Hub.mn

Hey everyone! My name's Bee. You may know me from the Kingdom of Roseland, an active nation within the MicroWiki community. Recently, I've been considering creating a new project to get involved with Micras, but I had a few questions .

1. I know that you are not permitted to claim land until 3 months of your nation having an active online presence, but I wanted to prepare for joining the world of Micras. The biggest confusion I have is where nations get their populations. An example : The Empire of the Alexandrians claims a population of around 313 million people, and I wondered what the rules/standard is for determining this number.

2. When creating a history, what is a good way for a nation to be started in Micras? A good beginning, so to speak.

3. Any good free forum hosting websites? Good ways to get an online nation started?

Thank you very much : )

honeybee1945 wrote:Hey everyone! My name's Bee. You may know me from the Kingdom of Roseland, an active nation within the MicroWiki community. Recently, I've been considering creating a new project to get involved with Micras, but I had a few questions .

1. I know that you are not permitted to claim land until 3 months of your nation having an active online presence, but I wanted to prepare for joining the world of Micras. The biggest confusion I have is where nations get their populations. An example : The Empire of the Alexandrians claims a population of around 313 million people, and I wondered what the rules/standard is for determining this number.

2. When creating a history, what is a good way for a nation to be started in Micras? A good beginning, so to speak.

3. Any good free forum hosting websites? Good ways to get an online nation started?

Thank you very much : )

I'll try and give you an answer to each question in order:

1. The populations are entirely inside the simulation of each nation (ie. we make it up). Judging by the amount of land claimed in each nation, we can roughly figure out what the population of our country should be. This isn't like MicroWiki, where number of citizens is equal to amount of respect given, so try to keep your numbers realistic, as it really doesn't matter whether it's 100 or 100 million!

2. You're pretty much free to create whatever backstory to your country as you like. A good way to construct this would be to create a page on MicrasWiki, and just start writing. You might want to think about events that have led to your country being where it is now. You can create as rich a history as you like, the only limits are imagination and effort to write!

3. This really depends, as it's up to you how much customisation you want to have, or how easy you want it to be to use. Different people find certain providers easier to use, whereas others prefer more powerful providers that give you more customisation, but are harder to set up.

Have a look at http://bastionunion.org/forum/, a place where some of the most active members of the community can be found. Alexandria and Hamland also have a shared forumspace.

Thank you both!!

A few more if you don't mind?

1. How do you determine outcomes of elections?

2. How do you come up with events that happen (disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.)? Some random way or?

3. I've considered using a program called icyboards for my forum. Good or bad?

4. What exactly is the Bastion Union. I've been on the forum several times and don't quite understand.

honeybee1945 wrote:
1. How do you determine outcomes of elections?

Depends from nation to nation. Some don't hold elections, others simulate it, some give their citizens one vote or more to distribute among parties and Jingdao lets people vote in each State (100 votes in each state, while your home province gives you a bonus of 150 votes to distribute among the parties) and 20% of the votes are distributed randomly (we used a script).

2. How do you come up with events that happen (disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.)? Some random way or?

Just pretend that something happened...

4. What exactly is the Bastion Union. I've been on the forum several times and don't quite understand.

Bastion is simply a place where several nations share a forum. They have their own subforums and can decide to interact with the others (or simply decide to not do so).

Hey, Bee! Welcome to the Hive Hub! I'm Craitman, the MCS's Administrator-General, and it's nice to see another new nation interested in claiming on Micras

Joe's answered your first questions pretty well, so I'll concern myself with the more recent ones below:

1. You'll start to notice a trend here, but deciding elections is pretty much down to how you want your own to be run. Some nations with a larger out-of-character population (by which I mean active real-life individuals) will run elections based on these people's votes alone, while some will take those numbers and equate them to certain percentages of their in-sim population. Many nations don't have quite the human resources to run elections this way, and these will either tend to use random generators for results, or even build them purely into their simulation and create the results based on backstorying. There's nothing that's strictly unacceptable as we have a wide range of nations here with different ways of working pretty much every aspect of micronationalism, so the best way is just whatever way you prefer.

2. Again, backstorying events can be played-out however you desire. I believe there are some simulations similar to NationStates which generate news/occurrences/disasters for your nations, but I don't think (m)any nations around here nowadays use them. Most news is either based on real discussions we have on changes to make to our nations, or are done in-sim - if you want your nation to suffer a terrorist attack, for example, think-up the details and report on it. Alexandria's Genevan Arrow is a good example of domestic news being reported with a mix of genuine and simulated developments.

3. A few nations have used IcyBoards over the years and, from what I can tell, they're a pretty reliable provider of free forums, so should be suitable.

4. The Bastion Union is essentially just a shared forum where a handful of nations are based, rather than each being situated on completely separate websites. There are a few "general" boards there for non-nation-specific conversation, but there is no official political association among the nations which call it home - it's best to think of it as a shared portal. My own nation, Craitland, moved to the Bastion a couple of years ago after our original forum (a free phpBB one) was deleted

Welcome!

I personally recommend Byethost for free forum/website hosting and Miraheze for free wiki hosting.

Welcome to the Micras community!

Having read up on the MicroWiki site, Roseland looks like a nice young micronation. It's good to have some new blood becoming interested in this hobby.

As far as getting started, I would suggest coming up with a concept and just jumping in. We tend to judge activity by forum presence, but this can be offset by a good wiki with frequent articles/writing. Overall I'd say we judge quality over quantity.

Proboards may be a bit wonky but it's always worked well for me. Or you are welcome to hop over to Bastion and we can set something up for you there (I'm one of the admins).