Cyber Nations Part One

This is a photo I took of a tree on University of Aberdeen campus.

As you've probably gathered by the title this is going to be the first of a series of posts I'm going to be making about Cyber Nations, a nation-simulation site similar in concept to NationStates.

I'd just like to make it clear at this point that this isn't going to be a review or rant about the site. Cyber Nations has often been viewed as NationStates' strongest 'competitor' if the term could be applied and as such a certain amount of rivalry has amounted between the proponents of either site and I think I may anticipate a certain amount of, ah, bitchiness if I don't portray things accurately enough. I'm just going to mention my observations and discuss the general ethos of the site.

NationStates will be five years old this November while Cyber Nations is a few months shy of its second. I remember when the site launched there was a certain amount of discussion on the NationStates forums about this new game and how it would compare. I confess I didn't have any interest in the site at the time and its much more complex nation management system rather put me off. I've never been much of a video/computer game person but I have watched someone play Civilisation before and that's what instantly comes to mind when I grapple with the micro-management required in Cyber Nations, except it's spread out over months of playing rather than one sitting and obviously has the added complexity of interaction with other players. I didn't really have the patience for that so I left it alone.

Until today. Cybernations has long since passed its early developmental stages and has developed its own devoted following so I decided I'd have another bash at it and record my gameplay and thoughts here for a while until I'd had enough.

I've registered my nation and called it Plijous. The first thing I noticed was just how much more customisable your nation is than on NationStates. You can choose a capital city, a major religion, an ethnicity, name your ruler and even write a small descriptive paragraph about your nation. Technically you can choose a major religion on NationStates through issues but you're pretty much restricted to Roman Catholicism, atheism, and paganism. I'd encourage people to submit an issue concerning that so it can be remedied. Could be pretty awesome I think. None of the rest is available on NationStates though so I enjoyed the extra freedom I had to populate Plijous with Arabian frogs that glow in the dark, all the while enjoying their diverse mixture of religions to which they adhered.

I was asked to choose a nation team, which I believe is the same as a trade alliance (think European Union). All teams have their own identifying colour. Those who do not wish to be in a nation team are independent grey states. There isn't really any equivalent of a nation team in NationStates, as we don't have any in-game mechanics for alliances or trading of any sort, leaving that up to roleplay co-ordinated efforts like GDODAD. The closest we have are regions though nations aren't necessarily allied in them. This may be the same for Cyber Nations, I'm not sure yet. Like NationStates, there's an FAQ page but due to the greater complexity of the game there's huge swathes of text to read through to get an essential understanding of the game.

As well as joining a team you can join an alliance too which seems a little confusing to me but it seems to work.

Wishing to throw myself into the game I decided to join the Yellow team and an alliance called 'We Are Perth Army'. I'd vaguely looked for any NationStates ones but didn't see any nor did I really expect to since there aren't any Cyber Nations regions on NationStates. I eventually joined this alliance while looking for somewhere a Scotsman such as myself could settle in.

I'm probably mixing up steps in the nation creation process but the next thing I did was choose a place on the Cyber Nations world map which looks exactly like a world map of Earth. This quite fascinated me because NationStates doesn't have any maps other than player-created ones. I recall an attempt once to construct a world map but unsurprisingly it fell through. The premise of the Cyber Nations map is simple (and necessarily so). You have the world map and you choose a place on it to be where your nation is, be it in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, clutching to an ice shelf in the Antarctic regions or in the hearts of the major continents. I chose for myself a small island off the north coast of Russia for no especial reason. You can't see where all nations are at any time on the map and with about 35,500 nations I'm sympathetic to that.

Moving on, I was asked whether I wanted to take part in wars or not. I elected to not take part in wars because I wanted my nation to still be standing by the time I'd finished the posts for this blog. Once I've done a few posts I'll activate it and see what the war mechanics are like.

My nation was complete! Hooray! The Benevolent Tim rules his people proudly, the flag of Paraguay flapping softly in the wind and there is nothing to be heard but the distant ribbiting of the nation's biofluorescent frogs. Moderately pleased, I had my first look at my nation page.

The first thing I noticed, and it's quite hard to miss, was the large block of angry red words telling me that my nation's peaceful nature meant I wouldn't make very much money, my nation was overcrowded with 250 people to a square mile, my citizens were rioting, my nation had no infrastructure, and I should have a military to police my people. Whew! I've only just founded Plijous and already it's falling apart.

The second thing I noticed was the sidebar. NationStates has a few links. Ones to your nation, your region, issues, telegrams, the world page, and the United Nations being the important ones. Cyber Nations has about thirty which support various features as collecting taxes, buying land, improving the infrastructure, paying bills, wars, foreign aid, and so much more. This is clearly a much more demanding game than NationStates has ever been but I'm open to new challenges so I looked through them all taking note of what seemed important and what didn't.

The last thing I noticed before trying to immerse myself in the game was the resource box. The resources show what kind of things I can trade with other nations to get more money for improving the nation. All these resources have their own little effects on the populace and the nation. I have to admit that I was almost turned off at this point because as much as I like the human interaction of alliances and such, I'm not such a big fan of the micro-management side of things, the whole SimCity vibe of having to buy and sell to work your way up. My two resources are oil and wine. My dislike for this is purely a personal preference though, and not a negative assessment of the way the game works.

An interesting site to visit is the Cyber Nations wiki which parallels the NationStates wiki that we've come to know ourselves. The differences should be obvious enough for me not to comment but the greater requirement for co-operation in Cyber Nations definitely seems to have helped bolster such a dedicated wiki. I was impressed by what I saw and the wiki's definitely been useful in assessing just how strong the fanbase is for Cyber Nations. Out of curiosity I looked up NationStates which throws up this page. Even to the casual reader it's not difficult to notice a rather scathing tone to the article. I don't want to sound like I'm bitching but I do wish to take issue with some of the assumptions made in it (not the least that bizarrely enough NationStates is referred to in the past tense for a majority of the article).

Most of these larger, complex regions did most of their business on off-site forums, like InvisionFree and others, as the game itself was very limited in capability.

This is a strange comment to make since Cyber Nations does the exact same thing. All the alliances have off-site forums just like NationStates regions.

Eventually, players realized that by 'crashing' a region, and installing a new Delegate, the game could take on characteristics gravely lacking in gameplay such as war, politics, etc.

Asides from the 'gravely' which I'll get back to, I agree that we don't have any official mechanisms in the game for war excepting regional influence. But no politics? That's just wrong all over. Having battled very hard to get my region Lancre off the ground and instill enough patriotic pride in its members to grow the region until it had 50+ members was very difficult. There's no in-game mechanism for encouraging people to join you region, or persuading people to vote you for delegate, or sorting out wrangles between nations in the region who are ideologically opposed. That's all done with words, with diplomacy, and with threats. And that is what politics is.

For a long time, there was speculation that Jolt (who now administers NationStates) would create an expanded version of NationStates. However, despite the rumors, no such sequel ever came into being. Many speculate that no programmer would attempt to create a more complex game for free.

NationStates 2, I can assure you, is still being developed. And it will come. There's a rumour that we might get some more news this Autumn, so there's no need to give up hope quite yet. As for the last sentence in the quote, no one ever said NationStates 2 would be free. Quite the opposite in fact. NationStates 2 when it comes out will cost about US$5-10 (or £2.50 - 5) a month.

With the advent of Cyber Nations, however, and the rise of faster, cheaper, more accessible alternate reality programming, many speculate that NationStates will eventually decline in popularity.

Well that's just bitchy. Right now we're experiencing the usual dip in nations we get everytime it's summer but the rest of the year we do just fine.

Well, that's it for part one. In the next article I'll focus more on the details and have a look at the wider Cyber Nations community and forums.