NationStates

Hello again!

Apologies for another thread regarding city-states, but this idea came up when discussing the inclusion of city-states in the Got Issues? Discord server, and I thought it would be interesting to propose it here.

So, the question I asked was whether there would be a way to track if a nation is a city-state or not as a possible validity for Issues catered specifically to city-states. The thought I had was that perhaps this could be tracked through the nation classification or pretitle, yet that wouldn't be an efficient manner of tracking it.

That is when I came up with the idea of the potential introduction of a new policy: city-state. After discussion with fellow GIers, this is how the policy could work:

• The policy would have to be available from the start, because often city-states are such from the start. There would be two ways to add this from the start:
  
  
  1. Through a starter question. This question could be "A nation is its capital" and it could primarily regulate the level of centralisation through agree or disagree. However, by choosing "strongly agree" a player's nation would get the "city-state" policy from the start.
  2. Through a History choice. A new choice for a nation origin could be added, for example "Seceding City-State" which would install the city-state policy instead of stat changes.
• For existing players, there would have to be an issue that allowed the addition of the city-state policy. SherpDaWerp suggested it as a possible crazy third option in an issue that dealt with complaints about a nation's rural regions, and in the third option a nation would be able to sell all land except the capital and thus become a city-state.
• There would also have to be an issue that enabled a nation to reverse the city-state policy. The most straightforward approach is to have an issue that talk about the city state being too small for the current population, and so there would be options to solve that and one or more of the approaches could be something to cancel the policy, like going on a landgrab campaign, reclaim land from the sea and such where new cities would be established.
• Another problem would be any issue that mentions a city beyond the capital. A possible solution there would be to exclude any nation with the city-state policy from receiving those issues. However, I could see this being a gargantuan task on part of the issue editors to go and backtrack all the issues, so I understand if there are reservations about this.

Overall, I think it would be nice to allow nations that play as city-states to have that be acknowledged by the game itself. Also, I could see several interesting issues being written specifically catered to city-states, so all of this comes down to whether there is enough merit in the introduction of a City-State policy to justify the effort needed in implementing this. I'd say there is, but of course I'd say that so I am interested in what others here think about this.

This would be a very interesting policy, for sure.

I agree that this would be an interesting policy. At the same time, it should take more than just a single issue to turn your nation into a city state. I have seen many scenarios where nations have accidentally changed their economic system from Capitalism to Socialism and vice versa, usually after skimming through an issue. That scenario would be even worse if a nation “accidentally” became a city state

Socialist Ancomistan wrote:I agree that this would be an interesting policy. At the same time, it should take more than just a single issue to turn your nation into a city state. I have seen many scenarios where nations have accidentally changed their economic system from Capitalism to Socialism and vice versa, usually after skimming through an issue. That scenario would be even worse if a nation “accidentally” became a city state

Well, that really is the responsibility of the player then. If a player made a choice they didn't read through then that is - in my opinion - their own fault. However, as I said in the OP, there would be a reversal issue to revert the city-state policy, and I am sure players would write more issues with a reversal option after the introduction of the policy (should it be introduced that is).

This will almost certainly not happen. It's a very niche policy that would nonetheless require validity changes/doppelganger options for a significant chunk of the issues base, and in many issues going forwards. I don't think exploring the concept of "city states" is significant or interesting enough to warrant that level of work.

Sedgistan wrote:This will almost certainly not happen. It's a very niche policy that would nonetheless require validity changes/doppelganger options for a significant chunk of the issues base, and in many issues going forwards. I don't think exploring the concept of "city states" is significant or interesting enough to warrant that level of work.

Fair enough and clear enough answer! Then it was a fun and interesting thought experiment in the GI? Discord server thank you for the reply!