.

Haha, don't take offense now

Heh, no worries, I didn't. :)

Oh, and as far as Game Design Nonos, isn't not having a winning or losing condition a nono? Is it then a simulation or a game? hehe, just throwing a wrench in the monkey-works.

Hmmm. No, I don't think it's a nono. I mean, MMORPGs don't really have a 'win' or 'lose' condition, per se. You definitely advance, even advancing as far as you possibly can, but you never actually 'win'. And you certainly can't lose. You can screw your character up so he's inefficient and, essentially, crappy, but even then he's playable and not totally useless. In some of those MMORPGs, such as good old Ultima Online, your skills actually atrophy over time, so even if you did advance as far as you could possibly advance, if you just sat back and got lazy, you'd begin to regress, and would still have some work to do. So yeah, I don't winning is exactly a necessity for a game. Perhaps short term successes are necessary, such as beating these scenarios you're talking about, but I think you can get away without a long-term win or lose condition.

This just pushes my point foward that Maxis and Blizzard (Simply for their support of Macs and great interfaces and good 'story and game' intergration) should get together and make a game based on this

Well.

A) Blizzard and Maxis are stupendously unlikely to ever actually team up and work on a game. The most you could probably ask for is one of them selling the rights for one game to the other. They'll never collaborate on a game, I don't think. Ever.

B) Blizzard would never make a game like this. It's just not their field. If they did make it, it would be set against a backdrop involving orcs fighting an encroaching plague of aliens while satan plotted to be reborn on earth. Whilst the cutscenes would be incredibly well-made and detailed, they'd be limited to accountants balancing market reports late at night (set to extremely dramatic music), and the entire cinematics department would lose their jobs. Those same accountants, once they level up, would gain the ability to choke their enemies in red tape, but would be staggeringly weak against the Office Party events. You get the idea. Blizzard will never, ever make a game like Nationstates.

C) I guess Maxis COULD, but for that to happen they'd probably have to take time out from flogging the SimHorse (2003 Gold edition), and I can't see that happening for a long long time. As much as it pains me to say it, they'd be stupid to stop making sequels to well-known Sim games, because those games are still topping the bestsellers lists. Whilst they could make Nationstates into, like, SimNation or something, it still wouldn't sell as well as a new incarnation of The Sims would until the latter well and truly reaches saturation point, and that's a long way off yet.

D) It's more likely that Firaxis would make it, given their history of games. But even then, it's highly, HIGHLY unlikely that at no point in the lifetime of Firaxis, and indeed of all games developers ever, has nobody stopped and thought "Hey, I know what'd make a great game! Making your own country!" I'm absolutely positive that the likes of Firaxis and Maxis have pondered and dismissed the idea, for whatever reason. Possibly because between Civilisation and Republic, there just isn't much room for Nationstates to be a fully-fledged game. Who knows. But there's no way in hell nobody has thought of this game before now. Let's be honest, it's a pretty obvious concept as far as games go.

Damn. Someone actually did a full analysis of my post. I feel special. Yeah, the problem is there is no real company to make this, so we have to hope Max and his group of coders can make this work. Heh. What you said actually would seem like a good spoof to make of Blizzard's games. It's just me and my wishful thinking.

Check question #1:
http://www.blizzard.com/legalfaq.shtml

Indeed. Even independent game developers like my own are highly unlikely to look at suggestions and proposals for games, simply because they spend so much time thinking up their own.

Besides, if some major publisher picked up NS2, they could change everything about this game that is so attractive to most of the dedicated players, and there's not much we could do about it.

Those publishers already have their nation simulation series, why would they pick up the kind of game we're talking about?

Bump...cuz I can