ARIDEXIA

The three things your people need every turn

Every turn your population consumes food, water and electricity. Falling short costs happiness immediately, and happiness only recovers once all three are met.

The single most common mistake: building Farms and expecting food. A Farm makes grain. Without a Food Processing Plant the grain just piles up while your people starve. The same trap catches Water Purification Plants with no Extraction Plant feeding them.

Happiness and your living-standards ceiling

Once your people are fed, watered and powered, happiness climbs each turn toward a ceiling set by how well you govern. It never rises above that ceiling, so pouring money into the army while healthcare rots will stall you.

Economic systems

Separate from your government type. This decides how the state deals with its own industry.

The state always buys above the reference price and sells below it, so buying then selling back always loses money. Switching systems costs unrest and stalls industry for a turn.

Buildings and what they produce

Battalions, not a single number

Your active-duty personnel are organised into real battalions, each with its own position, supply level, morale and orders. A battalion is raised with FORM_RAISE, drawing from your unassigned manpower pool -- it costs money and materiel, and it does not increase how many soldiers you have, only how many of them are organised and ready to fight.

Supply

A battalion within 12 grids of one of your supply depots (or an ally's, if they have granted you basing rights) ends the turn fully resupplied. Push further than that and it starts running down: below 55% it is strained and starts losing morale, below 25% it is critical, and at 0% it starts bleeding men every turn until it either falls back into range or is destroyed. Roughly four turns out of supply is enough to break a battalion.

Moving your army

Terrain slows everyone down, and armour suffers worse than infantry does in swamp, jungle and mountains. Move a single battalion with FORM_MOVE, or issue one order to an entire field army at once with ARMY_MOVE -- large armies are automatically grouped into field armies of about 60 battalions each specifically so a nation like PUSDR is not forced to issue two thousand individual orders every turn.

Crossing water

Moving between landmasses needs sealift. Every coastal nation has a small free landing craft pool (deliberately slow, 3 grids/turn) -- for a real invasion, designate a unit in your unit database as a troop transport (mark it in its description, or give it a troop_lift stat) and it will carry more and move faster once you have enough of them. Lift is spent per turn, so a large amphibious operation has to be staged over several turns rather than moved all at once.

Keeping a large army manageable

Real combat and heavy losses leave behind understrength battalions. Use FORM_CONSOLIDATE to fold same-type battalions standing on the same grid back into full-strength units, FORM_SPLIT to detach part of a battalion, and FORM_DISBAND to return men to the manpower pool entirely. None of this changes how many soldiers you have -- it only changes how they are organised.

Submitting a turn

Open your nation from the home page, enter your passphrase, then either use the order builder in your briefing or paste raw JSON under Restricted features. Orders are stored the moment you submit and replace anything you sent earlier that turn.

Turns resolve automatically every evening. Anything you have not submitted by then simply does not happen, so send something even if it is small.