The following is the full versions of two popular, well-used and well-known articles from when the Official NS forums was hosted by Jolt or older. These articles outline some useful and basic tidbits of knowledge that players have discovered over the years regarding the mysterious system that determines a nation's category/government type. After the Jolt forums collapsed, some of this information was partially lost or at-least made unaccessible to many players, so I found that is would be desirable to have copies of these useful texts made accessible on the current Official Forums. The first text is Nation Creation For Dummies, it was originally posted (and as far as I know, authored) by Qaaolchoura on the Jolt Forums. The purpose of Nation Creation For Dummies is to (1) explain how to easily create a new nation in a certain category, and (2) explore the effects of the introductory quiz (e.g., "Marijuana should be legal"), and the effects of selecting each government type (e.g., liberal, conservative, evil). It should be noted that the 'History' feature is a much more recent addition to the Nation Creation process, and predates this article. Nonetheless, the "History" feature does not seem to have any effect on the category/freedoms of a nation [1], which ultimately, Nation Creation For Dummies was more concerned with.
The second text that I've included is Categories of Government Types and Freedoms, which was reproduced by Euroslavia on the Jolt forums, but was written and posted by Aelenti on the original NationStates forum that predates the Jolt forum. The purpose of Categories of Government Types and Freedoms was to explain how a nation's freedom rankings (e.g., Frightening, Good, Unheard of) determined a nation's government category (e.g., Left-wing Utopia). Euroslavia's reproduction cut out some seemingly irrelevant introductory discussion by Aelenti to Angelika, which I found to be somewhat useful because it establishes what the author perceives as the meaning of each freedom. It should be noted that when Aelenti wrote about "Economic Freedom", it has been suggested by many that the statistic that appears on a nation's spotlight page represents something entirely differently than Economic Freedom, such as "Economic Strength". Therefore, your spotlight page and your subsequent government type may not align with the teachings of Categories of Government Types and Freedoms. I've also included a chart of how to quantitatively rank the qualitative freedom rankings, which Euroslavia included in his reproduction of the text.
If you find these articles interesting, I suggest you also read, "Deconstructing the Ideocube" and some of Professor Hell's later works, which have set the groundwork for a more scientific and analytical approach to discovering the inner workings of NationStates.
- INDEX