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**USoVietnam** · 03-29-2018, 03:05 PM

Annual Public Report Release #8

South Pacific Special Forces

1/1/2018 - 28/2/2018

The new leadership that was elected into the position of deciding the future of the South Pacific's military in 2018 has brought certain changes to the South Pacific Special Forces. These changes have been amplified with the increasingly high activity of the military gameplay world. In this eighth annual report, we will dive into the statistical facts of these changes, which were a lot more significant than the previous month of December. This report is a little bit unusual because its time span is from 1^stJanuary to 28^th February, which is two months, largely due to the cabinet election. Because of this, we won't compare the quantity-related performance of these two months to the previous month. Nonetheless, every bit of statistics is still going to be discussed below. Notable events to cover are the big improvements in chasing performance, a revive of Lily-SPSF tag raiding, some warzone raids. increasing cooperation with treaty-bound allies and the creation of the SPSF Reserve.

Activity
Our successful operation count was 495. With up to 201 tag defenses and 114 tag raids, those two types of operations held the first and second position for the type of operations we did the most. If you read through the raw data of the report (link below), you will know that a majority of our operations in this report were in February. This is because military gameplay, especially on the defender side, has been a lot more active in February than the previous months. This trend has been observed many times on defender side with a rather unknown cause. The surge in defender activity mostly acted on chasing, as more chasers turned out at updates than before. This helped drive up the tag defense count as well as the operation count of the SPSF in general in February.

Operations
With 97 updates the SPSF defended and 20 updates the SPSF raided, the title of defender-leaning independent has still been held in the past two months. Note that we did a little bit of changes on how we track this metric.

Change to military ideology assessment method
Previously, only the objective of operations that are done at update time such as tagging and chasing are accounted for in this metric. Now, the objective of pile operations are also included, which helps us giving out a more accurate picture on the ideology of the SPSF.
Tagging
With extremely valuable help from members the flower-themed organization Lily, SPSF got 114 lifeless regions vandalised with Lily and the South Pacific's military propaganda. NationStates truly has so many regions that are dead to the point where tagging is seemly the only activity they get. The number was low compare to earlier months but the tagging segment has just been revived very recently, at the end of February actually. Most of the big numbers are left for the next March report. Still, tagging accounted for 23% of successful operations that we did, the second highest. On the performance side, we got on average 45 tag hits and 24 fails, with an average success rate of 63%, a very decent number! Though, these data can't not reflect fully the aspect they try to reflect due to how little data points we got.

The extended time of major update from 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes has helped tag raiders tremendously since they got more time to tag and so were we . On the night of 28^thFebruary, we successfully did a tag run with up to 70 hits with just a team of 3 person. Aside of the long major update length, most of the credit must go to the state-of-the-art effort of Liliarchy at being the lead, with his unbelievable speed at appointing, dismissing ROs and switching. Also, honorable mention goes to Chingis for designing a trigger bot that arguably functions better in problematic updates than normal updates. He would have received more credit if he had been more active.

Chasing
Increased turnout of chasers at updates brought sharp improvement over the quantity and quality of chase defenses for the SPSF and defederdom as a whole. Over 201 regions got defended by SPSF and friends from taggers, accounted for over 40.6% of successful SPSF operations, the highest of any operation type. Unprecedented improvements over chasing performance are denoted by a success rate of over 56%, with 8 defenses and 7 fails on average. This brought our efficiency over chasing back to the same level as 2017's summer and autumn months. Note two chase runs that have a success rate of 100%, purely due to raiders' incompetence.

Salt-containing content

We can't look into chasing without paying attention to the tagger organizations that we fought against. The Black Hawks has definitely regained their stamina in tagging as we longer have frequent drop-outs mid-update although they haven't as success as they were in pre-2017 months, mostly due to increased chaser activity and improved technology (Breeze++). The Roman Empire has continued to dominate the battlefield since November 2017 when it comes to numbers and speed. The Roman Empire's recent achievements in tagging can mostly be attributed to their incredible triggering accuracy and cadence, with constant 1-2s triggers and a cadence of less than 30s for most tag runs. These speedy numbers overload a majority of chasers and make chasing the Roman Empire a hard-level game.

Raiding
Non-tagging raiding activity saw a substantial increase in the past 2 months. We had up to 6 raids, nearly of them were either self-run or allied with independent regions such as The North Pacific, The East Pacific,...

On the minor update of 24^thFebruary, 4 warzone regions: Warzone Australia, Warzone Airspace, Warzone Sandbox, and Warzone Africa got cleaned of supposed natives in a series of raids by the SPSF, the North Pacific Army, and the East Pacific Sovereign Army. Despite the time between the first three targets were just less than 5 minutes, the squad of 14 updaters from various militaries successfully raided them on time. The alliance flag of the SPSF and EPSA was flown on all warzones that we targeted, with only Warzone Europe freed from the might of the Pacifics.

[Image: dGrzlLK.png]

On another relevant story, February was not a good month for warzones in NationStates as practically all of them either got raided or under foreign occupation. Two ongoing warzone occupations at the time were Warzone Europe by the Order of the Grey Wardens and Warzone Asia by EPSA. We'll only focus on Warzone Europe since it was certainly a salt mine.

The Warzone Europe salt mine
Note: Article contains mostly opinions, take everything with a grain of salt.

Spoiler

The Warzone Europe occupation was the spiciest operation of 2018 as it invoked several userite factions over the legitimacy of their rules over a warzone, a GCR. Warzone Europe was previously a protectorate of a UCR known as Equilism. Warzones by design, are to be invaded by outside forces so everyone thinks making one of these a protectorate is a really dumb idea. Still, Equilism insisted that their power over Warzone Europe was indisputable and any attempt at raiding the region would be a violation of their right to the region. Several notable gameplay figures, especially Tim Stark, were displeased at those claims.

On the major update of 20^thFebruary, Warzone Europe was raided by the Grey Wardens along with 2 members of the SPSF who were accidentally on for it. The occupation lasted for nearly a week with the entire native population of the region received free tickets to the Rejected Realms and its embassies with notable regions such as Equilism and Osiris closed down. Reactions on the Equilism side was quite concentrated with Sodium Chloride as a high-ranked Equilist official made remarks that undermine the game mechanics itself again the Grey Wardens by saying that an invasion on the region was unjustifiable despite the region is designed to be invaded by outside forces. Several high-ranked Wardens made rebuttals against Equilism by reiterating about the true purpose of a warzone and criticizing the rhetoric of Equilism being the "sold inhabitants designated by God". To keep the article from derailing into full opinionated, we will just re-quote Tim's RMB post about the matter:

"Warzones, by design, are made for being invaded. That is literally their purpose in this game, as designated by the Administrators. There is no moral, ethical, or practical argument for the sovereignty of Warzones. However, since you claim I don't understand the relationship between Equilism and WZEU, I'll explain it very clearly. A couple years back, Asta really wanted to "own" a Warzone, so she got her fans to occupy and hold this one. Then she pulled strings to threaten and pressure anybody that even joked about invading it. To follow up on that, she got Equilism to declare it as a protectorate so as to attempt to keep it even safer from serving its designed purpose. Do you know why I target Warzone Europe? It's because, for some reason, you lot act like God himself chose you as the only rightful inhabitants of this region. Well that just doesn't sit well with me, mate. " - Native Tears, Tim's puppet

After the Wardens left, the region derailed into the same situation like Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. The New Pacific Orders (NPO) took over the region a few days after the Warden withdrawal. A few weeks after that, Lily tagged then the region then the NPO was in for it again. Finally, Warzone Europe went back to its true purpose, a place for wars. Also, this wasn't the first time Warzone Europe got invaded at this intensity, a similar operation happened in the spring of 2017 and brought us the same amount of salt from Equilism.

Aside from messing around with warzones, we also had another fascist sandcastle knocked over by ourselves. On minor update of 25^thFebruary, 6 SPSF soldiers invaded a dead and small fascist region called the Union of Fascist Lands. The occupation raid didn't last long. In just under 3 updates, we managed to destroy and re-found the region, it is now one of our permanent holdings aside from Axis Pact which was griefed in 2016. This was one of a few occupations that we did alone with no help from the outside whatsoever. The reason for the speedy occupation was the extremely low influence of nations in the region along with the effort at piling.

Liberating
Liberation operations were quite dull in the past 2 months since there weren't any major liberation against large occupations. We had 36 regions freed from noob raiders. The fact that we didn't have any liberation against large occupations doesn't mean we didn't have any big liberation against small occupations.

On the minor update of 7^thJanuary, the Dark Vanquishers conducted a small raid of 7 people on a small region known as the Nations of POWER. Unexpectedly, 12 hours after, defenders responded with an overkill liberation of more than 25 updaters. In only one update, all raiders got kicked out. Lesson to be learned here is "never raid a region on Saturday with fewer than 20 pilers". Defenders can mobilize on average more than 30 updaters with a 12 hours call on the weekends.

No endorsement graph GIF because it took just one update to clean out the raiders, however we do have the image for size comparison purpose:

Detagging
114 regions got cleaned from raiders' graffiti so that they can have clean targets to tag again in the future. As you have noted, the number of detags is the same as tags, one hundred and fourteen. This number of detags was achieved thanks to unbelievable dedication of some of our members, notably Somyrion (Aumeltopia), Nakari (Nakarisaune) and Neu Hundland. On a few updates when raiderdom was dead, we managed to get up to around 30 successful detags with fellow defenders.

Piling
There were lots of pile operations for the SPSF in the past 2 months. The most important one was the piling on the delegate transition of the SPSF's home region the South Pacific. A big force of more than 25 pilers from the SPSF, the North Pacific Army, the Eastern Pacific Sovereign Army, and the Pacific helped with the transition from a freely elected head of state/delegate Drugged Monkeys to another freely elected head of state/delegate Erinor. The transition happened successfully and securely on 4^thFebruary, 2018. However, the pile force still remained a few weeks after then to make sure the new delegate's endorsement level was high enough to avoid the old delegate from retaking the position. The pile operation officially terminated on 17^thFebruary, 2018, nearly 2 weeks after the delegate transition.

Creation of the Reserve force
After being saddened by the fact that the SPSF has one of the smallest pile force in this game, which was a great weak spot when we need to occupy a region either to destroy it or to clean out raiders after a liberation, MoMA Somyrion along with the General Corps decided to implement a program that allows TSP members who are wiling to help the military but can't or don't want to attend updates to register as a reservist, the reservists will provide additional manpower for pile operations aside from updaters as well as perform small operations that don't require a force of skilled updaters such as detags. This program was not our original idea, it was based on the Grey Wardens's Guardian program, which roughly has the same structure and purposes. Although the reserve has been very small because it is very new, our reservists have been able to deploy on orders in less than 12 hours.
The second pile operation was to assist the destruction and refound of the Union of Fascist Lands which we already covered above. The operation saw a good turnout of pilers from our already very small pile force with up to 9 pilers from both the updater and the newly created reserve force.

The third pile operation was another fash-bash. Some SPSF updaters and reservists assisted in the occupation of the Backbone Of Fascism. That occupation had up to 60 pilers from literally all feeder militaries: Militaries of the North Pacific, the East Pacific, the Pacific, the South Pacific, and even the West Pacific. Despite the South Pacific and the West Pacific has had a very tense relationship over foreign affairs matters, the hope of eradicating extremist political ideologies made them worked with each other in this operation. This occupation was truy an All-Pacifics operation. The occupation lasted until March with an ultimate successful lock-down of the region under the lead of the Eastern Pacific Sovereign Army.

The fourth un-official pile operation was in Warzone Europe as several members wanted to desalinate some of Warzone Europe's claimers.

Speed

As usual, in this section we will give complements to all the fastbois and girls of the SPSF

Chasing
As expected, the top performer was Roavin, with an average time between moving and first raider move is 2s with a maximum of 1s. Standing at the same rank as Roavin is a returned member: W&S (Witchcraft in TSP with the same average and maximum speed as Roavin. Old general Resentine (the Resentine Kingdom), MoMA Somyrion (Aumeltopia), and the stat nerd USoVietnam (United States of Vietnam) stand together at the secondwith an average of 3s and maximum of 2s. The third position belongs to Escade with her 5s average speed and 4s maximum speed. Honorable mention goes to Thatcher (the Noble Thatcherites) as he got an average of 6s and maximum of 3s.

Move+Endorse and Chase+Endorse
We didn't have any operation that required either of these skills so we don't have any data for them.

The SPSF has continued to be the only feeder military to have most of their force active chasers, that is something very unique about us and separates us with other GCR militaries and even defender-leaning GCR militaries such as the Rejected Realms Army.

Personnels and points
Roavin, with his remarkable activity and skills in defending, 76 tag defenses, 21 liberations he participated and a chase speed of 2s, continued to be the over-achiever as he managed to secure his 1^stposition on the score table of the SPSF with up to 357,280 points. Somyrion's activity in detagging and tagging with up to 133 tags and 66 detags made him the member with the 2^ndhighest score with over 164,313 points. Escade stands at the 3^rdrank with her 149,600 points, accumulated due to her incredible activity in chasing with up to 59 tag defenses. Those are the top three, mentions and commendations must not only be given to them but to all members who contributed to the activity and performance of the SPSF. Big thanks to USoVietnam for his dedication in tagging, W&S for his skills in chasing and the ability to gain such a high achievement despite joining after the audit started, Nakari (Nakarisaune) for the time she spent with Somyrion to detag dozens of regions and her active participation in liberations, Resentine for his contribution to our fastboi squad, Neu Hundland for being the largest contributor to our detag number with up to 71 detags, Nathan, and Unplannedland for their help on big liberations.

Special shout-out to the reservists
Our two new reservists: North Prarie and New Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who have already contributed a lot to the South Pacific via their activities on the Regional Message Board and game-side roleplaying, further expanded their contribution by helping our military on occupations. Despite not the ones who fight directly on the front-line, their help was extremely important to the security and success of our occupation operations.

Reservists' personal performance data (These data are just experimental)

Spoiler

Military-related foreign affairs
The SPSF continued to maintain its normal and friendly relationship with defender, defender-leaning, and independent organizations. However, we saw an increase in cooperation with feeder militaries such as the North Pacific Army and the Eastern Pacific Sovereign Army.

The Order of the Grey Wardens and the Rejected Realms Army still lead the table for the organizations that did the most updates with the SPSF with over 57 updates for the Grey Wardens and 37 for the Rejected Realms. The Renegade Islands Alliance Special Forces and the Union of Democratic States Armed Forces stand lower with 10 and 12 updates respectively. We also performed 6 updates with Lily on tag runs along with several updates with other smaller defender and independent organizations.

The reason for such a high degree of cooperation with defender and defender-leaning organizations
Additional reading

Spoiler

In an effort to reduce misleading interpretation of data by several factions to allege the South Pacific of being internally controlled by defenders to make sure we do more operations with them, we decided to write up this sort piece of text explaining the reason for such a high level of updates that the SPSF did with defender organizations. It is a direct consequence of SPSF's loosely-restricted policy on freedom of members to participate in operations and an indirect consequence of defenders' participation protocol.

Unlike other feeder militaries, the SPSF has the most liberal freedom of participation policy. Sanctions aren't needed most of the time for a member to participate in an operation that isn't run by the SPSF. That means on updates when there aren't anything planned by the SPSF, they can freely have fun with other organizations without the needs to ask the super-ordinates (The super-ordinates however do monitor members to ensure they don't do anything wrong such as joining an attack on our allies. Many defender-leaning members were explicitly reminded in the past not to participate in liberations against our treaty-bound allies such as the North Pacific).

Another reason for this is that it is very easy for one to work with many defender organizations. Unlike raiders who are required to plan everything ahead, defenders usually don't have any plan since they must watch out for raider activities to stop them on literally every update. This means on every update, there are things for defenders to do. Nearly all R/D organizations have a channel on their Discord server that is solely for in-operation chatting, these channels usually need to be isolated from other members, only members who attend the update are allowed to access it, this is for operational security (OpSec) reason. For raider and other organizations, the masking to access such channel is usually done manually and is not a problem. However, for defenders, who need to be on at every update, manually masking for access to the operation channel is inefficient and requires manpower which is not always available. So, they decided to use a bot that automates the masking process. Because of this, anyone can join an update to defense easily on their own. The SPSF along with defender organizations such as the Grey Wardens are in this server and are granted security clearance to use the bot. The SPSF itself has some defender-leaning members who frequently go online at update time and join updates to defense on their own using the bot. Since there are members from lots of defender organizations that also join updates easily with this way, it is easy for SPSF members to do operations with these members. The defenders' participation protocol along with our liberal participation policy allow any SPSF member to freely join an update to take part in defending at any time. This, couple with the fact that we have several very active defender-leaning members, means that we have a very high number of defending operations that we do with defender organizations.

But why is the SPSF granted security clearance?
Any organization that does defense is granted clearance, this includes non-defender organizations such as Lily and the Eastern Pacific Sovereign Army. Not to mention we used to have the New Pacific Order and the West Pacific Armed Forces in it for liberations.

One of the most unique thing about the February was an unprecedented increasing in cooperation on military matters between the South Pacific and treaty-bound feeder allies: the North Pacific, the East Pacific, and the Pacific, denoted by the series of warzone raids and large-scale fash-bash occupation raids we have covered above. Further cooperation with these allies are to be expected in the future as we are planning to do more detag runs and occupation raids with them in the future.

Aside from the organizations we mentioned, kudos must be given to other ones that have helped us in many operations: Spiritus Defense Force, Dragon Knights Of Aenaroth, Enadian Unified Forces, 10000 Islands Treaty Organization,...

Conclusion
That is it for the most delayed annual report. Hope you enjoy it and hope the SPSF continue to maintain its awesomeness under the new leadership of our new MoMA Somyrion.

Read the statistical report [Image: externallink.gif]

here

Chief Supervising Armchair

(This post was last modified: 04-12-2018, 03:16 AM by USoVietnam.)