NSImperialism - A site for Warfare Gameplay

[the Mechalus]

NSImperialism is a work-in-progress external site for controlling land and fighting wars available at https://nsimperialism.net/.

The idea is it would read nation statistics like Defense Forces and Scientific Advancement and use that with some random chance to determine who wins battles. Sort of like NSEconomy but for warfare instead of economics.

I'm looking for feedback and direction from this point to make sure it fills a real need in the community. I know people have asked in this forum for war mechanics before and I want to see what specifics people are interested in.

Would you use a site like this? What would you want to see in a site like this?

Some ideas I've had so far:

• Custom namable leaders with stats based on nation stats like Intelligence and Health
• Allies joining wars or assisting in defense with Foreign Aid
• User customizable maps that aren't a grid. e.g. a fictional world map or a solar system map
• Yearly battle results. e.g. General so and so died in the battle of whatever
• Revolutions based on stats like Youth Rebelliousness and Pacifism
• Types of wars like religious wars if the nation has a high enough Religiousness or liberation war if the territory was lost in a previous war

Thanks!

[Silvedania]

Interesting - I might use this. The features look nice.

Edit: Yikes. The idea is nice, but the execution isn't as good. The map and the styling need work.

[the Mechalus]

Interesting - I might use this. The features look nice.

Edit: Yikes. The idea is nice, but the execution isn't as good. The map and the styling need work.

Thanks for the feedback! It's mostly a functional prototype right now. What would you like to see in a map? Something more like the roleplay map here? https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=613799

[Leutria]

Played around with it out of curiosity. Should it maybe account for having a war on multiple fronts? Could also maybe use two nations attacking together?

[the Mechalus]

Played around with it out of curiosity. Should it maybe account for having a war on multiple fronts? Could also maybe use two nations attacking together?

Yeah I like the sound of both of those ideas. Thanks for the feedback!

[9003]

Random start: I put my nation in and the game randomly picks a different nation (form the daily dumps) to battle against me and it starts both in random spots


Growth: maybe I missed it when I only played a little bit with it but if I take a square there should be a chance to expanded my "emperor/kingdom/land owned" automatically maybe based of economy or some other stat. Then when 2 nations get to close it can randomly start wars against you cuz your nation is to close to the others.

[the Mechalus]

Random start: I put my nation in and the game randomly picks a different nation (form the daily dumps) to battle against me and it starts both in random spots


Growth: maybe I missed it when I only played a little bit with it but if I take a square there should be a chance to expanded my "emperor/kingdom/land owned" automatically maybe based of economy or some other stat. Then when 2 nations get to close it can randomly start wars against you cuz your nation is to close to the others.

Currently I'd like to keep it a deliberately social game instead of randomly picking an unwitting opponent, but I'm interested in adding the economic element. I think expanding based on economy makes sense and could provide a strategy for nations that don't focus on war. Thanks for the feedback!

[the Mechalus]

I just updated the map style to look like this:



@Silvedania, how does this look?

Next on my to-do list is:

1. Wars should render on the map
2. The game state should persist instead of resetting every time I deploy the server
3. Wars should be more interesting than the nation with higher defense forces winning every time

[the Mechalus]

Wars are now back on the map and all the game state is stored in the server now! The game is now hosted on https://nsimperialism.net/!



Next up: War should be more interesting and colonization/expansion should have some cost.

Some ideas:

• Allow allies in wars
• Wars should have a target territory but should allow battles in multiple areas
• Controlling a territory should generate people of that culture in that territory over time. Controlling a territory without a majority of the culture will have some consequence
• Wars should have some pretense like liberating a territory with minority rule, reconquering historic land or a holy war
• Adding lunar territories that can only be expanded to if the nationstate has a space program

Let me know what you think of the current site and what you think would be most interesting to add!

[the Mechalus]

I've implemented a lot of quality of life improvements since the last update:

• Users can create new instances of the map with different participants
• Verifying control of a nation is required to create a map and declare war
• Wars have some randomness so the stronger nation doesn't always win
• Wars have an occasion / reason (for example: conquest or liberation) to add some flavor

My upcoming priorities are:

• Make Wars more interesting (Allies joining, factoring in more statistics)
• Add an AI opponent that will try to conquer the continent (Something like Napoleon trying to conquer Europe)
• Add pages for each territory to add some flavor like the culture of the citizens and allow links to embassies and airports

I'd really appreciate any feedback from anyone who tries out the site. Feel free to create a map with The Mechalus in it!

[Reunited Rome]

I like a lot the website, pretty interesting.
There are 3 things I would like to be improved:
- Wars are too long (the first War took 31 years to complete)
- The map and provinces design (I would like to choose between some maps, be able to change the name of the provinces, or that the provinces are more visually appealing)
- Error messages (A simple blank page with Courier text isn't really interesting, you could fix that by using the JS command "alert", and you would make the website simpler by that method, disowning some error pages. Which I suppose make the domain be more expensive)

But overall, good game! I am amazed this hasn't got even a month and is that good!

[Odinburgh]

Looks interesting.

[the Mechalus]

Hey, Reunited_Rome and Odinburgh, thanks for the feedback!



I've implemented some improvements:

• Wars take less time. They get "swingier" over time so they move slowly at first and then start changing rapidly later.
• Added the ability to name maps and territories
• Made the error messages a lot friendlier

Next up:

• Make it so that nations can't start wars on maps they aren't already on
• Make Wars more interesting (Allies joining, factoring in more statistics)
• Add an AI opponent that will try to conquer the continent (Something like Napoleon trying to conquer Europe)
• Add more dynamic details for each territory to add some flavor like the culture of the citizens and allow links to embassies and airports
• Remove the button to advance maps forward and automatically advance maps forward every day

Let me know if you have any other feedback. Also let me know what you're most excited about!

[the Mechalus]

Hey y'all. Bad news but my employer says this is a conflict of interest with my employment, so I have to stop working on this project. I shut down the site, but I collected some screenshots to record what was there. Thanks to everyone who tried it out!

[United Calanworie]

Is there any chance that the code could be open-sourced?

[the Mechalus]

Yeah! The code is already available at https://github.com/brickman1444/NSImperialism

[Reunited Rome]

Yeah! The code is already available at https://github.com/brickman1444/NSImperialism

If someone decided to reboot the site, what would you do?