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Dispatch → Meta → Gameplay
The Shadow Nexus: Stealth Raiding Guide (Beginner)
This guide features Level 1 of 4:
A Nation is only affected by answering issues. Your nation stats do not affect anything outside of your own nation. Nations cannot be invaded.
A Region is a group of nations. Every nation is founded in one of five starting regions:
The Pacific
The North Pacific
The South Pacific
The East Pacific
The West Pacific
These are called "Game Created Regions" (GCRs). From the moment your nation is founded, it exists within a region. It is impossible to not be in a region, though you may choose which region your nation resides in. Unlike nations, regions can be invaded when teaming up with other players and their nations. This is known as raiding.
The World Assembly (WA), though not evident at first glance, is highly important to raiding regions. Every player is allowed 1 World Assembly member nation at a time, which may be freely changed between multiple owned nations at will.
[!] Important: It is against NationStates rules to have more than 1 nation in the World Assembly at a time. If your main nation is in the World Assembly, you'll need to resign first in order to join the World Assembly with your puppet nation.
World Assembly members can Endorse each other. This is done by scrolling to the bottom of the other person's WA nation and clicking the "Endorse" button. This is an important mechanic in raiding.
Raiding is done by multiple people (2 or more) using alternate nations known as puppets, moving them to a region, joining the World Assembly, and endorsing the leader of the raid. This elects the raid leader the WA Delegate of a region when the region next updates (every region updates every 12 hours). The WA Delegate is the nation in a region with the most endorsements. This makes him or her the leader of the region by force, and grants access to the regional controls, which allows him or her to eject or ban ("banject") nations from the region, and in some cases, password protect it from outside forces or re-entry.
Regions Cease to Exist (CTE) at one of its twice daily updates if there are no nations within the region at the time of the update. This allows the region to be refounded, which is creating a new region with the same name as the one that was destroyed to permanently hold onto the region and its successful raid. The Founder of a region has permanent and unrestricted access to regional controls.
Raiding or destroying a region with a founder isn't impossible, though cannot typically be done with conventional methods described so far. Founders can Cease to Exist just like regions however, as nations CTE after 28 days of inactivity (60 days in "Vacation-Mode"). A region without a founder is known as a Founderless region, and is usually an easier target to raid.
Stealth Raiding is when raiders use undercover puppet nations to infiltrate a region without being detected by enemies, disguised as a Native (a member nation of a region). These undercover nations are known as clean puppets, since they cannot be traced back to your main nation or any Raider region. A dirty puppet is the opposite, a nation that can be traced back to you, which cannot be used for stealth raids and can compromise the entire operation.
When the time is right, the region is secretly seized or occupied and then destroyed.
You can make a clean puppet by:
Founding a new nation with a random flag. A name generator can help with this if you can't think of anything original! The random generators on the site itself are not recommended due to being predictable.
Answering some issues with the nation. Nations not answering issues can be a red flag.
Move to a region from a recruitment telegram.
Repeat steps 2-3 as necessary. This process can take a few days if necessary.
Infiltrate the target region.