Roger Campbell

That's not even the whole city. That's just what you'd get with the first nuke. Because of the way it works, the most expensive stuff gets destroyed first. You also probably ought to throw in another ~$250K to account for improvements destroyed, but that will vary depending on what you hit, and obviously doesn't account for a large fraction of the total. The total cost for that much infra, assuming you continued pounding that one city into the ground, is $252,906,125.00, not including whatever you spend on improvements.

Playing around with the nuke simulator and plugging the averages into the infra cost calculator, it comes out to somewhere in the ballpark of $191,326,190.00

The Nuclear Winter War?

So I was curious exactly how much of nuclear winter we're experiencing here. I found a calculator that will convert Roentgens into your preferred dose equivalent. As of posting, the global average is 171.9 rads, or 1.719 sieverts. Correlating with the helpful xkcd chart, that tells us that while the background dose isn't enough to kill you right off the bat, it would give you some pretty nasty radiation poisoning, and your life expectancy is going to take a hit. Your short-term odds are slightly worse than playing Russian roulette. North America, meanwhile, is completely dead. You might be able to survive if you get straight to an ICU afterwards, but the odds are against you. So yeah, time to head underground there. So it seems it took us all of 30 hours to go from zero to nuclear wasteland. I suppose congratulations are in order.

"Most alliances have enormous requirements for declarations of war against another alliance." Given that wars are started for such deeply philosophical reasons as "Blood for the blood God" and "Ayy LMAO", I think this statement might be flawed. Also as you pointed out in your opening, war is generally seen as a good thing in this game, not some somber occasion that requires a carefully measured response. So treaties are pieces of paper that just formalize what everyone was already going to do anyways. They don't have any ingrained meaning other than what we attribute to them. Given this, I'd be willing to wager that even in absence of formal treaties, we'd still see something similar to "treaty chess" for political and strategic purposes.

I think directly messing with the effectiveness of troops is a dangerous path. Also, it would promote short, heavily damaging wars over longer grinds followed by spurts of rebuilding. The point you mentioned about having nations bounce back mid-war and buying all new military improvements also isn't necessarily a bad thing. In real life, large scale conventional wars are won by being able to out-produce the enemy. And this would add a new realm of strategy to wars, on whether damaged nations want to put their wartime resources towards short term or long term investments. I'd support a regular old discount like Sheepy mentioned, perhaps with some sort of diminishing return as you get closer to your original levels. So the first hundred or so of "easy" repairs is really cheap and can be recovered during the war if it drags on, followed by a period of reduced, but still reasonably expensive rebuilding. But only if that can be done in a simple manner that doesn't completely void everybody's plans, otherwise, what Sheepy said.

A Mutual Defense and Sorta-Kinda-Optional-But-C'mon-Guys-Help-A-Bro-Out? Aggression Pact. Or MDSKOBC(m)GHABOAP. I like it.

I have made that mistake before. I tried watching Fatherland before bed.

More colors, more characters, and more panels! Politics and War: A story in comic form Part 4: Selective Service Scheme In peacetime, they have too many volunteers, and so have to do a similar reverse where they fail anyone who reacts for not holding still as instructed. God forbid anyone should ever threaten the Capitol, the federation government would be handing out guns to everyone who could stand. The guard in panel one is rolling his eyes. He sees this kind of showing off a lot during wars. The uniforms were supposed to be based on the east german Nationale Volksarmee, but ended up with more of a blue-ish redcoats kinda vibe. Extra bonus points to anyone who can figure out where the jokes came from. Previous strips can be found below: Part 1: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-97-politics-and-war-the-comic/ Part 2: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-101-pnw-comic-part-2/ Part 3: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-112-pnw-comic-part-3/

Perhaps have a relatively moderate amount, but with a means-adjusted cap? That way big nations don't hog all the glory and newbies don't bankrupt themselves. Perhaps 24hrs revenue per event? Just to take a guess at numbers, maybe $60 Million for the cost? Large enough to be a setback to alliances, without braking the bank? EDIT: Ooh, I like this! The ability to take you down with me!

Glad you like it! Part three is already out, and it has pretty colors.

Today's comic has just a splash of color, which I think came out quite nicely. I've also made a few changes to the drawing process that will hopefully make better quality scans. Let me know what you think! Politics and War: A Story in Comic Form Part 3: Artistic Ambitions Previous strips can be found below: Part 1: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-97-politics-and-war-the-comic/ Part 2: http://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/blog/19/entry-101-pnw-comic-part-2/ For anyone who can't quite make out my writing in the image, the seal says Lingua latina mortua est.

The story continues. Part 1 can be found here. Politics and War: A Story in Comic form Part 2 About the Art: I ended up redoing this one after the second and third panels came out weird. There were a bunch of subtle tweaks that I think made a difference. Most of them focus on setting things out so that they will scan nicely. I've worked out a way to make the brightness and contrast a bit more consistent throughout the page at the expense of looking on the whole lighter. I reckon radio-speech-bubble thing came out nicely. It looks readable but still similar enough to the background that it doesn't distract from the actual narration/text. For any eagle-eyes that notice the pixel weirdness in panel four, this was due to me recognizing a glaring typo in the text only seconds before I was actually going to post it. I managed to correct it, but it required a great deal of cutting and camouflaging.

Good work to everyone involved. Gold stars for everyone! True, it's common courtesy. But even that's hard to expect, especially in a game that focuses on politics and competition. Plus, people don't tend to bring up when someone does something decent, at least not nearly as much as they complain when they don't. Whole negativity bias thing. It's good to see that people can still be courteous on both ends.

I'm very glad. Part 2 is in drafting phase, and will probably be put up either today or tomorrow. I haven't really done a continuous story arc in my drawings, nor adding text on the computer, so this is all an experiment for me.

I had been thinking of doing an in character, news/propaganda blog category for some time. However, it would seem that while I was thinking this over, the whole format has become widespread. While this isn't by any means a bad thing, I simply cannot bare being thought of as 'jumping on the bandwagon' and so decided that I must do something different. This morning I came up with an idea for a comic layout illustration, and it seems to have turned out acceptably. So I'm going with that. I've got an idea for a short little story arc that I think is both interesting and mostly within my current artistic capabilities. If people enjoy it, I may post more. Our story begins in the Campbell Nation, a burgeoning federation (Officially "Neosituationist People's Federation") following a peculiar variant of democratic socialism, and a proud member of the alliance Rose. It is late May, and although the alliance is at peace, it looks as if it will not remain so for long. (We'll meet our protagonist over the next few strips.) Politics and War: A Story in Comic form Part 1 About the art: I draw things by hand, with a regular old pencil and sketchpad, and occasionally some colored pencils. For this comic, I drew the pictures on a page, then fought with the scanner to give me an acceptable likeness, and chopped that up and put it back together again in MS Paint. I am well aware that better options exist, but at the moment I like focusing on the paper drawings. This process will probably stay the same for the story arc, though I may tweak a few specifics. The first panel shows three flags; they are, from left to right: the Campbell Nation's official flag, the Rose alliance flag, and the hammer and sickle used by my nation in game. The seal in the second panel is the official pencil-and-compass emblem of the National Neosituationist Party, which represents the Campbell Nation's official ideology. The third panel is a close up of the Grand Senate of the Federation. All of these symbols are very prominent, and likely to come up again.

I like the idea of a rotating bonus type thing. Maybe nations could build a genericly cryptic "Special Weapons Research Laboratory" (think Torchwood or SHIELD) that lets them periodically get something sci-fi like. So maybe today it's raptors. Next month maybe an advisor comes to your leader and says you've lost all the raptors, but figured out how to train sharks. Maybe Halloween brings some new contagion, or an otherworldly space ship. I think this has potential in the long run as a pleasant little feature for veterans, if the numbers are tweaked right. Also, this is totally the kind of thing I'd be very tempted to shell out a credit subscription for, even as a purely cosmetic/ VIPs only thing. Who wouldn't want to broadcast to other nations about their secret weapon programs?

Very interesting indeed. There issue I see with this is that as nations grow larger, land pretty much has to scale with it. You just can't build a 2000+ infra city on 500 land efficiently. And nations with a large population are the type of countries most likely to be investing resources into defensive systems. Perhaps instead of land, population density?

No, I am Spartacus!

Foreword: This has nothing to do with P&W. This is just my own opinions on the world. After all, that's what blogs are for, right? On the Judging of Books by Covers By Roger Campbell "Never judge a book by its cover." The old saying goes. This was one of the oldest and most oft-repeated lessons of my childhood. It was repeated by my parents, my teachers, my television shows, my films, and my nursery rhymes. It appeared countless times as the moral of my stories, and functioned as a summary of the vast majority of the curriculum of my preschool. My comrades on the schoolyard, and indeed even my most bitter playground rivals, acknowledged this ancient saying as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Most of the time this axiom was interpreted as a general message of acceptance towards those we deem as superficially different from ourselves. We applaud the diversity of appearance, background, and culture as a thing of beauty, and appraise the goal of living in harmony as amongst the greatest dreams of mankind. Despite making undeniable progress towards this goal, I fear we may have failed to understand this saying in a simpler, more literal meaning. Between the construction of these cultural lessons of my and my compatriots' collective childhood and the present day, society has undergone a massive shift in the primary means for the dissemination of information, and thus culture. Gone are the days when childhood lore, and indeed all information, was collected in physical libraries of paper and magnetic tapes. No longer can the intelligence of a given region be approximated by the breadth of topics and modernity of materials at the local library. Today every individual with an Internet connection has his or her own infinite library updated to the second, and with a truly unlimited variety of topics, in every language and attuned to every background and culture. Patrons of the digital age hold in their hands a wealth of material unparalleled in human history. Today, every citizen of a developed country can know, and can be expected to know any piece of information in existence within a handful of seconds. And even so, we are not all knowing. Despite having harnessed powers attributed only to gods a few centuries ago, modern humans are not omnipotent. With all of our digital hubris, we are just as mortal, and just as fallible as our predecessors. Rather than upgrade our physical forms to accommodate an increased capacity for thought, we have outsourced facts previously memorized to mechanical minds working in virtual libraries. While this might not be a problem if the Internet operated in a similar manner to physical libraries, with rigid structuring, order, and a central authority moderating contents for standards of accuracy, at present our digital library has no such standards. Instead, individuals are left to their own devices, and it is the choice of each user to determine which media is valuable and accurate. It is, of course, impossible for any mere mortal to search the entirety of our digital archives and determine alone what is important and what is interesting. It would be equally impossible to artificially structure the Internet with the standards of accuracy we have come to expect from libraries and academic institutions, without infringing on the freedom of the user to investigate and add to ongoing discussion. Instead, to bridge the gap, we have begun to rely increasingly on corporate-built platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter to serve as free and public forums and as a means of aggregating the daily influx of new content. These platforms allow us to restrict content to what is relevant and interesting to us, with the occasional interjection of reliable and relevant news and advertising. In return for our trust in handling our personal information and acting as the stage for our personal dramas, these platforms have provided us with a way to navigate this grand nexus of information. The problem arises when our interests diverge from those of the corporations. The primary goal of these corporations is to maximize user involvement in their platform, in order to provide paying advertisers the most prominent access to users' attention. Note that this does not require that the content be relevant, or indeed at all beneficial to the user. Take note also of the fact that this content need not have any standards of factual accuracy. If the goal of a platform is to extract attention, it is vastly more important for media to be personally engaging than accurate or helpful. This is dangerous in itself, but is made even more dangerous by the fact that the vast majority are unaware of this bias most of the time. When we expect our platforms to aggregate the reams of incoming material to find what is relevant to us, we tend to expect the result to be a concise summary of the state of the world. In fact, the result is a narrow perspective carefully calibrated to fit in with what we already believe. Already we have seen the result of this bias. Anyone who has witnessed any sort of online debate, especially those which arise from everyday comments where no sources are provided, has witnessed the polarization and fervor with which each side believes their viewpoint to be the obvious conclusion of clearly stated facts. To these people, the singularity of all modern evidence reaffirms what is already known. After all, if nine out of ten comments in my news feed support a particular point, what reason is there for me to look further? Any opposing comments which may slip by will only represent the fringes, which will further inflame and reinforce the original beliefs. In conditioning our platforms to play for our attention rather than present useful and balanced perspectives, we have taught them to judge for us. We have taught these computers to judge books solely by the covers before the humans so much as hear the titles, and we have led the humans to believe that these books represent the entirety of literature. We have rewarded extreme and unfounded media and tuned out balanced and well researched materials. Can it be any surprise then, that we are moving towards extremism in favor of moderation? Should we be surprised when ordinary people begin to believe that their views represent the only available conclusion? We are judging the whole story of humanity based on a few brief snapshots because they are more idly amusing, and because they fit in nicely with our existing biases, against all the childhood wisdom of our forefathers. If we continue this trend of rewarding the judging of books based on their covers, then we should expect a resurgence of the same thing happening to people within a few generations.

Campbell Nation Ministry of Information - Department of Wartime Propaganda Letter From Doeringgrad Resettlement Camp Published with permission from Author Since arriving in the Campbell Nation, I have been treated to a modest but comfortable lifestyle. Life in a refugee camp is by no means glamorous, but it is far better than what awaited me in in my former homeland. Although I am not currently permitted to leave the compound because of my former citizenship and factory work for the axis war effort, I have found a reasonable degree of comfort in the life provided to me by the state. As it were, the factory work provided within the compound is just the thing I have needed to keep my mind away from the war. This is ironic, because the factory which was built in the center of the camp is focused around building computer chips for the federation missile program. It is not particularly complicated, although it does require proper dexterity. It is rather curious having fled from a monarchy to a socialist nation. It was not my first choice. After the missile which struck my home "convinced" me to leave my homeland, I crossed several borders before winding up here. The first several countries would not accept me. I was politely informed by their security services that my citizenship disqualified me from applying for asylum, and to kindly get lost. The fourth country I was handed over to held onto me for only a handful of days, until a nuclear weapon exploded over their capital. Once again I was politely told to get lost so that the country's own citizens could have a place to sleep. I managed to get to the Campbell Nation by hitch hiking on a military convoy. They brought me to these newly constructed facilities meant mainly for Rose citizens, but told me I could stay as long as I applied my experience for the war effort. Since arriving, those of us able to work have been put to use in factories and repair shops. Since there are no televisions, and personal electronics are prohibited, there is little to do but work. We listen to the socialist realist songs and the military music as we work. The factory managers are required to turn down the volume before the world news comes on, but every time he nods and tells us that we are still safe. The camp is sparsely decorated, and there are few clocks, so those of us without watches tell the time by watching for the hourly sky patrols from the People's Defence Forces. During my first days here, the non-Rose refugees were ordered inside during every flyover, but the authorities have slowly given up on this. The food is tolerable. The main complaint is always that there is not enough. These are made mostly in jest, however. We are on rations similar to those throughout the Federation, and I suspect the entire world. At the suggestion of one of our younger comrades, and with the permission of the authorities, we have planted a small garden of our own, and as the seasons change we intend to put up a makeshift greenhouse. There has been some resentment between various nationalities, but the authorities have done a good job of avoiding conflict. If nothing else, they have kept us too busy to fight amongst ourselves. All of us want this war to be over, but each of us understands the need to end the war properly, so that the end of this war is not the cause of the next. I do not regret leaving my homeland, because I think that for better or worse, they are on the losing side. People have talked about the future historical importance of this conflict we are in the middle of. I hope they are right. I sincerely hope that this war is unique in being the last one. With socialist greetings, [Redacted] Recieved at Ministry of Information Headquarters, Doeringgrad C/O Commander Jacquelyn Fink, Doeringgrad Resettlement Camp

It's because you're being far too subtle. Perhaps you should have thrown in something about calling your alliance Keven Singdoms.

They're different. I can't say with any degree of conviction which is better, because it's an apples to oranges comparison. P&W players new to NationStates would probably be bored and confused. NS players moving to P&W would probably be overwhelmed and confused. I enjoy both for different reasons.

I've been thinking a lot about the difference between my "home" community of NationStates, and other nation sims like this one. I want to start off by saying that they are very different games. NationStates is, at its core, a political game, with a focus on ideology and broad policy over micromanaging. It has no clearly defined goal, and there is no clear metric for success or failure. War is conducted either through role playing (of which there is a great deal) or through a complicated proxy system involving the administration of regions. This second system is really better regarded as an entirely different game, and has its own universe of politics and opposing communities. Even this, however, has a minimal effect on an individual's choices. NationStates is somewhat strange among popular nation sims, in that there is almost nothing to do with game mechanics after one has mastered the basics. Paradoxically, this lack of hardcoded goals seems to have spurred players to develop entire world's of things to do. By the admission of the game creator, who is an award-winning author in his own right, the rigid self-imposed standards of quality in the role playing community rival those of fully published works. The level of politics and intrigue which permeates both national roleplaying, and especially relations between regions, makes real-world diplomatic crises seem straightforward. As with any sufficiently large community, the level of activity and detail is nested fractally, and has no endpoint. In sharp contrast, P&W is based on the premise of tweaking numbers to perfection, and micromanaging until the cows come home. Nation scores, leaderboards, and wars provide a plethora of goals and ways to stack up players' efforts. Alliances take this one step further with data-oriented aid programs and additional tools to pinpoint the effects of player actions. Players who do well can bask in the glory of being ranked highly, and nations who fail will know as much in no uncertain terms. Even with these features, however, players are limited in how much detail they can put into their nations. Daily activity is limited by resources, and creativity in policies and spending is limited by the need to maintain defensive capabilities. These limits are not necessarily a bad thing. The more complex a game becomes, the steeper the learning curve for new nations becomes, and the more likely new players are to become overwhelmed and quit. A finite number of daily actions promotes long-term strategies, and player loyalty. There is also a certain realism in limiting the possibilities for players to enact fringe policies, and shepherding players towards a particularly successful model. In many ways, P&W and NationStates are opposites. P&W is geared towards developing one's nation along very specific lines, with the end goal always coming back to war and building infrastructure. NationStates is not so much a simulator, as a template for creating stories, whether those stories be enshrined in roleplay, factbooks, or fictional statistics. And yet, the politics between alliances and regions is almost the same. The same language, the same agendas, and the same (contextually justified) paranoia of other groups. After a great deal of thought, I have concluded that it is not so much that the engines are similar, it is that the players, and their actions and intentions when dealing with each other, are virtually the same. The purpose of such an online game is not to generate a set of statistics for one's ideal utopia, as such could be just as easily accomplished with a pencil and paper, and skip the period of building. Nor is it for the purpose of the raw stimulus of pushing buttons correctly; we make it far too difficult for that. What is really on display in these games is the interactions between players. We desire external validation of our achievements, and we choose to seek such validation through a system which mimics the familiar flow of international politics. It can come as no surprise, then, that similar demographics will join both games, or that similar themes and buzzwords will arise in both communities of players with similar taste in style, because the source and manner of human validation is the same. In conclusion, while the mechanics of NationStates and Politics & War may be presented as opposites, and indeed, there are substantial differences in the traditional methods of regular players, the demographics of the players, and the manner in which they address each other, are almost indistinguishable.

Why not both? Also: Where's the option for a soviet-style single party state?