International Democratic Union

IDU Regional Anti-Zombie Policy 2021

What is Z-Day?

Z-Day is an annual Halloween minigame on NationStates where a zombie virus begins to spread across the world. Players have three options: cure the zombies, kill the zombies, or embrace the zombies.

The IDU has a cure missile only policy.

How To Play

When you first log in during the event, you’re given a special choice on your nation’s zombie page of what you want to do about the zombie problem. If you are in the IDU you must choose to research a cure.

If possible, log in as soon as possible after the event begins and choose this option, as even if you need to go offline immediately, this means your nation will start producing cure missiles sooner!

Once your nation has begun producing cure missiles (usually two hours after your nation began cure research), find other nations in the region who are not presently online and begin launching them at the other nations’ zombies! If you target nations which are also online, it will stop them from being able to launch their own cure missiles, so please pick targets who are offline.

Regional Rules

1. Use cure missiles only.
2. Do NOT target nations who are online and launching their own missiles, unless they ask you to.
3. Do NOT, under any circumstance, export zombie hordes to other nations.
4. Please do not use Tactical Zombie Elimination Squads (T.Z.E.S)* unless authorised to do so by a Regional Officer.

People who break these rules will be given three strikes; and on a third will be kicked from the region for the duration of Z-Day.

If you see someone breaking a rule, please send them one of the Z-Day Telegram templates: page=dispatch/id=1612568

*T.Z.E.S. kill the people who had been turned into zombies, rather than curing them, which means that the nation will have less survivors, and will incur dead. We do not want dead, so unless there’s some emergency - such as an imminent total collapse, or a horde/plague/other relevant collective noun of infiltrators is arround - where their use is authorised, please do not.

Hints & Tips

a) When you come online during the outbreak, and once you are able to start launching cure missiles, announce these facts in the RMB.

b)Do not target nations that have said they themselves are launching missiles, unless they post again specifically to request this help, because doing so would block them [temporarily] from continuing to launch.

c) Multiple nations targeting their curative efforts at a single nation isn’t actually a problem, unless it means that weaker countries are left to be destroyed at that time: In fact, if the nation being targeted is one that itself is very useful to the curative efforts & research, concentrating on it for long enough to make a significant difference might actually be a good idea.

d) If you see a nation that’s very close to collapse, post that fact in the RMB. If you join the effort to save a nation about which somebody else has made such a post then you could say so, if you have time, so that we don’t get too many people concentrating on the effort to save that one at the expense of others that might also be endangered.

e) If you see a nation that’s actually spreading the plague, post that fact in the RMB – and if they haven’t been involved in our discussion so far then send them a TG asking them to stop, and point them to this post’s explanation of regional policy.

f) If you see that a nation has been completely cleared, post that fact in the RMB… and copy-&-paste any existing list of already-cleared nations into those posts, too, so that we can see more easily where help is still needed.

g) However, check “cleared” nations now & then, especially after the game updates, in case the problem has resurfaced there.

h) When you have to drop out of the campaign, post that fact in the RMB so that other people don’t count on further help that isn’t coming…

i) Large nations are more effective at curing zombies in other large nations than smaller nations are, and large nations targeting smaller ones (or ones with only a few zombies left) may find their efforts having relatively small effects, so if there are enough people helping then it might be a good idea to concentrate on nations of about your own size first unless somebody else is calling desperately for help. Remember, though, that small nations might be at greater risk of quick collapse, and should require less clearing than larger ones, so if they’re willing to help in the campaign once cleared then giving them priority might be useful.

Thanks to Bears Armed for the above tips in the 2016 guide page=dispatch/id=714079

j) Alternative strategy to i): I (Lauchenoiria) have found that the higher the proportion of zombies in a nation, the more zombies it generates. Therefore I’d recommend, instead of clearing one nation at a time, ensuring each nation gets a few missiles every hour to reduce the proportion, rather than the raw number, to slow down the zombie reproduction rate. You can see which nations have the most zombies here: page=list_nations/region=international_democratic_union?censusid=82 and which have the highest proportion of zombies here: page=list_nations/region=international_democratic_union?censusid=84

Past Tricks & What To Do About Them

In past years, the game has thrown a few curveballs to make the event harder. Here are some examples of recent tricks, and how best to handle them.

2021: deactivating the Zombie Border Control towards the end of the event. This can only be resolved by the region's Zombie Controller, the LIDUN president, or someone with founder access.

2020: resetting everyone’s choice of how to handle the zombie outbreak. Resolve this by going back and selecting ‘cure’ across all your puppets again.

2019(?): when someone exported a zombie horde to a nation, that nation began producing zombie hordes. If this happens to you, quickly select “cure” again. If it’s someone else, TG them, ping them on discord, send them a carrier pigeon, to get them to select “cure”.

2018(?): zombie virus killed people after an amount of time. It was noticed that people died in nations that hadn’t been hit by cure missiles in a while, so ensuring every nation got at least one missile every 2 hours would reduce the likelihood of deaths.