NationStates v1.9: Regional Influence

Ladies and gentlemen, Influence is in the building. After a long, long wait we have grabbed our greatest grievances by the short and curlies and destroyed them utterly with one deft stroke. Region griefing, at least as we've known it previously, is no more. The strangely abstract concept of natives is finito. Ejecting to refound is no longer a crime but a remarkable achievement. And all because of that lovely nine-letter word... Influence. With a capital I. But what is it? Well, just see our explanatory page and you should get the lowdown, but what does it mean in the broad sense?

Well, now we have region crashing properly coded into the game which means no worrying about rules apart from the rather obvious one of only having one UN nation. When NS was first written by Max Barry he'd never suspected that people would gang up together and steal regions from others. He liked it, but obviously we had to make it fair or people would get discouraged from playing because of, for want of a better word, arseholes. So we ended up with a lot of complicated, precise and, sad to say it, makeshift rules to make things fair to all the players. It never really worked terribly well so something had to be done. And now it is. We now have Regional Influence, a co-operative creation between mods, admins, and players. This has actually got roots going as far as a year back and I'm thrilled that it's all finished now. It was exciting to be a part of, even if my contribution was rather small.

Your influence dictates just how powerful your nation is, and thus how easily it can be kicked from a region, or how many nations it can kick should it be delegate. Your influence grows depending on how long you've been in a region and on how many UN endorsements you have. Non-UN nations only have influence based on how long they've been in a region. It costs the UN delegate some of his/her influence to take particular actions like passwording the region or changing the world factbook entry. So, the more powerful your nation is, the more sway you have within a region.

The bit that I was involved in was the user interface - how should we tell nations what their influence level is? I helped create that, along with the regional power labels (which show how powerful a region is compared to the others).

Your influence label shows how much power you have in your region. So you may have the same label as someone in another region, but you might actually have less power (or more) than them. You'd have to look at the other nations in your region to compare yourself accurately.

The practical implications of this new system are I feel, to be explored by you, and not me. So go! Explore! Experiment! Have fun, and enjoy NationStates v1.9 - it's been a while coming.