Anatomy of an Operation: South Pacific
By: Westinor
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It’s never truly quiet during update. You can be certain that almost every update on Nationstates, night or day, something is happening.
Tag runs and chasing can take updaters through over a hundred regions in an update. Quieter days see detaggers meticulously sweeping up raider warpaths. And on some nights, stealth raiders lurk in the mist, lying low from the wary eyes of spotters. But above the rest, the most paramount and colossal of any operation is undoubtedly the liberation.
On the Minor update of July 10th, 2023, a large group of about 34 raiders jumped from the region NATO 2022 Frontier into South Pacific. In the next 12 hours, I and the rest of Update Command worked to plan out a liberation that would lead to the first major liberation victory for defenderdom in 2023.
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Part 1: The Legend of South Pacific
The raid and occupation of South Pacific occurred in the middle of Raidercon, an annual celebration of raiderdom and its ideals. Each year, a large-scale occupation takes place during the week or two of events; this year, defender intel had provided us with the primary Raidercon target, Nevadia, which we successfully protected on July 8th. This left raiders to seize a secondary backup target, NATO 2022 Frontier, and start piling into it.
NATO 2022 Frontier rose to about a hundred raider endorsements, which masked any stealth activity going on within it — usually, you can spot 30 raiders swapping endorsements pretty easily, but being part of a pile removes the need for them to endorse, masking any obvious activity. Using this to their advantage, raiders seized South Pacific.
South Pacific itself is the birthplace of military gameplay legends. It is one of the larger and more vibrant founderless regions, with a community built around its distinctly democratic culture, Pacific-island aesthetic, and somewhat confusing name (no relation to the South Pacific.) Unfortunately, its status as a vulnerable yet active region has lended it to the eyes of raiders time and time again, most recently and notably in modern history during the sieges of 2020.
The 2020 occupation saw raiders pull out all the stops — bringing insane (maybe record-breaking at the time?) numbers to the field, and utilizing new strategies — the most notable of which is known as “update-bending”, but more on that later on.
Legendary operations are a two-sided coin — and this most definitely held true for South Pacific in 2020. For the defender faction, South Pacific in 2020 is a story of successes and failures. From the Phoenix Flock Fleet’s incredible role in facilitating civilian outreach to incredible numbers and stamina out of the liberator camp to wonky triggers and a nail-biting loss that came down to a single endorsement, South Pacific lives on in the minds of many.
Part 2: Steps to Victory
As you can imagine, the memories of that very operation, just three years ago, burned bright on the minds of many Update Commanders as we watched raiders pour into the region once again. We’d nabbed a good victory just a few updates ago in the defense of Nevadia, but defenders hadn’t successfully liberated a large-scale occupation in nearly seven months.
Not all liberations are the same. There are always several things you want to consider and run through when an occupation begins — as the saying goes, the first twelve hours are the most important, as raider piles often grow unconquerable after a full day. As such, liberations are all about speed.
Upon the invasion of South Pacific, we recognized a few key details immediately. Firstly, the natives of South Pacific had (somewhat brashly) initiated a transition to Frontier status, as part of the path to appointing a governor and securing themselves. This was a necessary step to becoming a governor region, since formerly founderless regions must transition to Frontiers first, before being able to appoint a Governor.
This meant that the usual consideration of an Injunction would leave them as a Frontier — and that if raiders successfully held the region, they would only need two weeks to initiate the transition to Stronghold and give themselves the governor’s key permanently. As such, an Injunction to keep this region a Frontier was absolutely vital to any long-term plan.
Quebecshire, founder of the League and Concord and major defender command, and I generally tend to take point on the Security Council proposals. Quebec is far more proficient than I am at drafting Liberations or Injunctions, and he’s particularly good at whipping something up in a flash. In just over an hour, we had a working Injunction submitted — that was step one.
Every liberation also has its hiccups. In this case, we had two major ones — weekday turnout and native correspondence.
July 10th was a Monday. You don’t usually get great numbers for a Monday night liberation — people are coming back from work or school exhausted from their first day back, and incessant pings about a high-stakes operation aren’t exactly conducive to relaxation.
Native outreach is also a crucial aspect of every liberation — you want to coordinate with natives on all aspects of the liberation, from the Injunction to the jump. Oftentimes, you can utilize a strategy known as “Fake Puppetmaster/Fast Pre-Move” — better known as “FPM” — in which the native delegate or a high-endorsement count native moves into the defender jump point, collect liberator endorsements, then move back into the target minutes before the actual jump. This allows them to grab both liberator endorsements and native endorsements without liberators needing to endorse the native after the jump, which means more speed and endorsements.
The chances of a successful liberation are highest on the day after the invasion, and a robust FPM on that first day would be key to our success. Quebec tends to take point on native outreach, but I had established a working relationship with South Pacific’s community before — all the way back during my first ambassadorship in the North Pacific — and so I took the lead. Delegate Densaner was unresponsive, which heightened tensions throughout the day. Particularly in high-endorsement regions like South Pacific, native endorsements can be incredibly crucial to operational success.
The next steps are running the sleeper registry, contacting military commanders, and sending out native un-endorsement telegrams. Libcord runs a sleeper registry, which provides a list of regions for interested individuals to place sleepers in — during liberations like this one, this allows defenders to up WA in the region and potentially contribute without needing to be present at an update. We each reach out to leaders of other organizations to send out a liberation warning, so that they can round up their updaters for the upcoming operation. Then, you send out native un-endorsement telegrams — raiders will occasionally place WA sleepers in a region to establish a beachfront, who natives might unwittingly endorse. This happened during South Pacific, but luckily only two natives needed to remove their endorsements.
I’m beginning to realize that sounds like a lot. It’s a process, but after a few tries it becomes routine. During South Pacific in particular, I was unfortunately at work throughout the day, as was most of Update Command, so things didn’t really start kicking in until the evening.
A key part of outreach is running DMs, which basically means DMing your troops to come to the liberation. I believe that this has to happen in at least two rounds — I try to run DMs in the Grey Wardens once as close to minor as possible, in order to give any minor updaters willing to sacrifice their sleep a chance to set things up, and then once again as we come up towards update. I was lucky to have a good officer corps around me in TGW during South Pacific, as AuraklimaX and AC Alex were able to cover for me early in the day, allowing us to pull some key updaters.
South Pacific comes early in the update - just a few minutes in. For a large liberation, we like to start whipping over an hour before a region updates — this meant for South Pacific, we were whipping early. The first liberator logged on two hours and a half before update. Two hours before update, the engines came alive, as liberators flooded in and officers hopped back on.
Part 3: The Trigger
After running all of that outreach to natives and liberators comes the trigger. I set the majority of triggers for liberations, so I’m no stranger to difficult or wonky triggers — but for South Pacific, the trigger was perhaps the most difficult part of the operation to get right, and it ended up being one of if not the most crucial.
To understand why, a quick crash course on triggering. Triggers use regions or nations that update X seconds before your target, known as triggers. When they update, the person calling the trigger calls “GO”, sending everyone on a frantic jump with approximately X seconds to spare.The first problem with South Pacific was that the trigger was in the middle of a massive region — the Wellspring. This poses a problem, because you can’t really set an accurate trigger!
I use the API to set triggers, and use past regional happenings — the several lines of text under the WFE — to estimate times. To jump over the confusing technical stuff, there weren’t any sufficiently close happenings to the desired trigger time. Any trigger we had could be dozens of seconds too early or up to a second before the region updated. This constrained our time window to move even further, and made it more unpredictable..
To get around this, I manually estimated the time each nation would take on average to update and counted backwards a few hundred nations until I got my desired trigger time and linked that to the API — this would be a safer but potentially longer trigger.
Then I added another failsafe in a second set of triggers, estimating the nation ID (which determines update order) and having Makasta plop his nations with corresponding IDs into the Wellspring — due to update variance, I estimated this strategy was much more likely to produce shorter triggers. Once we got into update, we would have to decide which set of triggers to use; but that would come later.
Before we get to the actual operation, though, one thing that was on the back of all of our minds was the potential for update bending - which I mentioned earlier as a raider tactic first utilized in the 2020 occupation of South Pacific. Update bending - or in the words of an incensed defender commander, “trigger-fucking” - utilizes the mass movement of hundreds to thousands of puppets to a region that updates before South Pacific.
To understand why this works how it does, when several hundred or thousand nations move into a region between your trigger and the target, the time between your “GO” order and the target’s update extends, giving the occupying delegate precious seconds or even minutes to ban your liberators before they can update. The employment of this strategy resulted in the publication of the infamous thread “Liberations are literally impossible”, which has since become a widespread meme in the gameplay community.
Raiders have never been this strategically aggressive nor daring since 2020, and with South Pacific once again under siege, we couldn’t help but wonder if this would be a repeat of 2020. A few minutes before the two hour mark, we scratched together a potential “counter-flooding plan” — a tactic to potentially mitigate or control the effects of update bending, but nothing ever tried before. We didn’t know how it would really work, and for all the contingencies we set in place, this was one that hadn’t been tried before, to my knowledge — it would come down to me as the trigger to figure out how I would call go if that scenario occurred.
Between the deep history associated with South Pacific, the issues with native communication, the complicated nature of the operation and need for multiple contingencies, it started to sink in — things were starting to get serious.
Parts four and five, covering the execution and aftermath of this operation, will be released 8/31/2023. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!
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