Frontier Mechanics: A Deeper Dive into Defender Disadvantages
Written by Westinor
Edited by Kasaria ,Grea Kriopia, and Vorhollah
The topic of how Frontiers have impacted gameplay, particularly military gameplay, has been reiterated several times. However, the increasingly dire odds defenders face on the battlefield and the grim direction R/D winds seem to be shifting at the same time that raiders have refocused nearly their entire effort into targeting Frontiers above all else puts into question the role the Frontier Update has had on liberation dynamics.
Initially, this article was intended to go over multiple mechanical disadvantages the Frontier Update set for liberating forces and was titled “A Defender Copepost”. However, after digging deeper into this topic and reworking it several times, I found that a technical analysis of one Update interaction that has flown under the radar and likely had an impact on every liberation effort since the Frontier Update was both more interesting and simpler. It also necessitates a lot more military gameplay-specific knowledge to understand. As such, in this article, I dive specifically into how increased region size has affected occupations and liberations in the Frontier Era, taking time to outline the basics of liberations and Update that might be helpful for a casual observer to understand.
I should caveat that this is a topic that has not yet been explored nor documented in depth as far as I could find. I am working off of the relatively-little known information accrued from recent liberations and background knowledge.
Liberation Basics
In any liberation or siege, the objective of the liberating force is to free the region by taking its Delegacy. This must occur during Update – as you may well know, regions in Nationstates update their stats at two particular times every day, known as “Minor Update” and “Major Update”. Every Update, regions update in the same order; similarly, nations inside them update in a determined order as well.
A liberation is, at its core, a contest between the banning officers of the occupying force and the combined jumping force of the liberators. All of the Border Control authorities of a region can only ban at the rate of one nation per second, so more Border Control Officers do not necessarily mean more bans mid-jump. I specify mid-jump because so long as a nation has not yet updated in a region, it has no influence in that region. This means the nation, in this case a liberator, can be banned for free.
As such, liberators are in a race against time. Every second a liberator remains in the region before it “updates” is a second that the occupiers can use to ban them. Liberators are (for the most part - I'll elaborate later) “safe” once a region updates. Several variables allow us to estimate the relative time a region will update. This allows us to set a "trigger" an estimated timer set right before the besieged region updates that the officer(s) assigned to trigger utilize to call the movement order, which allows us to circumvent a total wipeout of liberating forces. Once the movement order is called, the liberators have a designated amount of time to move into the region. For example, twelve second trigger should give about twelve seconds between the time the order is called and the time the region updates. Once the region updates, all nations in the region at that present moment are set to update – any latecomers will not be counted, and as such, their endorsements are worth nothing.
A clear dilemma arises here: the shorter the trigger, the less time your liberators have to get into a region. The longer a trigger, the more time occupying forces have to ban your liberators. With the advent of tools like Brimstone, occupying forces can ban at just about exactly one nation per second. As past liberations have demonstrated, trigger length matters.
To understand how this ties into region size, let’s dig into our rough understanding of how Update length and speed is determined.
Update Basics and Variance
The total time a region takes to update is largely dependent on the number of nations in it. Nations each take a certain, largely uniform amount of time to update. On any given Major Update, about fifty nations update every second; on Minor Updates, this is closer to seventy or eighty nations per second. A region with four hundred nations might take eight seconds to update during a Major Update, and five seconds to update during a Minor Update. This is at the core of how we can measure Update speed and set triggers – the most rudimentary trigger would take a region, count backwards however many nations would make up the average length of a trigger (for example, on a Major Update you might count backwards 600 nations or so for a twelve second trigger), and since we know the order in which regions update, we can use this to determine which region or even nation would update at approximately twelve seconds before our target.
If this is the case, why can’t triggers be set to the perfect length to minimize bans and maximize liberators jumping, and what does this have to do with region size?
To answer both of these questions, we need to talk about one key factor that persists as the bane of trigger-callers on both sides of military gameplay: variance. Variance comes in two identifiable forms: artificial variance, and intrinsic variance. Artificial variance is the supposed “random variance” that was implemented by NS Admin in an effort to prevent perfect trigger lengths from being set – it evens out from a macro perspective, and supposedly speeds up or slows down as to not affect overall update length, though the micro scale at which it varies can affect trigger length. For example, a set of regions that would take ten seconds to update could take seven or fourteen seconds to update instead. This is why liberation triggers are set to be “about” twelve seconds – you can never really guarantee that it will update exactly at that length.
On the other hand, we know what drives intrinsic variance. This sort of variance occurs when a nation appears to take more time to update due to factors like stat ranking changes, new endorsements, region movement, and so forth, as well as CTEs and embassy openings and closures. It is not clear how much variance these factors cause, but examples like the raid on the Embassy or recent mass-endorsement swapping mid-update in which update has lagged or stopped altogether lend to the existence of intrinsic variance. Liberations obviously bring many of these variance-inducing factors into play with the high concentration of moving World Assembly nations.
The Ramifications
The Frontier Update has compounded these issues. A majority of high profile-raids and liberations take place in Frontiers, with past battlegrounds having accumulated hundreds of nations even before an occupation. Even the sites of smaller scale battles ballooned in size upon becoming Frontiers, and many active defenders may remember the embarrassment suffered at the hands of smaller-scale occupations insistent on holding out despite the poor odds. These massive Frontier targets dwarf common targets of old, which have only ever leaped past a hundred nations during past occupations. Combine this with increasingly record-breaking operations, even pre-Frontier Update, and regions that once housed a couple hundred nations maximum during an occupation, during which time only a few dozen were actively in the World Assembly, now see several hundred World Assembly nations inflating their already massive nation count.
What does this mean for liberation efforts? Actual jumps on an occupied region have become much, much harder than before. Given that targeted regions can leap up to over seven hundred nations during an occupation, a typical Major Update takes about fourteen seconds to update that region – not to mention the extra Update inflation and variance introduced by over two hundred World Assembly nations having just moved into the region and cumulatively swapped over a thousand endorsements with each other, at times seconds before the region updates. This strains Update to the breaking point – liberators of the Frontier Era know the feeling of waiting nearly half a minute for a region to update, and longer-term defenders know that this is a long distance away from the split-second updates of old.
The question lost in the clenched teeth and nerve-wracking wait here is – what are raiders doing during these extra seconds?
There was one more caveat that I did not mention in the initial introduction to bans. Raiders can continue to ban liberators for free so long as they have not individually updated – this means that during this extra time in which the region is struggling to update, raiders are happily banning away at a continued rate of one nation per second. Fourteen seconds means fourteen liberators lost. Half a minute is thirty liberators. Pile that on top of a twelve second trigger, and several dozen liberators are lost to bans alone. Most of these liberators are banned for free, because not all nations update immediately upon region update. In a military gameplay state where raiders easily gather over a hundred endorsements before liberators have a shot at a siege, it is not hard to imagine why liberation efforts so often fail.
This paragraph will delve into a quick technical niche that can be ignored, but may serve as fodder for a future article. The technical aspect of Update discussed here is ill-understood. I wrote up a very technical and confusing blurb here and ended up deleting it, as aspects of this Update interaction are still untested and uncertain – a testament to how formerly outlier cases that few thought to observe have now become the norm. In short, the Update order of nations may further mean that in extended region Update scenarios, “point nations”, or the nations soldiers are directed to endorse, may lose even more endorsements than they would otherwise. While in general, countermeasures exist to prevent this principle from being an issue in liberations, this is a problem for actually winning a liberation effort, where shoving one nation over the line is key. Notably, this appears to have come into play during the antifa occupation of Cities of the World, as the massive size of the region and its several minute-long Update allowed the owner of the region to ban the operation’s points repeatedly, despite odds being heavily in the favor of antifa forces.
Circling back to the original point, how exactly has this unintended mechanical consequence of the Frontier Update shifted operation outcomes? Unfortunately, few records of exact Update occurrences are publicly kept, so I will have to draw from memory, but it appears that the failure of neck-to-neck large-scale liberations and the success of smaller-scale holds have been the most notable products.
Two operations fall into the former category in the past year – the sieges of Philippines and UEPU. While Philippines was not affected by any Frontier-induced inflation as a purely governorless region (though the region doubled from its original size), UEPU saw well over 100 liberators in the first two Updates fall short in freeing the region. To simplify a concept, we often follow a “three-Update strategy” – if a region can not be freed in three Updates, an outright liberation is usually unlikely, as raiders can start appointing Border Control Officers and solidify their pile to a fairly impregnable position while whittling away at our beachhead after initial turnout falls. UEPU grew to 766 nations at its peak during the first Updates of the operation. The extra bans allowed by the increased Update time assuredly killed the strong chance we held at contesting the region – our first and only real shot to date at taking down a full raider unity hold that included the People’s Revolutionary Air Force (PRAF, the Communist Bloc’s military). This effect accumulates each Update, as the extra bans created by the region's extended update length cuts out more liberators that are unlikely to return to the effort again at the next update.
Smaller scale holds like the one in Kelios, which occurred during and in the aftermath of the sieges on Alcatraz, have also frustrated defender efforts. The hold on Kelios, which (to recollection) barely crested a dozen endorsements initially, took four Updates to liberate. The region was, at the time, several hundred nations large, and the occupiers stayed alive with the precious few extra seconds allotted to them to ban away at a scaled-down defender force. Smaller holds like Kelios are deceptively underwhelming, and defenders often treat them as easy one-shots and a break from the intense marshalling of large operations. However what seems like good odds can often turn out as the opposite. To illustrate this, Kelios would have taken five seconds to update on average during the siege. Sixteen liberators joined the first siege on the region – a ban in each of those five seconds reduces those sixteen to eleven, which is a huge proportion. Oft-overlooked calculations like these can be the bane of many operatinos.
There are some ramifications outside of the headliner operations of military gameplay. Raiding and defending goes both ways – large regions attempting to defend themselves from raider attack would also possess a similar advantage in banning attacking forces as they jump. For example, Europeia takes around twenty and thirty five seconds to update at Minor and Major Update respectively – those are crucial extra seconds to notice and chip away at any raider jump. In turn, however, consider that actually exercising this advantage would require preemptive knowledge of when an attempted raid would occur. This is an advantage that raiders hold over any native attempting to defend their region.
Are liberations literally impossible, then? Just as with past claims of defender doomsday, this too is unlikely to kill defender efforts to broach raider holds on their own. Defenders still hold two outright victories to their name in South Pacific and Far East Oriental Federation since the Frontier Update, and have come shockingly close to victory despite poorer odds in other operations. However, in conjunction with a resoundingly colossal raider faction regularly putting out nearly two hundred pilers per occupation, it will continue to take miracles to best invading forces in any head-to-head battle if defending remains in its current state. Both South Pacific and Far East Oriental Federation saw unusually small raider piles in the first Update, and both lacked PRAF reinforcements. To deal real blows against raider forces on what is an increasingly uneven battlefield, defenders will need all the help they can get from allies old and new, familiar and rarely seen, small and large, and all of them, determined. It is key to understand, though, that the path to victory is waylaid by more than the enemies that face us. Beneath the surface challenges still lie in wait, and defenders will need to prevail against them, too.
