Military Intervention

Roleplaying Basics

Before leaping into a roleplaying frenzy with guns ablazing, you should read The Euroslavia Series of Helpful Hints and The International Incidents Consolidation Sticky.

There are many ways and styles to roleplay military intervention. Most roleplaying of military incursions happen through simple public forum postings or other web page updates. There can be Telegrams (TGs) sent via the NationStates game, but that leaves no permanent record of exchanges. Chats through messenger applications may also be used, though this is private conversation.

It is all freeform roleplaying without referree or systemic underpinnings for war. There is no real-time game world enviroment like in an MMORPG, nor any turn-based system. No, do not try to request or demand them from the game staff either. Some people are experimenting with combat calculators based on your country's general economic and government statistics as private side-projects, but this is not inherent in the game.

In your prose, you can describe pretty much whatever you wish regarding ongoing military events, organization and orders of battle, vehicle or weapons specifications or other reference material. Make up your own maps and graphics.

Just remember that the more outrageous you become, the more likely others may just simply turn off their attention. This is called the "IGNORE Cannon," and it is devastatingly effective.

If you pretend that your forces are invincible or simply disbelievable given relative strength or technological capability, you may be accused and ruled against for godmoding, and your posts could be deleted.

Where do I look for Military Roleplaying in NationStates?

• NationStates International Incidents Forum - The central and foremost location for such activities.

• You can also roleplay an incident on your own regional web forum, create a blog, or maintain private web pages.

Technology Level

Each nation in NationStates can determine its basic technology or tech level. It is often categorized into one of the following (there is of course no limit):

• Modern Tech (MT) - technology available at the present time of play. Military technology should be systems that can be bought off-the-shelf by governments, or creative fictional variations similar to real weapon systems.

• Near Future Tech (NFT) - If you are reading about technology that's still underdevelopment, but is likely coming down the pike within the next 10 years, or perhaps as far as 20-30 years, you can call this Near Future Tech, or alternatively, Post-Modern Tech (PMT). It should be science, not science fiction. It should be practical and engineerable, perhaps relying on certain technologies that are still nascent or yet-to-be-designed, but not and never magical.

• Post Modern Tech (PMT) - see Near Future Tech.

• Future Tech (FT) - Future tech comprises all manner of futuristic combat systems. Whether giant-fighting mobile suits or space dreadnaughts. Populations of nations in the game can rise upwards of 5 or 6 billion persons. It is therefore reasonable that global-scale and interplanetary combat systems are required. However, just because your population grows to that size does not mean that you must become future tech. And just because you are small in population does not mean you cannot tuck your country into a future tech setting.

• Historical - a specific period or setting (ex: 19th Century, Medieval Crusades, World War I, World War II)

• Alternate World/History - variations of present day (modern tech) or historical settings with key differences (ex: World War III after Axis wins World War II, United States and Confederacy split after Civil War, etc.)

• Fantasy - either a generic or specific setting or genre where magic or mystical creatures exists.

• Science Fiction - While all "Future Tech" setting are science fiction, there might be a specific flavor based on the setting, such as the Star Trek or Star Wars universe.

Some nations blend their roleplaying, perhaps mostly Modern Tech, but with a whimsical bit of fantastic magic thrown in. Others might defy easy categorization. You are free to envision whatever setting you like. Others, of course, may or may not follow you there.

Open, Closed and Invitation Only

• Open - such a roleplaying thread may be entered by anyone who wants to post in it. Just pop a message reply, and your additions be added to the end of the story.

• Closed - roleplaying threads might have been opened once, but have been limited to a certain number of people. They are closed. You can read through what they are up to, but you should avoid posting in the thread yourself.

• Invitation Only - some threads were created with a select list of invitees in mind. You should not post in these threads, but again, read over their contents if you desire.

Ask Permission, Respect Answer

If you see a closed thread or an invitation-only thread, and really, really want to post, you might send a telegram (TG) to the nation who began the thread, informing them of your desire to participate. Do not expect or demand an answer, and respect whatever answer you are given. No one needs to involve you in their roleplay. Do not "crash" the thread either, or you can get ignored or sanctioned by the moderators.

Military Budget, Equipment and Storefronts

This entire section is optional, but highly recommended if someone wants to feel as if they are simulating, even loosely, a military budgetary process.

Your military equipment has no system mechanics to support it. It comes from nowhere. There is no real absolute or even logistical limitation to what you can produce. However there are systems that calculate your nation's economy, and particularly your defense budget, such as NSEconomy.

For people who are interested in verisimilitude, they can use this budgetary figure as a basis of military spending. Every day your population will increase, and you can consider this a new budget cycle. The absolute value may go up or down depending on your GDP per capita and tax rate (which will change based on your policy choices or effected UN Resolutions).

Wait! My Defense Budget says $0.00

Yes. Some nations spend absolutely nothing on defense. You will have to choose a domestic Issue that sounds like it will raise defense spending. Or, if you are part of the UN, certain Resolutions may increase defense spending at the cost of other forms of spending.

Until that number goes above zero, you can roleplay being the victim of a military intervention, and call others to come assist you, but you won't be marching your own forces anywhere. You don't have any.

Budgeting, or Don't Spend it All in One Place

You probably should only use a small percentage of your daily budget for weapons spending. You have to pay soldiers, feed them, house them, purchase fuel and power for their vehicles and facilities, and much more than just buy new hardware.

• Personnel - How much your military get paid. Remember to compensate reservists too, if you keep them. It should likely be linked to GDP per capita rise and fall. This segment of budget can account for 25% - 50% of your annual military budget.
• Maintenance - Logistics of bases, port and airfield facilities, buildings, power, fuel, food, vehicle and equipment repairs, etc. Usually about 25% - 50%. Push for a higher figure if you need to expand to new bases or repair heavily damaged ones, or if you are consuming massive amounts of fuel and spare parts during a war.
• Procurement - This is the budget for new and replacement weapons systems and munitions. You should only be able to buy generally available systems in this budget. Tanks, airplanes, and other vehicles usually have a per-unit cost. If you want, you can search for weapon system costs on the Internet for actual military hardware. There are sites which detail how much an M1A2 Abrams costs the US government, or even an aircraft carrier if you care to read through Congressional budget reports. You should budget for ammunition, since some missiles might cost more than the vehicles that launch them. Don't forget uniforms or boots for everyone. Did you get helmets? Tactical vests? Radios, electronic countermeasures, handheld GPS units or night vision goggles. Search for actual figures, or make best estimates. If you want to brag about it in your roleplay, make sure your nation bought them. If it is a top-secret, never-been-seen-before weapon system, consider tucking it under your R&D budget instead. Keep procurement about 20% - 40% of the budget. Remember that this will go up dramatically during time of war if you need to replace destroyed materiel.
• Research & Development - Cutting edge technologies. If you do not spend here, do not expect to have the latest gadgets described in defense magazines and web sites. Also remember R&D should be far higher than recurring system purchases. In fact, you might see a lot of real-world examples where the first 20 units might have cost $1 billion to produce in an R&D program -- for a per-unit cost of $50 million per unit -- and then subsequent costs dropped to $38 million per unit. That's just an fictitious example, but it pays to do homework. R&D should run between 0% (if you buy only older-generation equipment, and do not mind to have lower-grade equipment) up to 20%. If you are spending more than 20% on R&D, it's possible, but you are likely scrimping somewhere else.

Storefronts

Storefronts are where other players will advertise various real or fictional products for sale, usually posted under International Incidents, though some virtual arms merchants might maintain private sites.

If you are playing in a Modern Tech world, this can save you a lot of scrounging around for information. But be wary. Some information might be quoted out of context or be incorrect.

If you are in a Future Tech world, or Near Future Tech, there are no real-world examples. Products and costs will generally be made up by someone who has designed what they feel is a reasonable system for a reasonable price for the technology level.

There's no real money that changes hands. You're not spending anything other than your time when you post to a thread that you are 'buying' something at a certain quantity for a certain price. You do not need to go through a storefront. You can pretend you built these products internally, or bought them from 'somewhere' -- which never needs to be logically defined unless you want.

Organizing Your Military

Once you've afforded your force, it's best to keep a clear list of what you have available. You can keep this private, or publish it under your NSWiki page, International Incidents, or some other location. There are a few types of listings you might want to make.

Ranks and Grades

From lowest to highest, what are the rank structures of your military forces? Who is considered an officer, and who is enlisted? Feel free to adopt a real world model, or make up your own.

Order of Battle

This is usually a high-level picture of all the forces you have at your disposal, broken out by branch of service, such as your army, air force or navy. You should list how they are organized by divisions, squadrons, fleets, and how many main weapon systems or personnel each one includes.

You might also put together lists of totals and types of major systems in your military: tanks, personnel carriers, aircraft and helicopters, guns, missiles and even nuclear weapons. How you afford these and how many you specifically purchase is covered below in more detail, but for now, consider categories of major weapon systems you'd like to have and track, at a high-level in your military.

Ship Catalog

Because naval vessels are so vastly different from other weapon systems, some players write up long ship listings, recording, naming and numbering each ship in their fleet. You can assign whatever naming methodology you want for your navy, sensical or not. It could be the PXQ Preztel, or the Q-1101, or just "that big sub."

Or just keep track that you have a certain number of vessels of a type, and don't worry about naming them until you need to toss one into a story.

Table of Organization & Equipment (TO&E)

This is a list of the ideal organization of a standard, specific unit of your military. It may list all or only some of the following:

• The name and description of the unit type, along with its general mission or purpose
• The parent unit to which such a unit would likely be subordinate to
• A list of subordinate units that comprise the unit (and their makeup)
• Personnel quantities, requisite military grade levels and specific assignment in the unit
• Models, descriptions and quantity of each item of issued equipment, from vehicles to bayonets to mess kits (though many people leave out all the extraneous details and focus mainly on vehicles, weapons, defensive and communication systems)
• Total cost of procurement and ongoing support

Airforce Personnel to Aircraft Ratio

This is just an example, but one element many players forget is that there is far more to a modern air force than simply pilots and mechanics. The fact is air forces require, on average, about 50 personnel for every commissioned aircraft.

In a highly efficient air force (or one that scrimps on repairs and lacks many support services), that number can drop as low as 35 personnel to one aircraft.

In a less-efficient air force (or one that lavishes great care on each aircraft, might have multiple crews to enable round-the-clock missions, or many support services), it can be as high as 100 to one.

Within a squadron itself (usually comprised of 8-24 aircraft), it is usally advisable to keep a ratio of 15 or 20 personnel per aircraft -- a mix of air and ground crews, plus mission planning and command staff.

The rest serve outside the squadron, as base operations and security, medical and legal staff, drivers, computer, networking and electronics technicians, logistics and procurement officers -- anything you can image.

The same type of analysis goes for Armies and Navies (though at different ratios depending on type and class of weapon system). You need more than tank and submarine crews. You need the entire infrastructure and logistical chain behind them to field those systems.

You can, of course, pretend you have automated, computerized robotic systems to minimize human personnel, but someone still needs to repair, maintain, and test those systems.

These things can be generally hand-waved at, but should not be considered magically "solved" (unless you are roleplaying in a fantasy setting). You do not need to calculate everything ad naueum, but people will catch on if you have 50,000 people in your Air Force and are trying to field 20,000 2-seat advanced jet fighters.

Population and Military Personnel

Set reasonable relations between your population and your military personnel. Do you have 1% under arms? That sounds very little, but it's quite reasonable for most states. Can you realistically set it to 10%? Yes, but then your military personnel is likely running much of the state's enterprises.

Don't look solely at the percentage next to your defense spending, because that's the percentage of your government spending. Instead, look at how much your defense spending is in relation to your total GDP. (You'll have to use your own calculator or spreadsheet.)

Make sure you can afford to pay a military of that size. Or even feed them.

Loyal? Of course they're completely loyal!

Are they? Use tools like EconomyStatistics to check your National Loyalty. This should affect recruitment and desertion rates, general fighting spirit, and so on. Many nations have claimed to have 'crack troops,' and then you note their national loyalty is below 50%. Perhaps some units are loyal, perhaps even most of them, but the general mood of the country is not in support of the regime. Expect such troops to have little popular sympathy or support.

You can also use that in your arguments when creating your stories. Perhaps low-loyalty troops can be more easily forced to surrender, or yield to bribes.

Conversely, if your opponent has a high loyalty, expect them to fight to the death, or have the popular support of the common people. Don't pretend you're the welcome liberator if people loved the government they already got. Or if you are acting that way, admit it's an act, and you're just bluffing.

Characters

Stories come alive with characters. For military roleplaying, see if you can have a cast of characters to tell different levels of the action, from commanders to front-line grunts. Vary their voice or attitudes to show that there is more than just one person or one personality-type in your nation.

Keep track of your characters if you want in a list on your Forum or Wiki pages. They might be one-shot characters just for a scene, or recurring characters you tell the overall story of the growth of your nation around.

Roleplaying Does Not Affect Game Mechanics or Vice Versa

• Roleplaying warfare has no bearing around the NationStates mechanical game system to control regions through the UN Delegate position.

• Roleplaying will not lower your game population, no matter how many casualties you roleplay died because of nuclear war.

• Roleplaying will not alter your economic statistics or in any way systemically alter your nation.

• No one can "take over" your nation from you mechanically, though you can roleplay through your forum postings that you are an occupied nation.

Posting Netiquette

• Spell properly. Avoid leetspeak and Internet shorthand.

• Allow others some time to respond. If you can post 3 times a day, and other participants post once a day or every other day, you will simply barrage the thread.

• If someone dropped off, move on, but be accommodating to let them back in. There are times when someone you were roleplaying with simply stops responding. Feel free to leave the post there and roleplay in other threads.

• Check in NationStates to see the last day they were active, and send a friendly reminder to check a thread. Respect if they do not get back to you. That by itself is an answer.

• Bump with content. Don't just post "Bump." Try to add a nuance of character, or some more factoids of the region or characters involved. "The Lieutenant was reminded of the incident on Hill 612. Narrowing his eyes, he grimly awaited what was to unfold next," sounds quite more dramatic than "Bump."

• Be ready to wrap it up. A lot of good threads do not have closure. They just sort of peter out after a great burst of creativity. Try to plan for episodic closure, and perhaps start a new thread especially if the post rate has dropped off undramatically.

• Show your military élan, don't just claim it. Everyone in the game apparently has the most crack troops in the world, or galaxy. Everyone has the best equipment, and every weapon fired is a hit! If you wish to earn that reputation, then know your terms. Use military technical terms and tactics properly. Don't exaggerate the capabilities of your systems as if you are defense contractor commercial. Do some research.

• Celebrate cool roleplaying, even from your opponent. Remember that you cannot really 'lose' in NationStates. Your nation will muddle along regardless of whatever story is concocted on the forums. If someone just told a great story, and you are on the short end of it, die with a flourish! ("We cannot be defeated.... Nooooooo! Argk--") Don't worry. You'll be back in the battle the next day.

• If you're not interested, please say so politely. Some people might crash your threads and interject totally inappropriate comments. You are within your rights to ignore them or ask them to leave the thread alone. If you did not close the thread, you might want to close it. If you need to, report the issue to the mods (moderators). But don't get too riled up. Focus on your game and enjoy.