N-Day 15: September 2026
by Heliseum (@Heliseum)
Last week on Saturday, September 26th, NationStates celebrated International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons with a 24-hour nuclear war simulation: N-Day. During N-Day, nations band together in factions, produce nukes and shields, and compete to land the most strikes on opposing factions while taking on the least amount of radiation from others striking you.
TSP once again joined up with the Coalition of Radiant Atlantic Lobsters, or CORAL, a faction consisting of Starlight and Horizon, the South Pacific, 10000 Islands, the Rejected Realms, The Region That Has No Big Banks, RGBN, and Lazarus. A full list of regional representatives and commanders can be found on CORAL’s main dispatch.
Allegiances were forged early in the event and carried lately unharmed to the end. The two largest factions by number of nations, Housemen of the Apocalypse (HOTA) and Supreme Powers Eviscerating All Rivals (SPEAR), had worked closely on previous N-Days, and so it shocked no one to see them work together on this event as well. To combat them, CORAL teamed up with Anime Nations Against Liberals (ANAL), Starlight Brigade and Canopy.
Out the gate, HOTA and CORAL began pummeling each other hard. The early leaderboard was chaotic, as a faction would pull ahead with a big strike, then get pulled back when the enemy retaliated. The factions settled into their hourly cycle of producing nukes, targeting and firing.
One consistent theme – almost to the point of becoming a meme – was the technical difficulties that came with the site struggling to handle N-Day. At best, NationStates would become extremely slow to load new pages whenever a major faction launched a volley. At worst, the site would begin to sprout technical error pages every couple of seconds or appear to go down entirely. The server’s unreliability across N-Day did have a tactical effect, as some of the largest coordinated attacks were simultaneously hard to get off the ground and hard to effectively deploy shields against.
Over the late-night hours, CORAL’s fortune began to turn. Key players were lost to sleep and other responsibilities, while many active players had their puppets specifically targeted by HOTA to take them out of the game. The numbers, already in HOTA and SPEAR’s favor from the outset, began to slip even more. By the final quarter, it became clear that CORAL was not going to be able to win, but we had done an incredibly large amount of damage.
In the end, it was SPEAR that technically took home the victory. HOTA had been identified as the bigger threat of that partnership, and thus had been the target of the overwhelming majority of the damage. The amount of radiation put on HOTA by CORAL and its allies pulled them down the leaderboard. CORAL took the brunt of HOTA and SPEAR’s attacks, and thus ended at 7th. While it’s not the victory we hoped for, we are nevertheless proud to have hung on in the top 10 despite how much things had turned against us. What was unusual about the rankings of this event was that no major faction ended up with a negative score.
CORAL plans to be back in 6 months, and command is already working on planning what to do better next time. We encourage all members of the Coalition to get involved with N-Day when it comes around again, be it with one nation or a thousand.