Roleplay Nations 2 is playable.
The next Roleplay Nations was built from scratch as a proper browser-based nation simulator. It keeps the diplomacy, rivalry, and nation-building of the original, and puts them on a shared hex map where one game hour passes every real hour. Your nation produces, trades, votes and argues whether or not you are watching.
Teaser
Twenty seconds of the map, the newspaper and the systems underneath.
A Living World
Claim hexes on one shared map, out to 250. Terrain decides what the ground will take, and roads, rails and power lines decide whether it works at all. Your land splits into provinces, each with its own governor and focus.
Deeper Government
Pick from sixteen government types and take your policies to a hundred-seat parliament that can refuse them. Whip the vote, buy a holdout, or decree past the chamber. Five strata on the Street keep score, and they strike.
Multiplayer History
Issue your own currency and let rivals adopt it. Run standing trade contracts, tariffs and smugglers. Send spies. Contest the sky before the ground. The newspaper prints all of it, and everyone reads the same pages.
The playtest is running now. Join the waitlist with Discord and we'll message you when a seat opens, or sign in and play if you already have one.
Why is Roleplay Nations shutting down?
I haven't been actively developing new features for a while. The player base has shrunk, I stopped working on the project regularly, and I've decided not to renew the VPS subscription when it expires in January 2027. That date marks six full years since the project first started back in 2020.
Until then, the bot will stay online and playable, though admittedly more "half-playable" than anything.
About me and this project
I want to be upfront: I am not a professional developer. I'm a hobbyist. I don't have a computer science degree, I don't work in software, and when I started this project I barely knew what I was doing. Roleplay Nations is one of my first big projects. I started it way back in 2020 when I was just learning Python, and I've been chipping away at it on and off ever since. I've learned a lot of things along the way, but a lot of the code reflects the fact that I was learning as I went.
The database layer alone has gone through three complete rewrites. The bot originally stored everything in pure JSON files, then I migrated to SQLite, and eventually moved to PostgreSQL. Each migration was messy and incomplete in its own way. That's six years of a hobbyist learning databases in real time.
What's next?
Roleplay Nations 2 is playable now, a proper browser-based nation simulator, built from scratch and much more sophisticated than what a Discord bot can offer. I built it with a friend from college, with a living map and deeper systems for politics, economics, diplomacy, and conflict. It is in playtest, so it is still changing week to week.
This domain will become the home of the next game.
The state of Discord nation-RP games
When I started Roleplay Nations in 2020, Discord-based nation simulation games were actually a thing. There were several active bots, communities were engaged, and the format worked because people were already on Discord all day. It was a natural fit. You'd run commands in a channel, manage your nation between classes or during downtime, and the social aspect of alliances and wars happened organically in the same servers.
That scene has largely died. Most of the Discord nation-RP bots from that era are either dead or barely maintained. The genre has shifted toward browser-based simulators, proper web apps with UIs, maps, real-time updates, things that a Discord bot can't really compete with.
On top of that, AI tooling has let people build these kinds of games much faster than I ever could working alone. People are spinning up full-stack nation simulators with proper frontends in weeks, stuff that took me years to approximate in a Discord bot. The landscape moved on, and Discord nation-RP bots are a niche of a niche now.
I still think there's something to the format, the immediacy of running a command and seeing your nation change, the trash talk in alliance channels, the drama of a surprise war declaration at 2am. But as a platform for this kind of game, Discord has its limits, and the audience has mostly moved elsewhere.
Open Source
The full source code is now public on GitHub. If anyone wants to run their own version of Roleplay Nations, fork it, modify it, or learn from it (or learn what not to do). It's all there. Fair warning: the code quality is rough. This was one of my first big projects and it shows.
Built with discord.py 2.5.2 (slash commands), PostgreSQL, and Python 3.10+. Over 150 slash commands across 14 cogs.
What was Roleplay Nations?
A Discord bot for running a nation simulation/roleplay game. Players could create and manage virtual nations, setting governments, building infrastructure, managing economies, trading resources, waging wars, running espionage, managing airlines, forming alliances, and more.
Nation Building
Create a nation with custom name, flag, leader, capital, motto, religion. Choose from 16 government types and set economic & social policies.
Diplomacy & Alliances
Form alliances with shared vaults and taxes, negotiate treaties, send diplomatic proposals, manage embargoes and rivalries.
Economy & Trade
22 resource types, 20+ production buildings, player-driven market, Central International Bank with dynamic pricing and loans.
Military & War
Train tanks, soldiers, planes, ships, missiles. Build military factories with 5 upgrade levels. Declare wars, fight ground/naval/air/missile battles.
Espionage
Create spy agencies, train agents, research 13 different spy traits. Run intel gathering, sabotage, and infrastructure attack missions.
Airlines & More
Run airlines, build tourism infrastructure, manage civil services, set tax rates, achieve milestones, and compete on leaderboards.