Document:Taijitu Citizens' Militia Manual
Contents
Organization of the Militia
Policy
The primary goal of the Citizens’ Militia is the defense of its own and other regions’ sovereignty. This policy is underpinned by the philosophy of sovereigntism, which holds that all regions contain sovereign communities entitled to self-determination. The exception is regions which use military force to impinge on the sovereignty of others and forfeit their own in doing so. As a result, the Militia participates mainly in defenses and liberations of peaceful and allied regions as well as attacks on regions known to regularly invade others.
Ranks
The commander-in-chief of the Militia is the Citizen-Sergeant. The Citizen-Sergeant is elected freely from among and by the citizens of the region to a three-month, once-renewable term of office and is by law the highest ranking officer of the Militia. The Citizen-Sergeant may also establish and assign ranks within the Militia. In addition to the rank of Citizen-Sergeant itself, the current ranks are, in descending order of seniority, corporal, lancepesade, sans-culottes and trainee. Each ranks has a flag for use in operations and, with the exception of trainee, a symbolic trigram of the 'Bagua' associated with it.
| Name | Trigram | Flag |
|---|---|---|
| Citizen-Sergeant | ☰ sky |
|
| Corporal | ☲ fire |
|
| Lancepesade | ☵ water |
|
| Sans-Culottes | ☷ earth |
|
| Trainee | None | 
|
Chain of Command
Chain of Command The Citizen-Sergeant may establish a chain of command among the members of the militia. In the absence of the Citizen-Sergeant, command temporarily passes to the highest ranking officer in the chain. Currently the chain of command is simply ordered by rank and, within each rank, by seniority. You should always follow orders given to you by an acting commander unless it violates the provisions of the Militia Act or a standing mandate of the Ecclesia. Such an order should be considered illegal and reported to the Citizen-Sergeant or the Ecclesia.
Ecclesiastic Oversight
The Citizens’ Militia serves the citizens of Taijitu and must abide by any military mandate passed by the legislative Ecclesia that these citizens compose. This includes the Militia Act, which provides that the Militia may freely deploy to defend or liberate other regions. The law also permits the Militia to attack regions with a history of raiding peaceful regions but forbids it from attacking others without a legislative mandate to do so. The Ecclesia must also approve any operation which lasts longer than three days by a two-thirds majority vote.
NationStates Warfare
If a region contains at least one World Assembly nation with at least one endorsement, it will elect a World Assembly delegate. Warfare in NationStates is centered around controlling such regional delegacies.
Regional controls
In most cases a region’s delegate will have access to its regional controls. These controls permit them to update the World Factbook entry and regional flag, open and close embassies with other regions, suppress posts on the regional message board, ban or ejection nations from the region or password protect the region. Many user-created regions will also have a founder. A region’s founder is permanent and always has unfettered access to the regional controls A founder can also remove regional delegate’s access to them by making the delegate non-executive. As a result an active founder in a region can easily check the power of its delegate, and warfare focuses on founderless regions which are either game-created or whose founders have ceased to exist. In these regions, control of the delegacy means control of the region.
Updates
Changes in regional delegacies occur twice-daily at updates. There is a minor update beginning at 12:00 PM (noon) Eastern US Time and a major update beginning at 12:00 AM (midnight) Eastern US Time. Regions are updated sequentially in an arbitrary but discoverable order. Within each region nations are updated in descending order by length of residency. Both updates take an hour to an hour and a half, with the major updating taking longer.
At update valid endorsements for nations in the World Assembly are counted. An endorsement from a nation is valid if the nation is in the World Assembly, the nation in the same region and the nation has not already updated in another region during the update. The nation in the region with the most valid endorsements becomes the World Assembly delegate.
Influence
A delegate’s power in a region is limited by their influence in it. Banning or ejecting a nation costs influence proportional to the influence of the target, with the cost for bans being greater. Password protecting a region also requires influence, more if the password is hidden from residents.
Influence is gained and lost at updates. When a nation updates in a region, it gains influence equal to one plus the number of valid endorsements it has unless it has not been logged into for a week. At the same time the nation loses influence in other regions. If a nation ceases to exist, it loses its influence in all regions except the one it was in. If it is later revived, it loses influence in the region it ceased to exist in for each update there it missed. In game-created regions influence above a certain level accrued over six months ago is also lost.
Puppets
Creation
A puppet is simply another nation other than your main one that you create for use in military operations. When you create a puppet you must provide an email address for it so that it can receive invitations to the World Assembly. To ensure you do not have multiple nations in the World Assembly at the same time, always use the same email address for all your puppets. Having multiple nations in the World Assembly at the same time is cheating and can get your nations expelled from the World Assembly or even deleted by the moderators. Do not do it!
World Assembly Invitations
When you apply to the World Assembly with a puppet, you will receive an email containing an invitation and link to join. You can then save this email and only click on the link when you are need your puppet join the World Assembly. By having an invitation ready in advance you can quickly swap World Assembly status from one puppet to another.
You should maintain a valid invitation for each of your puppets. To do so, apply to the World Assembly with your puppet when you first create it and when it resigns from the World Assembly. You should also apply with a puppet if the most recent invitation you received for it is over a month old.
You should track which invitations have been used. The easiest way to do so is to not open emails for invitations until you use them. Whether an email has been read or not will then show if the invitation been used.
Gmail is the best email service to use for puppets and invitations. It lets you easily make sure NationStates emails are not marked as spam and allows you to rapidly search for “World Assembly Invitation” or configure a filter to label all invitation emails.
Switchers
Switchers are puppets intended to move between regions and to quickly swap World Assembly status between each other. Once a nation updates, its endorsements are invalid until the next update, so to deploy to more than one region in a single update you must swap World Assembly status from an updated switcher to one that has not updated. To do so, have the switcher which updated resign from the World Assembly and use your saved invitation for the one which has not updated.
Switchers should be stored in the Citizens’ Militia’s jump point Waves. This region is one of the very last to update, so the endorsements of puppets stored there will be valid for operations in almost any region. Switchers should fly the Citizens’ Militia flag for your rank. They can be named and themed anyway you like so long as it is not offensive.
