Frontier/Stronghold in Numbers
What could Europeia stand to gain as a Frontier?
Written by Maowi
Finishing touches by Seva
The Frontier/Stronghold update “is perhaps the most major issue in recent Europeian history,” affirmed Founder of Europeia HEM on Thursday evening. Accordingly, public engagement with the matter has been extensive, with a public statement released last term by then-President Calvin Coolidge, the formation of a Transition Advisory Board and a political party advocating for the Frontier option, private media coverage, discussions in the Grand Hall, "slightly rambling but hopefully coherent arguments", and Senate platforms. The difficulty lies in deciding whether the potential gains in activity arising from nations spawning directly in the region as a Frontier are worth forgoing for the security of a Stronghold, and vice versa; is the risk of invasion or destruction enough to justify opting out of a substantial population boost?
For many of these issues, quantitative analysis is extremely difficult. However, potential population gain is not necessarily one of these.
The following results pertain to the world’s seven largest user-created regions (UCRs) excluding puppet storage - of which Europeia is fourth - as well as all non-warzone game-created regions (GCRs). Data from each region’s activity page, going back six days, was taken on October 22 to examine the flow of nations into and out of each region during this timespan. It is important to note that this article presents a single snapshot of six days, which may not be a reliable indicator of long-term trends - it may be beneficial to collect the same set of data some weeks into the future to compare results.
Data
The table below presents all the data collected for this analysis.
It is notable that among these top UCRs, Europeia has the lowest absolute and second-lowest percentage retention of nations. Some Senate campaigns in Friday’s general election proposed a need for a more focused gameside engagement strategy; this statistic is perhaps in accordance with some of their claims, as well as UPC's claims from the Grand Hall post he made. Also worth pointing out is Nationstates’ incredibly high percentage retention, which seems to be an outlier value within the UCR group. However, NationStates also serves as a puppet storage for Mikeswill, which is how most of the retention is explained.
Turning to feeders, the first thing to mention is that The West Pacific (TWP) is a definite outlier due to the fact that an ejecting competition took place there in the week the data were collected, expectedly significantly affecting the number of ejected nations. Like NationStates, The North Pacific (TNP) has an unusually high percentage retention for its group, for reasons that in this case are not apparent. Excluding TWP and TNP, these results give an average retention of 10.41% for feeders.
Finally, the sinkers are included for interest but their results are almost certainly skewed by the huge numbers of puppet series there being refounded, ceasing to exist, or being moved to storage regions.
What would these numbers look like after the update?
These statistics can be used to estimate how sizeable population gains could be for Europeia as a Frontier. However, some assumptions had to be made in this analysis, some of which may be better approximations to the real situation than others:
- If Europeia became a Stronghold, its retention of nations would be identical to that for the past six days (i.e. twenty five nations would be retained, equal to 16.45% of the number of nations newly coming into Europeia).
- If Europeia became a Frontier, Europeian recruitment efforts would continue at the same pace, and retention of recruited nations would be unaffected by changes resulting from the update.
- If Europeia became a Frontier, comparable gameside infrastructure would be developed to that of feeders, capable of handling the flow of newly spawned nations and maintaining a retention of 10.41%.
In particular, the third assumption might mean that the second assumption is not completely valid, but its effect would be difficult to quantify and would be unlikely to completely derail any conclusions drawn. Another important factor to take into account is that a number of the nations spawning into Frontier regions may be puppets. In cases where they are moved into puppet storage regions, this effect manifests in the lower retention rate for feeders - but in some cases, they may be kept in the region where they are founded and so as a Frontier, the fraction of new nations that translate into active members of the community would likely be lower than as a Stronghold.
The graphs below are plots of nations retained over a six-day period against the total number of Frontier regions in NationStates during that time. There are currently around one hundred and twenty UCRs eligible for Frontier status; the more of these become Frontiers, the more thinly spread the newly-created nations. Scenarios based on four possible distributions of spawn rates among Frontier regions are shown: equal distribution among all Frontier regions, which seems unlikely according to the update planning thread; proportional distribution; logarithmic distribution; and square root distribution.
The best-case scenario implies that the regions with the lowest number of endorsements will choose the path of a Frontier first, and the larger regions will follow. The worst-case scenario implies the opposite. Proportional distribution is the most optimistic one for Europeia; square root distribution is closer to proportional distribution, and logarithmic distribution is closer to equal distribution. Naturally, the real scenario lies somewhere between the two, with high-endorsement as well as low-endorsement regions opting to be a Frontier.
- As per the table above, 12139 nations were founded in feeders during this period of time.
- The number of new nations spawning in Frontiers would be around half of this, i.e. 6070.
- If x is the number of Frontier UCRs, then 6070/x nations would spawn in Europeia.
- Using the average percentage retention from feeders excluding TWP and TNP, Europeia would retain 0.1041*6070/x nations.
- Applying the second assumption, the total number of nations retained over that time would be 0.1041*6070/x + 25 with equal distribution
- With proportional distribution, instead of 6070/x nations Europeia would get a number proportional to its endorsement count relative to other Frontiers, 6070*(share of endos). The number of recruits would then decrease, but the effect is negligible, though it is included in the formula
- The same logic applies to logarithmic and square root distribution, but the share is now based on log endos and square root endos
The potential for enormous population gains is huge if the number of UCRs willing to take the plunge and become Frontiers remains low. However, the population benefits of becoming a Frontier instead of a Stronghold start to peter out significantly after around thirty regions choose the Frontier option; as this number increases, the number of nations retained inches closer and closer to the Stronghold value. It might be impossible to predict how many regions take the Frontier option. Hopefully, however, this analysis helps provide at least a very rough idea of what kind of prize Europeia would be gambling for as a Frontier.
To be in the position to gamble for the prize, though, Europeia must develop an infrastructure similar to that of a GCR as the analysis assumes. It is hard to predict what the actual retention rate will be, but our efforts must now be focused on developing such an infrastructure, as the rewards may well be substantial.
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