Nations RP Guidelines

[walpvrgis]

Two pretty significant issues that were brought up during the round were (1) the ambiguity around silicons and how people treat them (2) the ambiguity around rogue/splinter nations and in-fighting.

For the former, I'm open to any suggestions for how to make silicon players' experiences better. Do you think it'd be good if they were essentially free agents and could work with any nation (and so don't necessarily have to listen to the UN), or would we prefer something more like a silicon nation?

Having played a cyborg during the event, this was my biggest issue; silicons didn't really have any purpose or role during the round. With default laws and being at the mercy of medbay as Cal said, it was difficult to find our place (we mostly ended up being ignored or treated as property which was weird). I like the idea of being "assets", and I think that could be pushed more; nations should want to have silicons siding with them due to their versatility, either through law changes or through treaties. A silicon nation could be fun; maybe they start off with (modified, for the purpose of the event) basic laws, and have the AI present in the initial meeting as a representative. Having espionage involving someone breaking into upload in order to force, through laws, silicons to side with a particular department/nation would also give players another way to gain the upper hand during a war for example.

Goals in general for the nations would help a lot, as I noticed that the round was a little slow to start with the early UN meetings floundering a bit due to lack of direction. Maybe there is neutral territory that departments want to claim? Or a stockpile of resources for departments to find and declare war/a treaty over? It might help with giving a direction to steer the roleplay towards!

Traders should definitely all be on-station; could be worth disabling the regular merchant random event, and having traders set up permanent shop in those locations. Would be easier on a larger map that more people are familiar with too. I like the idea of loading little pre-made map builds onto the map (I think this is what happened during the event?), to make them striking enough to stand out to players.

Last bit of feedback is that I definitely think signups are a good idea for Captain and also maybe just department heads in general! The google form you mentioned would work really well, especially as roles like Captain definitely seemed to be a bit of information overload and stress during the round.

All in all, regardless of my feedback and issues during the round, I think the event was still a blast, and it's a unique and fun playstyle that I'd love to see happen more often. As I mentioned on discord, growing pains are kind of destined to happen and it went really well regardless! These recent RP events have been great, ty admins for hosting them!

[WrongEnd]

Right, sad I missed the first nations round in a while: you did it while I was at work! Here's my thoughts from the after-action reports:

1. Captain and heads definitely need some form of access-gating, whether locking to mentors or signups or whatever comes to mind.
2. I personally feel like the huge engineering megablock nation is going to be way too powerful each nations round. I'd recommend splitting it into Engi-mech and qm-mining.
3. Silicons need either a special nations lawset or need to be told to ignore their laws for the event.
4. Coups, elections, revolutions, rebellions, etc need to be allowed.
5. A new map for this would be nice!

I'll go through each point in more detail.

From what I gathered from the after-action report, the captain was brand-spanking new to the game and happened to roll captain on an event where the captain is a high-intensity job that makes or breaks the event. This obviously went bad, and the UN was nowhere near as present as it should have been. This isn't on the newbie, but on the fact that such an important role was not access-gated to people that could be guaranteed to have the experience necessary. Further, I also gathered that the RD and the MDir were not.. Entirely there. The RD apparently just essentially declared war against the UN and made WMDs, before hiding them and logging off, leaving their nation in the dust. MDir wanted to go against the wishes of the whole medbay and go to war, and was entirely absent from diplomacy and didn't command his nation. Both Medical and Research sounded fairly directionless as a result, which makes me think the head roles that are guaranteed to be leading a nation also need to be access-gated in some way to people we know will follow the spirit of the event and are experienced enough to handle the added responsibilities.


The engineering megablock thing is just a personal preference -- in my original nations events, I split the two precisely because I worried about those kind of balance concerns. They have all the ways to make money on the ship, and together they have more people than any other nation on the station. It's going to end with them overly-powerful every event round, IMO. In my nations rounds, I found that a qm-mining and engi-mechanic split allowed both of them to be decently powerful, but not overwhelmingly so. I think it's worth trying.


Silicons definitely need clearer roles. In my original draft, when I envisioned them as UN Assets, I imagined them as essentially having replaced 'human' with 'UN Employee', where they essentially just had to act in good faith to assist the UN wherever they could in whatever form they could, including hurting non-UN people. In my original nations event, I just told them to ignore their laws and focus on just helping the UN, but that also cuts out the law interactions that could result from people doing things like subversion; so I'd definitely prefer their own lawset for it.


In the after-action report, I heard that the medbay wanted to depose the MDir due to his absences, and were told they couldn't; I definitely feel like that was a bad call. Part of being a leader is keeping the confidence of your underlings, and if you want to depose them from power, you should be able to. In the case of the medbay, it would have been a coup, but there was an example of a peaceful transition of power potentially in Civ, had the call been made that leaders could not be deposed: The HoP was too peaceful for civ, and was not following the wishes of their nation to go to war quickly. I'd argue Civ should've had the right to have a vote to depose the HoP, and give the HoP's power to someone else while the HoP becomes an underling of the new leader. In the same vein, Medbay should've been allowed to force the MDir out of power for his warmongering against the nation's wishes.


I was talking with a mapper on the discord about what a good map might look like; I feel like a map with small starting departments spread out across a station with a lot of maintenance and filler rooms would be good. Give them materials to build, and let them expand their departments across the station. It'd give an early goal and allow for territorial tensions once territories meet. Not really anything to do with your end, Flourish, but I thought I'd mention it.


Those are my thoughts!

[Ikea]

Honestly instead of splitting up engineering megablock Id honestly prefer to see the opposite approach and merge medical and science and give staffies to civillian (have them spawn with civillian headsets for the event). This honestly may allow departments to go toe to toe with peacekeepers and would end up with the departments feeling a lot more powerful. Engineering would have the power of being the ones who supply stuff, medsci would have good WMDs + lots of good support, and civillian would have raw numbers to back them up plus good support.

[AlyasGrey]

Perhaps an added law that allows cyborgs and the AI to request approval from the UN, given an appropriate grievance, to deny service to specified nations?

[DioChasek]

I wasn’t apart of the round unfortunately but a centralized meeting area sounds like a must for any diplomacy between nations.

[DioChasek]

A weird thing to bring up, but what exactly would the roboticists allegiance be medical or UN? Yes they are medical, but they directly increase the scope of the UN and it’s ability to try to keep the peace, which may or may not be in the interest of medical.

[AmazingDragons]

I, unfortunately, missed the last one, so I don't have direct experience, but I think that medical and research ought to be combined. Right now, both engineering and civilians have much, larger role limits (with these events there could be thousands of staffies!). Medbay has like 12 people depending on late-joins and extra job slots and the like, research has six, engineering has seventeen (as well as generally being considered to be the most powerful), and civilians both have an infinite number of slots (which really stacks up with the high player counts of events) and most of the special latejoin roles are civilians.

Beyond players, research is super weak. Everything they can do can be done by other people (toxins = engineering, chems = bartender) and it's all considered WMDs anyway. They need some help. Medical also doesn't have much that they can do: basic healing is pretty available and making money is difficult for them.

Lastly, as it's being debated whether or not roboticists are part of the UN, that's another thing that medbay would be losing, and two more people they'll be short. If that happens, medical will definitely need even more help.

[Flourish]

Guidelines have been updated with major changes in bold. We hope to iterate on these guidelines as we continue to play!

[Cringe]

We need a dedicated server for Nations (Suggested by Thomas Light on Discord)

[Ikea]

The whole you need to be in a summit to switch nations thing is pretty weird and I find it doesnt work in practice with how guarded summits are, feel like itd be better if you just needed permission from the head who leads that department. Lower pops would help a ton, also a timecap for the round I also feel would be good to prevent rounds from dragging on.

[Merlin1230]

Okay so, I was sitting a sec desk as a blind character for this nations round, I don't know what happened with a lot of stuff so take my words with a grain of salt.

Basically, the civillian department seem really un-united. The staffies that make up most of its population don't even have the civ channel, and at the end of the round I was harboring MANY MANY civ members, I'm not sure what happened but they seemed overworked.
I was also harboring a engistan member, I think people in general were overworked.

I personally think the pop was WAY too high for that, everyone seemed overworked and some nations didn't really seem united at all. Perhaps there can be a pop-cap or similar, although I personally think a pop-cap is terrible.

I don't have much else to say really, like I said I was a blind character sitting at a desk for over two hours...

Actually, I do have one more thing. They had a policy to take headsets off in the UN summits, since there would be a lot to focus on with all the channels. However, I think this lead to SOME disunity since nations didn't have a leader for the first... 30 or so minutes. However I think most of the issues were just from the extremely high pop.

edit: actually I have a few more things to say:
The round dragged on for a little long, it might be a good idea to consider a hard time limit.

And also, personally, I think maybe staffies should be free to join any nation? And I think it should be a little easier to switch nations, we had someone that wanted to switch but it was denied by the HoS since tensions were too high. I think in general its a little too hard for people to switch considering they have to be in a meeting that only happened twice the entire round.

[Cringe]

Ozymandias for Nations seems like a cool experience.

[Waffleloffle]

pop cap of like 80-85. please god. you can have the finest handpicked heads in the world who are committed to doing the best rp they can, but they can do NOTHING in the face of too many people who are constantly saying things and attacking without procedure and making unlicensed checkpoints in the halls and just generally running amok

[Rilor]

I personally think one issue is that nations is VERY RP heavy, and as a result of events being special and all that, they always have a much higher pop than usual. And it seems in my opinion that generally speaking the higher the pop the harder it is to RP.

Annother thing is that without a single active leader the nation tends to fall apart it seems, and obviously managing a ton of people whilst also in the middle of tense negotiation is very hard. The RD was able to manage it and sci did GREAT, The CE wasnt able to do that and thus engistan DIDNT do great. one idea to combat this is that the leader could delegate an ambassador to attend negotiation instead so that the leader could run the nation and keep it in one peice

[Ikea]

Id like splitting up heads into two jobs, you have departmental managers who manage internal affairs, and you have ambassadors who manage external affairs. These two jobs are in close contact of course, but it should help take a lot of burden away from heads and make things far less chaotic.