Power

The concept of power is sort of the abstract constraint on a particular nation’s, well, power. It controls how large a Nation can become and when a Nation is vulnerable or weakened. Nations will always have a set limit based upon this power concept, and weakened Nations can be taken over by rivals very quickly.

Power Explained
Power is a value that each individual player holds. Individual power contributes to national power, which is the sum of the power levels of all individuals in the Nation. For a variety of reasons that will be explained shortly, individual power can range from a minimum of -225 to a maximum of +225. Negative values will detract from a Nations’s power score, positive values will add to it. Power always starts at 0 when a player first enters the world. Power is decreased by 60 whenever a player dies, regardless of how they die. However, power is regenerated at a rate of 1 every minute, meaning it takes one hour to fully recover from a single death, and just over 4 hours to reach full power starting from zero. Therefore, it would take 10 deaths within 15 seconds (that would be quite impressive actually) to go all the way from +225 to -225, and with regeneration, it would take at least 11 deaths in an hour to reach the full negative value (less impressive, but still won’t happen very often). More importantly, it takes 4 deaths for a player at full power to go below zero. Note, regeneration only occurs when a player is actually online, and power actually decreases whenever a player is offline, at a rate of 15 per day. Power will not degenerate below zero just from being offline, and it will take 15 days to actually go from 225 to zero, but still, the loss of power is an incentive to not be offline for too long a time.

Now, that’s a lot of numbers to remember so to recap, +225 is your maximum, -225 is your minimum, you lose 60 power when you die, you regenerate 1 power per minute when online, and you lose 15 every day you’re offline.

The effects of power level don’t really act on the individual, they act on Nations. National power, as already mentioned, is the sum of the power levels of all citizens. At any given time, a Nation’s power level determines their maximum size. A nation with a single member (at full power) will have a maximum size of 225 chunks, a nation with three members will have a maximum size of 675 chunks, and so on. The functioning maximum size will, of course, be lower than that because accidents happen, deaths occur, and power is decreased. A Nation’s power level at any time only actually restricts the claiming of new chunks. A Nation with one member at full power can therefore only claim up to 225 chunks, two members can claim 450, etc. If a nation is at half power, they can only claim new chunks up to half of their maximum power. For example, that single member Nation at a power level of 110 can not claim any more chunks once it has already claimed 110. Of course, regeneration makes it possible to claim more chunks fairly quickly, but power level is a hard limit on the claiming of new chunks.

You might be wondering what happens when power level goes below the number of chunks a Nation has control of. The territory isn’t reduced to match the power level, as that would be annoying and frustrating to no end. Instead, a Nation is considered “weakened” until their power level is back above the number of chunks claimed. Weakened Nations are vulnerable to advances by other nations, meaning simply that any nation can claim land away from a weakened nation at no cost. This takes place just like the claiming of any other piece of land with the command:

/n claim

There may come a time when a nation has expanded too much and needs to downsize to reduce thier vulnerability (also if players have been banned from the Nation or server, or if a player "rage quits" on the eve of battle). To reduce the range of a Nations borders the following command is to be used: /n unclaim

Only national admins and moderators can do this. This provides a means by which more powerful Nations (literally pertaining to the power value and figuratively as to abstract power) can expand their territory. Claiming land belonging to other Nations is the one way to bypass the restriction that all land claims must be connected. Worth mentioning here is the fact that you have to start at a Nation’s border to claim land away from it; you can’t just go claim away their city and stand triumphantly while making that mass applause breathing noise to yourself for your cleverness. No, you have to start at the border and work in.

Also worthy to note is that players cannot join, leave or be kicked from a Nation when they are at negative power. This prevents players from negatively affecting Nations they join, or from giving back power to their own Nation until they regenerate and rejoin when they’re in the black again. Conversely, this prevents national admins from kicking players who have died a lot and are affecting national power very negatively. At the very least they have to wait for the player to regenerate their power, then they can kick them to the curb. In very severe cases such as where a player "ragequits" by dying enough to get their power all the way to -225, then logs off for days and doesn’t appear as if they’re coming back, server admin intervention is allowed, and the offending player will be removed from the Nation behind the scenes and likely banned. Either way, players who are not online for 30 days (meaning they are at most zero by that point) will be kicked from their Nation automatically.

That about covers the major direct effects of power as it pertains to Nations and individual players. Power determines how much a nation can expand, and then determines if a nation is weakened and land can be taken away from them. The dynamics of power really come into play when international relationships are taken into consideration, leading us nicely into our discussion of diplomacy on the server.