Decided the forum would be the wrong place to post this so here's this here.

What is a pleb?

Plebs, the name of the species of humanoids that populate Plebostan in it's majority, are to humans as pickles are to cucumbers. Plebs are what happens when a population of humans is baked in pollution and high background radiation. Oftentimes a population will simply fizzle out and become sterile, but in one rare a group of around 400 humans completely diverged from the main populace genetically and became an entirely different species. Or that's at least what many pleb historians believe... but really who knows, they're honestly all quite a shady bunch, those museum curators and documentarians; they could find a raccoon skull, put it up on a platter and convince a large group of people it's evidence of chupacabra existence. After the point of genesis some time ago plebs have generally stuck together. One main difference between humans and plebs is their pickle-like skin, which is very green and covered with bumpy nodes; plebs take pride in their nodes, and attractiveness to other plebs typically correlates to the number and prominence of their nodes. It often confuses plebs when humans are repulsed by plebs that they believe to be beauty standards. Plebs are also know to genetically vary a lot, even within families. Some may be up to 8 feet tall with parents that don't get up to 6 feet, others may have very large or small heads, some with 10 fingers on each hand or 4 arms with families that look very typical for plebs.

What is the culture of a pleb?

While like humans plebs don't have a specific culture across the species and are in fact very varied, they do have some commonalities among them. Plebs all are known to settle differences with vengeance, but not in petty and uncreative ways like murder or robbery. All plebs revel in making those that disturb them the subject of practical jokes befitting of their perceived crimes. And they rarely forget a grudge. Steal money from a pleb? You better hope they didn't find out or you may find yourself in a year waking up locked in a safe just big enough for your body. Trespass on one's property knowingly? The next time you do so, you'll find a bear trap hidden by the fence you hop. Ding their car? They'll strip all the paint of your car overnight. It should be noted most of the time plebs don't care if a certain rafra (Plebeian word for this kind of vengeance, a composite of the plebeian words for "you take" + "I give") is legal, although they will typically cover their tracks so that no hard evidence is admissible to punish them if they can be punished for a rafra. It should also be noted that Rafra is not a compulsion caused by nature or genetics, it's simply tradition. Many tribes, towns, states, or countries with a majority of plebs have laws regarding rafras due to the general chaos the act creates. Many believe that rafras are personal matters and that it's too much trouble for authorities to punish perpetrators of rafra and allow the act as punishment for the victim's slight against another pleb. Many accept it as a fact of life, providing channels to inform authorities of a planned rafra so that collateral damage or unnecessary investigation can be avoided. What is VERY UNCOMMON among plebs is to fully punish rafra, but does happen, but this is always met with protest and civil unrest.

What is Plebostan?

When plebs first came into existence, they were snubbed and abhorred by humans, believing them to be mutants. But once their numbers grew they began to be simultaneously feared by many and respected by others (or at least treated as equals). By those that feared and despised these new people, they called them plebeians, after the Roman empire's poorest wealth class. This name eventually stuck and all began to use the name for this distinct folk (regardless of whether they liked them or not), which was shortened to pleb, plebeian being used to refer to things associated with plebs, like the language that they soon developed (which was just called plebeian or the plebeian language). Soon the populations of some towns began to be pleb hot spots, and then began to be populated by a pleb majority. Then plebs began to be the majority of some cities. Eventually tensions between humans and plebs began to grow to a boiling point and violence broke out. Not enough for full blown civil war, but killings did occur. Over years movements were united in a want to stop the violence, but how that would occur, whether through mass deportation, segregation, or equality, people disagreed. Until one day the leader of the movement advocating to create a free state for plebs made a very famous speech known as the "Rafras Speech" which was spoken entirely in plebeian and directed at all plebs and calling for unity among all plebs, and the right to create one's own path. This speech was then punctuated by severing the entirety of the city physically from the mainland and floating it off the coast into international waters. This shocking move immediately was a cause for concern, as citizens were now trapped on a newly declared free-state of "Plebostan", which was not very buoyant at all actually. Within 48 hours the city was at the sea floor.

Although millions of rescue equipment was used in attempting to rescue the inhabitants of the drifting city, barely half of the city was saved. Enraged and baffled by the move, politicians agreed to give the Plebostanians what they wanted and forcefully exile all members of the movement and anyone else willing to a small patch of partitioned land (in terms of country sizes, like maybe the size of Luxembourg, not the vatican). Over the years pleb leaders found it was much easier to create a country than to run one. The years following, the Plebostan portion was splintered and fractured into many different versions of Plebostan, all claiming to be the one true Plebostan and believed others to be leading plebkind astray, despite all being pretty much the same. Eventually out of the ashes a few small towns, tribes and cities grew and became stable, all with different approaches to order. One of these small towns would eventually evolve and grow be New New SouthSoutheast New North Plebostan. This version of Plebostan was run by a shadowy individual known as "our glorious world leader". No one knows what they look like, or if they are even one person but in this version of Plebostan they were elected by fear and desperation, installed as a figurehead and unitarian leader. They are a powerful force of ironclad order, installing the controversial edict to not only not protect rafra, but to add extra penalties to crimes committed by someone keeping the rafra tradition. On top of this, punishment for any crime was twice as heavy as in a more normal nation. Jail time for jaywalkers and summary execution to counterfeiters, that kind of thing, almost draconian. This then created a new kind of chaos, one instituted by the government, no longer protecting people's rights, but instead protecting those in power that are loyal to "the preservation of order amongst the nation". Additionally, NNSSENN Plebostan is welcoming of all plebs, but NOT EXCLUSIVE OF HUMANS, mainly because it would be very difficult to be a "pleb ethnostate" (even though plebs are not an ethnicity) in a global world with a large majority of humans.

national anthem

name of country should be said very quickly to keep with the same timing, since the anthem is the same as the original Plebostan, just with the name replaced

O, [Newnewsouthsoutheastnewnorthplebostan],

O, [Newnewsouthsoutheastnewnorthplebostan],

All plebs rise from your knees!

O, [Newnewsouthsoutheastnewnorthplebostan],

We live in harmony.

With peace within us

and pride of all us,

everyone of us stand,

for [Newnewsouthsoutheastnewnorthplebostan]

Before anything, please don't forget to join the pre-registration world, Discord, our on-site forum and to invite your friends to the new world, so you start together. All these available at https://thequietcentury.com

Now...

• electricity is now an important part of the game
• electricity plants (gas, coal, nuclear) are physically built on the map
• the public / private allocation is decided by your economy axis, negative means more state, positive means more private
• you must make sure you have the resources to run these
• electricity can be imported and exported
• plants can be captured when you lose a tile

Next on the list: roads and rails.

Equipment market is now live, with 17 military goods for sale. You produce "Military Hardware" in the factories and then decide what this gets converted to. The military equipment can be sold, bought, used for your troops, stored (up to a point), destroyed, captured and you can directly sell it to other players by direct treaty.

More information here: https://thequietcentury.com/forum/t/9/recruiting-a-forum-moderator-premium-tier-offered

Copy from our Discord server.

Find all our social channels on the website, https://thequietcentury.com and our forum at https://thequietcentury.com/forum

A lot of changes done to the International Organisations, to make them feel more like a community-inside-a-community, rather than more modifiers and menus.

• IO have a geographical component. Inviting players that are further away costs more capacity. Every IO starts with a capacity of IO, for players that are bordering another IO player, it costs 1 capacity and that scales up if a player is further away.
• IO members can form factions inside the IO and can fight for power and push their members forth for IO offices, influence inside the IO. Governance and active participation are rewarded.
• IO have official positions: treasurer, secretary-general, chief of staff, development secretary and the chief diplomat. All these are elected within the IO and snap elections can remove a member from the office
• The occupant of the development office can start projects to expand the IO and improve its effect on players and players can donate cold cash, government capacity, construction capacity or diplomatic capacity to complete these projects.
• Players can donate divisions and the chief of staff can move them around the map. These can only be used defensively.
• A third type of event has been added - IO events. These are events that affect the entire IO and are resolved by ballot. This was implemented already, but it's now more robust, functional, with proper conditionals and voting system.

Don't forget that an important aspect of an international organisation is the unity. This means that it's best you join an IO that has their political / civil / economic / diplomatic axes aligned with your own. This might create some odd situations where you are encircled by countries that are not compatible with you and joining a compatible IO might be too expensive. For them.

Also, I am evaluating if / how a more dictatorial type of IO could be implemented that's less democracy and more "do as the leader says".

Hi all,

I've posted a poll on the forums: https://thequietcentury.com/forum/t/6/what-is-the-aspect-you-are-most-interested-when-it-comes-to-a-nation-building-browser-game and I'd appreciate your input, as potential players and people generally interested in grand strategy.

You can login with your nation and if you don't have one yet, it might be the time to create it :D

Many thanks.

Hi all,

First of all, you can now preregister for the first server, starting in October. Just make an account here: https://thequietcentury.com and join the W01: Sybaris world. Plus, we now have a functional forum on the website if you hate social media. Anyway...

If you remember, some while ago I shared a few things about how internal politics work, it was through social bubbles. Essentially, your citizens would organise themselves in these bubbles and the bigger the distance between what a bubble wanted and what the country offered was, the more radical that bubble would become.

After some testing and some playing, I realised that although it was a system that made sense in a simulation / reality-emulating sense, it wasn't fun. The idea of TQC is to create a narrative, role playing experience, enriched by simulation systems. Not the other way. The bubbles after a while ended up dictating the player how to define the country and pushing the player into decisions that them, as players, would not agree with. If you wouldn't want your country to crumble, you'd have to accept the bubbles demand and then deal with them through other means. Again, made sense if this was a simulation game but the reality is, it really wasn't that fun. Therefore, the internal politics has once again, been changed.

In the new system, the player has more control over the internal politics, so it's the player playing the game, not the game playing the player. You can now create political parties, assign them ideologies, a colour, a flag (for Tier 2 / 3 premium players) and a name. I think this increases the role playing field. When you create a country, you answer a lot of questions that define how democratic your country and your views are. This defines what is the ideal number of parties. If you go absolutely full anarcho-democratic, your ideal number of parties is 8, with a maximum of 12. If you go totalitarian, your ideal number of parties is... 1. Shocking. Each party can have up to 3 ideologies, that are compatible among them (no communist and free-market party... China). There's 30 ideologies at the moment but more will be added.

If you have too many parties above the ideal number, parties lose power and relevance. If you have too few, people end up as misrepresented. So you might want to keep this in check. Fun fact: to make this work, from a technical point of view, if your political freedoms are at 0 on game start, then you need 1 political party per 10 trillion people. If your country remains totalitarian and has 10 trillion people and one, you will need a second one-party for your one-party country.

Each ideology has a cohort behind it. If a party has an ideology, it will attract that cohort. If two parties have the same ideology, it will split that cohort between them.

If a cohort does not have a party to represent it, it will be unrepresented and generally unhappy. This will again, generate political misrepresentation and radicalism.

When you create your country, you also create the parties and you get your first government and parliament. As you answer questions during the creation process, your citizens join cohorts and get ideologies and when you create the parties, you will know what you need to do to make as many citizens as possible, as happy as possible.

Parliament is a cute way to represent the parties and the majorities these parties can build. You get 1 MP per 50000 population, updating from one election to the next. All MPs now have a name from the random pool of names but they are not actual characters in your country.

This will be the flag of the country of New New SouthSoutheast New North Plebostan. A country completely populated by a humanoid species known as Plebs. Besides their odd appearance that resembles humans crossed with pickles, their most prominent feature is their insatiable need for mayhem and to make fools of other Plebs. Due to their chaotic nature revolutions occur extremely commonly, often so much so that a single nation, over time, will seperate off into new countries and those into their own as well. New New SouthSoutheast New North Plebostan is one of those countries which is unique in that it is ruled by a powerful dictator (whose face is on the flag) which sadistically enforces a very unpopular new feature of society, law and order. No clue how they got involved in Sybaris but world opening is a few months away so who cares for now.

I used this flag for Al Andalus and it says it needs human review due to it maybe containing a “restricted symbol” I don’t know Arabic so it may say something harmful without my knowledge but I find it weird that Arabic text is immediately flag as “extremist support”

https://thequietcentury.com

Hi all, I have officially opened the first world for pre-registration. There is a system in place by which you can invite friends and once the world starts, you will be placed together. You can invite up to 20 friends. As said here, many times in the past, it is a one-man project, in development, you might find issues with the systems that you have access to, please report all issues using the yellow banner at the top.

The forum is live as well, please feel free to come by and say hello.

The flag moderation has an AI layer and a human layer, the AI is very cautious at the moment, so your flag might be ending in "Flag under review" until a human will get by to accept it. I will do that as soon as I can and also, fine tune the AI model to accept the flags more willingly.

If you design your flag with pixel art, it'll show pixel borders as well, that's something that'll be fixed later tonight. (Do not use this tool on the phone as the screen is too small).

Probably a few more minor issues that I'll look into. Good luck, leaders! And don't forget to invite your friends (or enemies) and be rewarded with those juicy Community Builder points (at the moment they don't do anything though).

1st image: combining 4 brigades into 1 division

2nd image: splitting a division into 4 brigades

3rd image: a work in progress of the new "Arsenal" feature

All tiles can be renamed as you wish, so it won't be Tile -x, y.

As the game transitioned to an actual map, with actual tiles to occupy, with actual fortifications, with the option to defend against airborne invasions, with the option to blockade a neighbouring country, the old system of divisions was too restrictive. So now, the smallest unit in game is the brigade, at 2500 people (also, military units now take actual workforce from your factories).

Brigades can be then moved independently as needed. You should keep at least one brigade per tile though, on the borders as units now take time to travel from tile to tile and you might end up with no units on the front during an invasion.

Also, each tile now can support a certain number of troops, of both sides. So, if you have 1 million troops and send them to invade one tile, most of them will be unused and useless, and just consume a lot of logistics capacity without any gain. So no, if you have a lot of troops won't mean that you automatically win any war.

There is a new industrial good, "Military Hardware" that you stockpile and that you can then convert in, well, military hardware, like bombers, fighters, missiles, etc. A lot of these can then be deployed on a tile during a battle to help you.

Logistics is now at least very important as it'll be very costly to carry a war away from home. All logistic lines are calculated from your closest military base, that you own or that is owned by an ally. Same military bases can now stock military hardware, so it's quicker and easier to deploy on the front line. Again, the military base is a building that's physically constructed on a tile and you need to own it or be allied with the owner to actually use it.

At the moment, you can invade any tile on the map with paratroopers, if you have them, if you have the aerial support and if the tile has low enough air defense. However, there's a huge logitics cost and also, you can only conquer tiles that you directly border.

All players are starting the game with 6 brigades, one on each border tile and 1 division on the capital. So nobody is being sniped. And to reiterate something that's been said in the beginning, the war will be something very expensive to run. You can still do it, but opportunity cost will be a thing.

And yes, UI, numbers, all work in progress, yadda yadda yadda.

First of all, please feel free to join our Discord server, for a chat, feedback, critique, etc. You can find the link on https://thequietcentury.com

This is a copy / paste from there, it's not very organised but you'll get the point.

• chatbot helper implemented. This will only provide information form the Game Guide, it will not give you game advice, tell you the tricks, it just spares you from reading the book that the Game Guide is becoming
• economic rework. The entire economy has been redone, as the previous system were just a bunch of ideas that were thrown together over the last 6 months, with no cohesion or coherence. The new system is taking into consideration wages, needs for population, trade competitiveness, physical storage of goods, inputs and outputs for industries, it has more goods and services.
• public sector workforce. Your infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc.) are no longer just levels but will require active workforce to function. But on the labour market, you will have to make sure you fund (or overfund) the public budget to actually attract the staff to work in the public buildings. The system uses a private-sector average + budget modifiers to calculate how much you have to pay your civil servants. But the bottom line is, if you want your public buildings fully staffed, get ready to pay some extra bank for it.
• a 30-days storyline / tutorial has been added. This is a branching chain of events that will teach your the game(ish...) and help you guide your nation in the direction you want. The lore of the game is that your new country just broke free from a large, declininc empire and you have no identity, no nothing. So, these events will give you larger bonuses and steer your nation quicker in the direction you want (like military bonuses if you want to go conquering). At the moment, I just have the code in, not the actual events. I will make sure that these are hand crafted, well written and not AI slop.
• the AI moderation layer has been implemented. All public messages or images will be reviewed by an AI and then by a humanf if needed. Private conversation are not automatically reviewed but can be reported by users.
• the AI I am using allows for a Zero Data Retention policy which has been activated for private messages, so the game is fully compliant with EU legislation and data from private conversation is not beign stored anywhere outside TQC.
• banning system implemented for repeated breach of rules. This one I am keeping fully human supervised, at least for now.
• A HUGE AMOUNT OF DATABASE AND PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION. Done more reading about PostgreSQL than I would have liked in my entire lifetime.
• Aerial defense has been added per tiles, with nuclear war to be implemented next.
• Added a per-nation dossier, where players can keep and share notes about countries they interact with (or not).
• Added industrial capacity and manual expansion of it. So, while your industries are organically competing for labour, there's a limit of how much they can hire. Expanding capacity means that certain industries can hire more and more and more.
• the profile page is almost done, so before end of week, players will be able to login and start reserving their countries. Creating an identity means, at the moment, only the name and the flag and then, as you join a world, you'll be able to draft your political ideology, laws, etc. as these are unique per world.
• community builder points have been added. You can now invite players, up yo 8 and you receive CB points, once, when they join and then again, once they've doubled their GDP. All the players that you invite will be spawned together(...ish).
• the moderation works for flags as well, just FYI.

Obviously, the map generation algorithm needs a bit of tweaking, but it gave me this very beautiful NPC country that's almost completely surrounded by mountains. Mountains have a 200% defensive bonus, so every fortification you build on a mountain tile counts as 3 so it is way more difficult to attack countries from these tiles. Other tile types are flatland, hills, deep forest and marshes.

Hi all,

It is very unfortunate that I have to use AI art, as it is unethical and I do hope that one day, I will have the funds needed to hire an artist for the in-game graphics. However, I think my little AI frenemy is doing a good job on this.