Do you worldbuild with NationStates or capped population?

[Yohannes]

Roleplaying a small, Middle Eastern dictatorship isn't fun when you have 1.131 billion people

That is true. It seems writing about a Middle Eastern dictatorship is the thing lately. The International Incidents sub forum has been full of awesome Middle eastern oppression threads for two years or so now

[Purpelia]

Yea, methinks that it's possible too. If land area's not enough to fit so much people then FT nations pretty much can build entire satellites to fit all their population and let them thrive through multi-planetary resources.

(Image) Ever seen the movie Elysium? This is the satellite that's pretty much the size of an entire dwarf planet (lol).

Personally I am more partial to O'Neill cylinders. But that's just a matter of taste. I just really like the esthetic of a giant can rolling around in space.

The one thing I feel we can both agree on is that a FT civilization, magic FTL or none is not going to look like the silly stuff we see in regular SF. Empires won't be built around tiny blue balls surrounded by vast expanses of nothing. Rather, the whole thing, but especially planetary systems are going to be full of this stuff.

The way I describe these things each system is basically the equivalent of a metropolis. Every planetary body larger than a small asteroid has some colonial presence. And even than most of the people and industry actually lives on space habitats strewn around these and the paths in between. So you have your orbital habitats, your stationary habitats and your moving habitats. You have your maintenance and fueling stations and stopover points and shipyards and the thousands of ships connecting all of those and trading between them and the infrastructure needed to maintain those transports and the transports needed to feed that infrastructure...

So like entering into the inner confines of a solar system is just suicide. It's a giant 3 dimensional traffic jam. And like in my stories it is universally true (since I do use FTL) that it takes less time to get from one star system to another than to get to your planet of choice once you get there.

It's hard (or I might just not be looking hard enough) for me to find FT nations that actually seem sensible. What you just said pretty much gives me an idea that FT people are indeed OP and definitely more relevant than your typical NS nation, but those same players behind the FT nations aren't really able to provide an explanation into their population, their weapons that make them OP, or how they're even able to travel between entire planets.

If there's a player behind a FT nation that can actually explain how their nation's stuff works without simply saying that "it's just how it is" then I'm gonna be curious, haha. It'll be hard to find someone with that much experience because we in the real world can't do that right now (aka explain how we can do stuff like maintaining such a high population, etc.).

If you ask me the absolute stupidest thing you can do as a FT author is explain your technology. FT technology like FTL is just magic that serves the plot.
The second stupidest thing you can do is make up even one thing that is unnecessary to the story you want to tell.
The third is not making sure everything else is realistic so that people can more easily buy into the stuff you did make up.


And just to give you some perspective on what I say this I'll talk a tad about my style. Personally I like writing space opera, FTL travel and communications, space is an ocean and all that. And I don't shy away from the outright fantastic like space wizards or demons either.
In the best game I ever ran which lasted almost a decade I literally had a giant fleet of a million starships (quite realistic actually) fighting a planet sized demon god (not so much) for dominance over the souls of my people. And the starships used solid plate armor and atomic bombs for weapons. And there was no AI or magical force fields and the missiles were guided by plain old radar.

The demon god served a purpose. It had a thematic reason for being there. Adding in unrealistic shield or weapons would have not. And I feel that by not having those fantastic elements where I easily could have I grounded the story much better making the human struggle at the center of it more believable.

[Coconut Palm Island]

Being a small, Island nation, we capped population at 23 million. We will slowly increase it, at a rate of no more than 1mil/month. Technically, our Island will only hold about 85 million before overcrowding becomes an issue.

[Artemea]

The population of Artemea is currently 44 000 404 people, spread out across 333 993 km² of island landmass.

[Allanea]

The Free Kingdom of Allanea is a gargantuan, efficient nation, ruled by King Alexander Blaken-Kazansky with an even hand, and remarkable for its museums and concert halls, multi-spousal wedding ceremonies, and smutty television. The hard-nosed, hard-working, democratic, humorless population of 32.63 billion Allaneans are either ruled by a sleek, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

That said, for obvious reasons, when role-playing with people who do not use their 'full nationstates population', I downplay this aspect of my nation in my posts, and my military deployments and such are scaled down to the story and the RP.i

[Yohannes]

That said, for obvious reasons, when role-playing with people who do not use their 'full nationstates population', I downplay this aspect of my nation in my posts, and my military deployments and such are scaled down to the story and the RP.i

You are one of the most active and open-minded writers I know (of your standing). From you, I wouldn't expect anything less

[Fatatatutti]

"The guidebook says there are 24 billion people in Fatatatutti. I think every single one of them is in front of us."
-- a frustrated tourist trying to get our of the parking lot at Fat City International airport

[Divitalia]

I don’t use my NS population, it’s one of the few NStats I actually don’t use. It’s nothing more than a poor way to show how long you’ve been on the site.

[Arthropol]

Removed for retcon purposes (2019-08-01)

[Yohannes]

As Arthropol is a real life Earth based alternate reality nation, I roleplay using a population of around 67 million when in MT. When in FT, I roleplay as Europe minus Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as a single country in 2518, with a population of around 1.5 billion on Earth and around 1.5 million settlers in our interstellar colony Novus Colony.

I want to try out roleplaying in Future Technology too one day. What is the purpose of an interstellar colony?

[Yohannes]

"The guidebook says there are 24 billion people in Fatatatutti. I think every single one of them is in front of us."
-- a frustrated tourist trying to get our of the parking lot at Fat City International airport

Oh, don't worry. I remember since 2010 not to mess with you

p.s. still remember your old post in one of my old threads eight years ago; was a good (entertaining) one

[Arthropol]

Removed for retcon purposes (2019-08-01)

[Qinhai]

I roleplay with Qinhai as having roughly 32 million people.

[Kostantinoupoli]

My NS population is 6 million but I roleplay with a population of 148 million since my nation contains Greece, parts of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and a large part of Anatolia.

[Vallermoore]

A capped population of about 60 million people or so.

[Gryphonian Alliance]

Do you worldbuild and roleplay with NationStates (full population like what it says on your NationStates account in-game page), or do you roleplay with smaller, modified and limited population?

For me, I don't use my NationStates account page population. I worldbuild and write Yohannes as having 379 million population;

How about you?

I do not use my NS census population, but I don't cap my RP population, either. It's increasing steadily as the GA advances over the years, though I suppose there is somewhat of a limit to growth, because of the area-wise constraints of my nation. I doubt I'll let it go above 500 million.

[Yohannes]

I do not use my NS census population, but I don't cap my RP population, either. It's increasing steadily as the GA advances over the years, though I suppose there is somewhat of a limit to growth, because of the area-wise constraints of my nation. I doubt I'll let it go above 500 million.

Why not over 500 million?

And that's commendable (work). The amount of work (i.e. having to change every little thing whenever you update your population) you need to do that kind of gradual (population) progression is the reason I don't bother doing that myself (too lazy)

[Aldina]

Since Aldina was originally a project on the r/worldbuilding subreddit, and NS seems to like giving nations ludicrously high populations and tax rates that would make no sense for a nation that is being written as well as played, I choose to ignore everything on Aldina's front page that I didn't write myself. Aldina's population is canonically 42M in 1935 (Aldina's "present day"), and there it will stay.

[Legokiller]

Currently, I rp Silverdale's population at a capped size of 93 million beings as I prefer to keep things at a reasonable size for the land Silverdale possess at this moment.

[Estainia]

I've used capped intrapersonal worldbuilding for so long I don't quite recall what it was like when I didn't and used NS, which I did for some time when I first signed up (first couple years, really). I finally settled on capping in mid-2011 or so, give or take. The Empire is still quite outlandishly populated, but it also spans a continent, which helps mitigate that. The current Imperial Population is in excess of half a billion people, settling in the six hundred millions range (Hard number being: 689,400,000).

[Yohannes]

Since Aldina was originally a project on the r/worldbuilding subreddit, and NS seems to like giving nations ludicrously high populations and tax rates that would make no sense for a nation that is being written as well as played, I choose to ignore everything on Aldina's front page that I didn't write myself. Aldina's population is canonically 42M in 1935 (Aldina's "present day"), and there it will stay.

If there is any proof that NationStates is becoming more popular, this is it. r/worldbuilding subreddit? Back then all we have got was our military designs being ripped off by roleplayers from Cybernations (or something like that)

r/worldbuilding subreddit sounds oh so cool

[Happy Christian Land]

I use NationStates stats, but I'm still new enough that my population figure isn't outrageous.

For those who point out there aren't that many billions of people on Earth... I received an issue once which resulted in my navy becoming the scourge of the "seven thousand seas". From that, I extrapolate that NationStates' version of Earth is about 1000 times larger than in real life. That would also fit with how there are 188,361 nations in NationStates - that's roughly a thousand times the real life figure (191 countries).