Annual Public Report Release #7

South Pacific Special Forces

1/12/2017 - 31/12/2017

 
Dispatch version
 

As the last month of the year passed, the South Pacific Special Forces has continued to maintain their stamina and ideology on the military gameplay field under the leadership of Minister of Military Affairs Escade. Everything during the past month was the same as the previous month but we got several interesting events such as the participation of the SPSF in the second biggest successful liberation of 2017 and a big drop in tagging activity due to active taggers went into the realm of inactivity. As usual, the statistical report is below for anyone who is interested. (The summary was not interesting since the author ran out of words for this part)

Activity
The SPSF got 331 successful operations during the past month. Although in the hundreds level, this was a major drop from the previous month when it had been at 549, an 166% drop. This was caused by a significant drop in tagging activity, SPSF's biggest operation count contributor, which was caused by the inactive of the entire tagger team due to final tests and holidays. The good news is that some taggers are expected to go back into active in the spring of 2018 so we should expect the number to recover back to its autumn's level. Another good news is that defending activity was at its nominal level since most of the defenders are in the old-age segment of the game which is not interrupted by schools.

Operations
At 37 updates the SPSF defended and only 4 updates the SPSF raided, the status of defender-leaning independent was maintained albeit a complete defender status would be the de facto military ideological stance.



This was a big change in the percentages. Percentage of defending updates increased for about 12.4% from the 77.8% and that of raiding updates dropped with the same amount from the 22.2% of previous month. This trend should stop since the revivals of some taggers are expected for the next month.



For the first time since June, tag defenses regained the first position for the type of operations the SPSF did the most as it accounted for 43.8% of total successful operations. Tag raids fell to the second position at 26%. De-tags fell to the third position at 23%, still much compare to the other months but is significantly lower than the previous month. 

Tagging
We did around 86 successful tag raids with tremendous help from Lily. This was a major drop from the 268 figure of previous month, an 184% decrease. Tag embassy count on SPSF's jump point (Versailles Isle) fell from over 400 to just under 200 due to ruthless efforts of other raiders at re-tagging and defenders at de-tagging. On the performance side, a significant plummet was also observed, as average success rate dropped from the 72% of the previous month to only 59%, with 29 hits and 18 fails per tag run. Buggy trigger bot and defenders' increased focus on SPSF-LILY operations as well as the low amount of data points caused this drop in term of performance. However, as SPSF's tagger squad goes back into active state, the tagging division should get back its stamina and professional on the tag field in the future. Also, we got a new member on the tagger squad: Somyrion (Aumeltopia).



Chasing
We got over 145 successful defenses against tag raids in last month. This put tag defenses back to the first position for the kind of operations SPSF did the most. This was a notable improvement compare to previous month, when it had been at only 97, a 149% increase. On the performance side, we got a success rate of 40% on average with 9 hits and 12 fails, which was nearly the same as previous month. The reason was the same as previous month also: Incredible raiders' tagging skill, especially from The Roman Empire. 

"...with unseen trigger accuracy, speed, skill, and dedication. They [the Roman Empire] managed to put the chasers in nausea with constant under 3s triggers and a cadence of under 20s. This challenges even the most recognized chasers in the defenderdom. Better yet, all of these were led and triggered manually, not through any mean of automation."

 

- SPSF's Annual Report #6

 

Raid
On a few nights before Christmas, the major update of 21^st December, several SPSF members conducted a biscuit-themed raid on Warzone Australia to destroy the stronghold of the South Pacific's most notorious anti-Coalition group: TSP Next. TSP Next is a group of far-right activists that mostly spread their rhetoric of "fighting against the Communist New Pacific Order's controlled TSP's establishment" on TSP's Regional Message Board. After several unsuccessful attempts at trolling which led to bans from the Council on Regional Security (TSP's security institution) along with series of moderators' suppression, they founded their own region and started to look for places to continue their effort at spreading their rhetoric. As expected for a noob group of players, a warzone got raided. However, just 12 hours after the raid, the region was raided again by SPSF and friends, under a yummy biscuit theme in response to the unpleasant flavors of extremists, which is usually of iron and similar metals. The entire region got purged of TSP Next's raiders a few minutes after. Although their existence is still maintained, the group stopped its propaganda activity lately. This was a rare case of high-degree noob political activists that gave people a laugh. 

Liberation
Liberation was the most interesting activity of the SPSF in the past month. Alongside 12 small liberations against noob raiders, we got one very big liberation, it was second only after the Japan's liberation back in September in term of size and importance. 

On the major update of 17^th December, a group of around 20 raiders from The Black Hawks and their friends raided the region of Philippines. At first, defenders thought it would be easy to liberate since the difference between native delegate and raider delegate was small enough for a medium-size defender force. The pile then went up to more than 30, which posed an incredible challenge for defenders in term of head count. Still, 12 hours after the raid, a liberation attempt was carried out with up to 8 defender and small independent organizations which provided over 25 endorsements, incredible for a liberation that had only under 12 hours of noticing. The attempt managed to increase the native delegate's endorsement level to over 30, only 2-3 endorsements short from the coup threshold. It failed but was an incredible show of performance and personnel pull-out over a short notice time. Because the high amount of influence in the target region which made any attempt at griefing impossible , further liberation attempts were aborted and raiders started to give free tickets to the Rejected Realms for defenders. Within the span of 3 days, all defenders were banjected. Everyone, from defenders to raiders thought the liberation was a done deal until several high-profile defenders, in response to natives' call for help in a series of telegrams sent to many regional leaders, put the liberation effort back into the spotlight of December. A second liberation attempt was planned on the night before Christmas Eve, major update of 23^rd December. During the days between two major liberation attempts, many efforts at gathering liberators were conducted not only on various current defender and defender-leaning organizations but also on some really old and thought-to-be-dead defender organizations such as Texas along with several independent organizations such as the East Pacific Sovereign Army. The defenders got aboard 13 military organizations which provided more than 50 people. Then, on the cold night before the Eve of Christmas, 50 brave nations rushed into the region, along with some who operated on sleepers, brought native's endorsement count to 55, surpassed the coup threshold by more than 14 endorsements. A native who was not the original delegate of the region was put into the delegacy (Because they were far more active than the native delegate) with no damage to the jump force at all despite nearly all raider regional officers have border control power and defenders moved on a really loose trigger of 20 seconds. 20 minutes after the jump, the native woke up and within less than 5 minutes, all raiders were sent to the Rejected Realms, all of that, with only a small drop in the native's influence count. Both defenders and raiders did not expect such a liberation to take place on such day since it was so close to holiday, when people are usually inactive on the R/D field. This was one of the most successful community organizing attempt of defenders in 2017.

Additional reading
The usefulness of cross-endorsing in a raid or a liberation and raiders' inefficiency when ignoring the technique
Note: Anything in this article are well-known facts about the said technique. This article is just an attempt at using graph algorithms to further prove those facts.

Spoiler

The liberation of Philippines gave us a great example about the usual anatomy of a large-scale liberation in the modern time of gameplay. In a typical big liberation (20 people and up), there will be 3 groups of nations (called “communities”): The first one consists of raider pilers (including lead and regional officers); the second one consists of defender jumpers (defender nations that move into the region at update time); the third one consists of natives and defender sleepers. All of them are shown on the endorsement graph below. From the analysis of the event, we can drive out how useful cross-endorsing (a nation endorses every other nation) is in many cases as well as many inefficiencies of the point-only-endorsing technique (Nations only endorse a few designated nations) used by most occupation raids.

Defender jumper group and the benefits of cross-endorsing for a liberation or a raid
All defender nations that move into the target region on the GO command at update time are sorted into this group. As seen on the graph at frame "Major update - 23/12/2017", nations in this group endorse like crazy. For the Philippines liberation, 43 nations were in this group and gave out a remarkable 1479 endorsement activities. This yielded us an average endorsement activity rate (also known as “Average degrees of nodes”) of 34, which means each nation has 34 total received and gave-out endorsements. The density of the endorsement graph (how close it is to the situation of all nations endorse each other, the value will be 1 if all nations endorse each other, nearly same thing as the “WA Dream Metric” that the North Pacific and Europeia used in their WA development program, this number decides a lot of things as analyzed below) was at 0.819 for Philippines. This is probably the highest of all endorsement communities exist in NationStates at the time and certainly trumped the North Pacific and Europeia’s, as the cross-endorsing technique was used by all nations of this group and the order for doing so was repeated frequently in the operation, but the number could have been higher if defenders were really invested in properly cross-endorsing. Another cool fact is that each nation is so closely related to each other, the most clicks you will need to find another nation that you haven’t endorsed yet in the group via the endorsement list is 3 (this is called “Network Diameter”).

Note: "Distance" means the amount of nations that lies in the shortest path between any two nations on the graph
 

(Distribution of total amount of endorsements a nation in this group received and gave out)


(Distribution of each nation's endorsement level)


(Distribution of the amount of endorsements each nation in this group gave out)


(Distribution of average distance from a given nation in this group to all other nations in this group)


(Distribution of distance from a nation in this group to another nation in this group that is farthest from it)

The close connections of defender jumpers give a tremendous boost to the total influence level of the entire defender side in a liberation. This boost in influence is evenly distributed, as endorsements are distributed nearly evenly between each nation as shown on the “In-degree distribution” chart. The even distribution of endorsements, which makes each nation has a relatively high influence level, has many good sides. Firstly, it would be very hard to banject defenders from the region should the liberation failed. Secondly, it would provide more nations that were eligible for regional officer positions that serve the purpose of kicking out raiders. This benefit is created solely by the cross-endorsing technique and can be utilized by both raiders and defenders. If raiders were cross-endorsing on the Philippines liberation, it would cost the native delegate far more influence to banject all raiders from the region and if raiders still held the delegacy, more nations that have suitable influence level could have been appointed to regional officers in a shorter time to clear out defenders and natives. From this analysis, we have a conclusion:
 

Always cross-endorsing in an operation for the efficiency of the operation and the strength of a stronghold

(Note: The above statement is not always correct as sometimes, low-influence piler nations are desired to have for easier ejection before passwording a region, if the piler nations don't obey or aren't aware of the retrieve order)

Another cool thing about cross-endorsing is that there is no single important  “lead” nations in an operation that uses it, the key nations which a ban on those nations will lead to total failure of the operation in the jump phase. As shown on the “PageRank distribution” chart below, most nations have a low score, which means each has a low overall importance level to the successful of the operation, plus, the importance level is evenly distributed between nations as you can see that many dots lay very close to each other to the point they resemble a line. A banjection of a single or a few nations will not cause a failure as long as there are nations that have higher endorsement level than the enemy as every nation has a low and uniform importance level to the operation. Raiders will need to ban more defender jumpers than they would need to if cross-endorsing wasn’t used to protect a raid. This strategy is what increases the chance of success for a liberation where defenders take a region for themselves.
 

(The distribution of the importance level of nations in this group,
higher score means higher importance level to the successful of an operation)

The same can be applied to raiders as it would be harder for natives and defenders’ regional officers to defense a region via banjections. Both short trigger length and cross-endorsing are top solutions for mitigating banjection damages as length decides the number of nations that can be banjected and cross-endorsing determines the number of nations need to be banjected to knock down the enemy. We have another conclusion:
 

Cross-endorsing helps mitigate damages caused by banjections while jumping

 
The native & sleeper group, spotting defender sleepers and how that can be prevented via cross-endorsing of natives
Endorsement activity tends to be low in the native community of regions that don't have an endorsement exchanging campaign. You can see that red spheres dominate the whole defender & native area on the graph at many frames and the links are sparsely distributed, which indicates low amount of endorsements gave out by each nation.
 

(Distribution of total amount of endorsements a nation in this group received and gave out)


(Distribution of each nation's endorsement level)


(Distribution of the amount of endorsements each nation in this group gave out)

 
But there is something interesting in there, some spheres have green color, that means those nations are very active in endorsing compare to the rest of the group. Those are maybe just some really committing natives but if you check the activity feed of them and note that they were just admitted to the WA recently, then there is a high chance that those nations are sleepers placed in by defenders to endorse the native delegate when the region is in danger.
 

Actively endorsing, new WA nations in a region full of inactively endorsing natives are usually defender sleepers

The spotting of defender sleepers can be prevented by making sure natives in a region endorse each other a.k.a cross-endorsing. This will make every nation looks like the same in term of endorsement activity level and the chance of spotting a defender sleeper will be reduced. That is another useful purpose of cross-endorsing, which applies to natives in this case.
 

Native communities that are active in cross-endorsing are better hide places for defender sleepers

(Note: It is not usually important to hide defender sleepers since they will be wiped out anyway before griefing a region. Consider this the most unimportant benefit of cross-endorsing)

Not to mention cross-endorsing will increase the cumulative influence level of natives and make griefing a region a more painful experience for raiders as explained in the previous part.

The raider group and many vulnerabilities and inefficiencies caused by the lack of cross-endorsing
With an average endorsement activity rate of just 3 and 129 endorsement activities for 46 nations for the Philippines liberation, we can conclude that endorsements are sparingly exchanged by raiders and sparsely distributed between raider nations. This is primarily caused by the fact that raiders don’t usually cross-endorse in a raid. Most of the time, raiders just endorse one or some designated “lead” nations called “points”, this is the point-only endorsing technique. The sparingness is further shown via the graph density of just 0.062. All of these mean the total influence level gained by raiders are significantly lower than by defenders. This gives defenders an upper hand as it will cost them far fewer influence to banject all raiders from a region than it would be if cross-endorsing was used. Also, low cumulative influence gain means that only some nations will have the necessary level of influence to be appointed as banjection regional officers. If an officer runs out of influence, raiders will have to wait for them to regain the influence. Higher cumulative influence gain provides more nations that are eligible in term of influence to conduct banjection. If an officer runs out of influence, that officer can be dismissed and another nation in the abundant sea of high-influence nations can be appointed to replace in a short time. The waiting time for an influence regain is eliminated. Another thing to note is that there are only a few nations that are ranked high on the “PageRank Distribution” chart below and those few nations have a very high score, which means there are a small of collection of nations (2 at the jump phase of the raid) that are extremely important to the successful of the operation, since all endorsements necessary to coup the native delegate focus only on these nations. Banjections on this small collection of nations will cause a decisive failure of the operation. If a raid has only one lead then this will be a much easier game as only one nation needs to be eradicated. This provides a big benefit to both defender and native regional officers as far fewer effort is needed in order to sabotage a raid.
 

(The distribution of the importance level of nations in this group,
higher score means higher importance level to the successful of an operation)
(Note: The time of this chart is 17^th December major update, which is when the raid happened)

Conclusion
Cross-endorsing is an awesome technique for:

• Increasing the efficiency of an operation and the strength of a stronghold
  
• Avoiding damages from banjections when jumping into the target
  
• Hiding defender sleepers that have the purpose of endorsing natives.
  

Also, from all those long paragraphs, we can admit that graph density or the better-sounded “WA Dream Metric” as used by Europeia and the North Pacific is a number that has great influence on the success rate of raids and liberations as it affects many aspects of “front-line defense”.

Summary of the event (Animated GIF)

(Try to find Feirmont's puppet in there)
(Link to full-resolution image of each frame will be updated later)

Piling
There were 4 major pile operations during the past month, the first one was the Boston pile from November which extended to the beginning of December. The second one was the pile on Philippines's native delegate by the participants of the first major attempt at liberating the region, which was terminated a few days after due to raiders' banjection. The third one was an important one, a pile to support the transferring of delegate in one of the South Pacific's treaty-binded allies: the Rejected Realms. Several SPSF members along with a whole lot of pilers from other TRR's friend regions such as the East Pacific conducted a successful democratic transferring of power between the Rejected Realms's former delegate the Church of Satan and the elected delegate Catalyse. This was one of SPSF's most important pile operations in 2017 as it carried an important purpose of help protecting the sovereign and democratic institutions of one of the South Pacific's long-time friends. Catalyse became the delegate a few days after the operation started. The operation terminated on major update of 23^rd December as it was determined that the delegate had gathered enough endorsements to avoid an overthrown from external forces. The last major pile operation was the one on Philippines again after the successful second liberation attempt. At first, the pile operation was planned to be a short one as the native delegate only consumed a minor amount of influence and with a big force of more than 68 endorsements, they should have taken back the loss influence with ease. However, the native delegate accidentally banned an high-influence native nation, which costed them a tremendous amount of influence. The operation got extended for a few weeks as thousands of influence points needed to be recovered. Although most of the piler force has pulled out at the time this report was written, the influence still hasn't recovered to the original level which means the pile operation got extended to January.

Speed
The usual shout out section to fast bois and gurls. 

Chasing
As usual, the prize for fastest boi belonged to Roavin with his usual average chase speed of 2s and maximum of 1s. Stood at the second position for fastest chaser is a former member: Katie (Rikuchar), although only briefly stayed in the SPSF, they managed to get an average speed of 3s and maximum of 2s. Belonged to the third position is USoVietnam (United States of Vietnam) and Somyrion (Aumeltopia) with an average of 4s and maximums of 2s for USoVietnam and 3s for Somyrion. Escade and Thatcher (The Noble Thatcherites) belonged to the fourth position at a 5s average and a 3s maximum. Honorable mention goes to Nakari (Nakarisaune) with her 6s chase speed. Chasing is one of the most difficult things to do on the field of military gameplay and these individuals have managed to put the SPSF to the proud of having chasing-capable players, an unique and rare strength of most military organizations, even professional defender ones. 

Move+Endorsement
The liberation of Philippines gave out several interesting data on the move and endorse skill, a must-have skill for any liberator, of some SPSF members. Both USoVietnam and Somyrion took the first position for the fastest move and endorse at the speed of 3s, while Thatcher lagged a little bit behind at 8s. Data from other liberators were not available as most of them operated in the region as sleepers and not jumpers. 

Chase+Endorsement
Ever since July, the lack of personnel prevented any chase defense against raid from being done so again, we unfortunately don't have any data for this skill. 

Members
Commend general/prime minister Roavin for retaining his first position on the score table with over 156,720 points, his extremely active participation in tag defending with a tag defense count of more than 97, a second-position number of liberations at 6, and a chase speed of 2s made him continue to be the member with the highest points in the SPSF. Stand at the second position is officer Nakari at up to 138,930 points, gained through her 95 tag defenses which is only behind Roavin and her unbelievable dedication at participating in liberations, especially big ones, a tremendous improvement from her sixth position in the previous month . At the third position, we have Thatcher, who, with a point level of 1700 in the previous month, now got up to 65,863 points, collected through his actively participation in chasing at the tag defense count of 51. Somyrion belonged to the fourth position with a score only a little bit behind Thatcher, a number of 60,789, a well-deserved point level for his 51 tag raids, 49 detags, and 14 updates that he joined,  the highest in the SPSF. Big shout out to all members and former members aside from those mentioned above who have contributed to SPSF's activity, dynamic, diversity, and competence on one of the most harsh areas of NationStates in the past month, they are: general USoVietnam (United States of Vietnam), our MoMA Escade, our former fastboi Katie (Rikuchar), our most active big operation jumper South Asians (Asia and Pacific), along with our most dedicated pilers Serres (The Serres Republic), Neu Hundland, Nathan, and Unplannedland. Thank you all for making the SPSF an awesome place. 






Military-related foreign affairs
The Order of the Grey Wardens and the Rejected Realms Army as always, took the first and second position for the organizations that the SPSF worked the most. The next positions belonged to The Union of Democratic States Armed Forces, Dragon Knights Of Aenaroth, The Shining Host (Caer Sidi), Lily, 10000 Islands Treaty Organization, Spiritus Defense Force, Renegade Islands Alliance Special Forces, and the East Pacific Sovereign Army. Big props to all organizations that provided a friendly and professional environment for the SPSF to enjoy the fun of military gameplay at maximum joyfulness!

Appreciation for the Minister of Foreign Affairs Tim Stark and Minister of Military Affairs Escade as their professional at leading their respective ministry has ensured no major foreign affairs drama happened in the past month for the SPSF as well as the South Pacific in general.



Conclusion
Although late, Happy New Years. Hope the SPSF will continue to maintain its incredible performance, gain more members, pursue its objectives successfully, and keep the status of one of the most skilled and active feeder army in NationStates in the year of 2018. 

Read the statistical report here

Chief Supervising Armchair

(This post was last modified: 03-05-2018, 02:38 AM by USoVietnam.)

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Incredible report, as always!

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Vietnam, that was beautiful as always!

[Image: Lj1SunN.png]
Formerly Banned For Still Unspecified "OOC Toxicity"

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So much love <3

Escade

~ Positions Held in TSP ~
Delegate | Vice Delegate 
Minister of Regional Affairs, | Minister of Foreign Affairs | Minister of Military Affairs
~ The Sparkly One ~

My Pinterest

 

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Fantastic report as always!

Marius Rahl

Fortitudine Vincimus!

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Another flawless report. Great job !

Sent from my A1601 using Tapatalk

Former Cabinet Advisor
Former Minister of Military Affairs
Proud Citizen and Legislator of the South Pacific.
Nation in the South Pacific- Asia and Pacific.
Soldier in the South Pacific Special Force.

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<3 This is absolutely amazing.

~ Aumeltopia ~

Raccoons are bandits! First they steal your food . . . and then your heart/identity!

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