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.

Need	Per million people, per day	Where it comes from
Food	10	Farm → grain, Ranch → livestock, then a Food Processing Plant turns both into food
Water	15	Water Extraction Plant → water_raw, then a Water Purification Plant makes it drinkable
Electricity	20	Coal / Gas / Nuclear plants, Hydroelectric Dams, Solar and Wind Farms

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.

The opposite mistake is just as real, and just as silent: building far more extraction than you have conversion capacity for. A Water Extraction Plant produces 600 water_raw per turn; a Water Purification Plant only consumes 200 water_raw per turn to make its 540 water. That means one Purification Plant can only keep up with a third of one Extraction Plant's output. Two Extraction Plants feeding a single Purification Plant will pile up roughly 400+ water_raw of dead weight every single turn, forever, with no cap and no spoilage. It isn't dangerous and it isn't wasted potential decaying away. It just sits there, inert, until you build enough purification to actually use it. Same shape of imbalance hits Farms fed into too few Food Processing Plants (one Farm's 300 grain/turn vastly outpaces the 60 grain/turn one Processing Plant consumes) and Crude Oil Wells outpacing Oil Refineries. Check the Resources tab on your own briefing for your real production-vs-consumption numbers rather than guessing from a 1-for-1 build order. The raw and processed sides of these chains are almost never actually matched 1:1.

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.

Raises the ceiling	Lowers it
Healthcare, education, rule of law, housing districts, worker protections	Crime, unemployment, civilian hardship, corruption

Economic systems

Separate from your government type (set that under 🎌 Customize in your own briefing -- Republic, Federation, Empire, and a few others; purely descriptive, no mechanical effect). This decides how the state deals with its own industry.

System	What it means
Market	private firms; dear materials, but purchases put money in wages
Mixed	part private, part state; muted in both directions
Command	state-owned industry; cheap requisition, no wage effect, quiet resentment

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.

Research focus

RESEARCH_FOCUS_SET picks Military (+20% RP toward military research, -20% civilian), Civilian (the reverse), or Mixed (no modifier either way). No unrest cost, no disruption. Unlike your economic system, this is a clean switch.

War economy footing

WAR_ECONOMY_SET picks Off, Partial, Full, or Total. Higher footings speed up crew training and shift several other economic formulas toward military output -- real tradeoffs, already built into those formulas, not a separate penalty this order adds on top.

Alliances

Official alliances (the "bloc" field) are capped at 4 members, and a nation can only belong to one alliance at a time. ALLIANCE_CREATE (name) founds a brand-new one with you as its first member. Refused if you're already in one, or if that name is already taken (join it instead). ALLIANCE_JOIN (name) joins an alliance that already has at least one member. Refused if you're already in a different alliance, the name doesn't exist yet, or it's already full. ALLIANCE_LEAVE gives 2 turns' formal notice: you remain a full member. Still counted against the 4-member cap, still get every bonus below. For the whole notice period, so you can't dodge an incoming attack by "leaving" the instant before contact.

Being allied pays for itself: up to +25% industrial output (scales with your allies' combined industry), 2x trade route speed with allies, faster and safer space missions, a real reduction to your corruption target (up to -9, scaling with ally count. See the "Alliance stability" line on your Governance panel), and Homeland Defense. Infantry defending on their own territory, or an ally's, fight at ×1.12 combat power. Attackers never get this bonus, on any territory, including their own.

Where your treasury actually moves

Every turn your budget shifts three ways: your daily balance (revenue minus expenditure) adds up over the whole turn, a Financial Center pays out a share of your GDP if you have one, and corruption quietly takes a cut: of your current treasury, not your income. That last part matters: it barely touches a nation that's short on cash, but it hits a large treasury hard, every single turn. A big stockpile of money sitting around isn't safe just because it isn't being spent. Corruption doesn't care how it got there. A Financial Center is the real way to out-earn that drain instead of just losing the race to it.

Buildings, prices and what they produce

Every building costs money and turns to build. There's no separate up-front materials cost, unlike units. Some buildings then need a steady resource input every turn just to operate (a Steel Mill needs iron and coal flowing in, not just to be built); miss that input and the building idles rather than producing. Every standing building also costs a small upkeep in money each turn regardless of whether it's actually running, so idle buildings aren't free. Worth knowing: an extraction building is drawing on a real deposit under that grid, not manufacturing its output from nothing. It won't necessarily produce forever.

Building	Cost & build time	Output
Aircraft Plant	12.00B 4 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Bridge	2.50B 3 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Civilian Airport	4.50B 3 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Coal Mine	1.00B 2 turns to build	produces 50 coal/day
Coal Power Plant	3.00B 4 turns to build	produces 300 electricity/day consumes 20 coal/day to run
Commercial Port	4.00B 3 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Copper Mine	1.50B 2 turns to build	produces 30 copper/day
Crude Oil Well	2.50B 3 turns to build	produces 30 crude oil/day
Deep Space Observatory	8.00B 3 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Farm	500.0M 1 turn to build	produces 300 grain/day
Financial Center	2.50B 2 turns to build	+3% GDP growth
Food Processing Plant	2.00B 3 turns to build	produces 240 food/day consumes 60 grain, 20 livestock/day to run
Gas Power Plant	3.50B 4 turns to build	produces 360 electricity/day consumes 15 gas/day to run
Gas Processing Plant	6.00B 4 turns to build	produces 20 gas/day consumes 25 unrefined gas/day to run
Gas Well	2.00B 3 turns to build	produces 25 unrefined gas/day
Gold Mine	2.00B 3 turns to build	produces 5 gold/day
Hospital	3.50B 3 turns to build	+9 health quality contribution
Housing District	3.00B 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Hydroelectric Dam	8.00B 6 turns to build	produces 450 electricity/day
Iron Mine	1.00B 2 turns to build	produces 50 iron/day
Laboratory	5.00B 2 turns to build	+4 research points/day
Lead Mine	1.00B 2 turns to build	produces 40 lead/day
Lithium Mine	2.00B 3 turns to build	produces 15 lithium/day
Logistics Hub	1.00B 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Lumber Mill	600.0M 2 turns to build	produces 80 timber, 3 rubber/day
Military Airbase	6.00B 4 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Military Fort	1.50B 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Mineral Mine	1.50B 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Missile Defense Complex	18.00B 5 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Naval Base	8.00B 4 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Naval Shipyard	15.00B 5 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Nuclear Power Plant	15.00B 10 turns to build	produces 1500 electricity/day consumes 1 uranium/day to run
Oil Refinery	8.00B 4 turns to build	produces 15 oil/day consumes 20 crude oil/day to run
Platinum Mine	3.00B 4 turns to build	produces 3 platinum/day
Railroad	2.00B 4 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Ranch	750.0M 2 turns to build	produces 150 livestock/day
REE Mine	3.00B 3 turns to build	produces 10 ree/day
Road	800.0M 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Rocket Launch Site	12.00B 5 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Rubber Plantation	1.50B 3 turns to build	produces 30 rubber/day
Semiconductor Fab	25.00B 6 turns to build	produces 5 semiconductors/day consumes 10 copper, 5 ree, 3 lithium/day to run
Solar Farm	1.50B 3 turns to build	produces 150 electricity/day
Steel Mill	10.00B 4 turns to build	produces 40 steel/day consumes 75 iron, 40 coal/day to run
Strategic AI Directorate	50.00B 10 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Strategic Command Center	10.00B 4 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Supply Depot	500.0M 2 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Uranium Enrichment Facility	30.00B 8 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Uranium Mine	4.00B 4 turns to build	produces 2 uranium/day
Vehicle Mobilization Plant	5.00B 3 turns to build	no direct resource output. Strategic/civil infrastructure
Water Extraction Plant	1.20B 2 turns to build	produces 600 water raw/day
Water Purification Plant	2.00B 2 turns to build	produces 540 water/day consumes 200 water raw/day to run
Wind Farm	1.00B 3 turns to build	produces 120 electricity/day
Wire Mill	2.00B 2 turns to build	produces 25 wire/day consumes 15 copper/day to run

A grid that fills up with real buildings reads as a settlement wherever it's actually shown. A town at 1 building, a real city at 2, a major city once it hits the 4-building limit for a single grid. Your capital always shows as its own distinct fortified city regardless of how built up it is. See your own settlements under My Territory in your own briefing; a foreign one only shows up if your recon actually reaches that exact grid, same as any other building. Losing a real settlement (especially your capital) to an enemy hits happiness and unrest much harder than losing empty ground.

Biome & Terrain

What biome actually touches

Every grid has a biome, and it quietly shapes three separate things: how much a building on it produces, the odds of that turn's weather, and the attack/defence math in a fight there. It does not touch how fast anything moves. See the note at the end of this section.

Building output, by biome

Most buildings use one flat output multiplier for whatever biome they're sited on. A Farm on plains (×1.2) massively outproduces the same Farm on arctic ground (×0.5). Same building, same cost, very different return, which is exactly why where you build matters.

Biome	Output multiplier
Plains	×1.2. The best all-round biome
Coastal	×1.0
Urban	×0.9
Forest	×0.8
Jungle / Desert	×0.7 each
Taiga	×0.65
Mountain / Swamp	×0.6 each
Tundra	×0.55
Arctic	×0.5. The worst ground on Aridexia itself

Off-world colonies sit on a completely different biome set:

APS biome	Output multiplier
Shallow Sea	×1.0. The best ground off-world
Metallic Plain	×0.9
Crystal Plateau	×0.8
Vent Field	×0.7
Storm Ocean	×0.6
Regolith	×0.5
Ice Shell / Magma Flat	×0.4 each
Cryovolcanic	×0.3
Ring Debris	×0.2
Radiation Belt	×0. Nothing produces here at all

Buildings that play by their own rules

Five buildings ignore the general table above entirely:

Building	Rule
Lumber Mill	Forest ×1.0, Jungle ×0.9, Swamp ×0.4, Tundra ×0.2, Arctic ×0.1: zero everywhere else. No fallback: site it on the wrong biome and it produces nothing, permanently, until moved.
Rubber Plantation	Jungle ×1.0, Swamp ×0.6, Forest ×0.3: zero everywhere else, same hard restriction.
Farm	Plains ×1.2, Coastal ×0.9, Jungle ×0.7, Forest ×0.5, Swamp ×0.3, Mountain ×0.2, Tundra ×0.15, Desert ×0.1. Gets worse off its best ground, never zero.
Solar Farm	Desert ×1.3 (the single best output multiplier in the game), Coastal ×1.1, Plains ×1.0, Mountain / Swamp ×0.8, Forest ×0.7, Jungle / Tundra ×0.5, Arctic ×0.4. Never zero.
Water Extraction Plant	Ignores biome entirely on a river grid. Flat ×1.8 there instead. Off a river it falls back to the grid's ordinary biome multiplier.

Lumber Mill and Rubber Plantation are the real trap in this whole system: build one on the wrong biome and it isn't just underperforming, it's producing nothing.

Weather odds, by biome

Biome sets the odds for that turn's weather roll, not a fixed forecast. A desert grid draws from a hot, dry weather table; a coastal or swamp grid draws from a storm-prone one. Weather then shifts detection and the attack/defence numbers below for anyone fighting on that grid that turn, on top of whatever the terrain itself is already doing.

Terrain in combat

This is the one real, numeric combat effect terrain has, and it applies equally to every soldier committed on that side. Infantry and armour together, not one worse than the other:

Terrain	Attacker	Defender
Plains	×1.08 / ×0.92. The easiest ground to attack across
Grassland	×1.06 / ×0.94
Desert	×1.05 / ×0.95
Coastal	×1.00 / ×1.02
Tundra	×0.92 / ×1.06
Forest	×0.88 / ×1.14
Taiga	×0.86 / ×1.16
Jungle	×0.80 / ×1.22
Swamp	×0.78 / ×1.20
Urban	×0.72 / ×1.34
Mountain	×0.70 / ×1.38. The hardest ground to attack across

For a straight infantry engagement these numbers feed the combat math directly. For a battle involving vehicles or other hardware, the same terrain and weather numbers are handed to the AI umpire as inputs alongside equipment, supply and morale, not applied as a strict formula. The umpire is explicitly told armour is not everything, and that bad ground, bad weather or a broken supply line can blunt a materially stronger attacker. Either way: defenders dug into mountain, urban or swamp terrain hold a real, meaningful edge, and open plains or desert is the easiest ground there is to attack across.

What biome does not affect

Movement speed is completely untouched by terrain. A battalion crosses swamp, mountain or tundra at exactly the same rate it crosses open plains. The only place terrain enters the picture is the attack/defence modifier above, applied once a fight actually happens, never on the march there.

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.

Type	Stats
Infantry Battalion	800 men · moves 2/turn · attack ×1 / defence ×1.15 · needs 8 supply/turn · sealift cost 1 · 9.0M, 2 steel to raise
Motorised Battalion	750 men · moves 4/turn · attack ×1.1 / defence ×1 · needs 12 supply/turn · sealift cost 1.5 · 24.0M, 8 steel, 1 rubber to raise
Mechanised Battalion	700 men · moves 5/turn · attack ×1.3 / defence ×1.2 · needs 16 supply/turn · sealift cost 2.4 · 75.0M, 26 steel, 5 copper, 2 rubber to raise
Armoured Battalion	550 men · moves 5/turn · attack ×1.6 / defence ×1.25 · needs 22 supply/turn · sealift cost 3.6 · 160.0M, 55 steel, 10 copper, 3 rubber to raise
Artillery Battalion	500 men · moves 2/turn · attack ×1.45 / defence ×0.8 · needs 19 supply/turn · sealift cost 2.2 · 60.0M, 22 steel, 4 copper to raise
Airborne Battalion	650 men · moves 3/turn · attack ×1.2 / defence ×0.95 · needs 11 supply/turn · sealift cost 0.8 · 32.0M, 5 steel to raise
Marine Battalion	700 men · moves 3/turn · attack ×1.25 / defence ×1.05 · needs 13 supply/turn · sealift cost 1.1 · 40.0M, 9 steel to raise
Engineer Battalion	600 men · moves 2/turn · attack ×0.7 / defence ×1.2 · needs 10 supply/turn · sealift cost 1.4 · 26.0M, 12 steel to raise
Garrison Regiment	1200 men · moves 1/turn · attack ×0.55 / defence ×1.35 · needs 5 supply/turn · sealift cost 1.8 · 7.0M, 1 steel to raise

Claiming territory

Land nobody owns can be claimed outright with CLAIM_LAND. No attack, no judge, just a grid that's either touching your existing border or has a formation of yours standing on or near it. It's capped at 50 grids per nation per turn; past that, the rest are simply refused (not queued), so resubmit them next turn if you still want them.

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. Between 12 and 24 grids it gets a partial top-up and holds up reasonably well. Past 24 grids with nothing in reach at all, it isn't just failing to resupply. It's bleeding supply hard, every turn, on top of what it already burns. 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. A battalion with real depot coverage can hold out indefinitely; one with none can burn through most of a full supply bar in a single turn. Newly claimed territory doesn't come with a supply line attached, if you want to actually hold ground out there, build something that counts as a depot on or near it before you plan on staying.

Roads and Railroads

BUILD a Road or Railroad between two grids you already own (give both a "where" and a "route ends at" grid. This connects ground you hold, it does not claim new land) and your supply network effectively reaches further along that line once it's finished: a railroad closes most of the gap, a road narrows it. Cost scales with how long the route actually is, so a short domestic link is cheap and a line all the way to a distant frontier is a real investment. Like a bridge, a road or railroad is a real target. An enemy at war with you and within strike range of any grid it touches can cut it with RAIL_DEMOLISH, the same way BRIDGE_DEMOLISH works. See your own network laid out on a real map under the My Territory tab in your own briefing. Solid once finished, dashed while still under construction. Reconnaissance on someone else's territory shows their buildings and cities grid by grid, but not their roads/railroads -- that needs two grids drawn together, which a foreign recon tile doesn't do.

Moving your army

Terrain does not slow movement. A battalion crosses swamp, mountain or tundra at exactly the same speed as open plains. The only place terrain touches your army is in combat itself; see Biome & Terrain below for the real numbers. 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 Republic of Altyr 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 (slow on purpose, 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.

Biological & chemical warfare

This is a real, working system almost nobody has actually used. It does not touch territory or buildings at all. It is purely a weapon against a population: happiness, unrest, mortality and the workforce. Four strains exist, each a genuine tradeoff between how hard it hits, how far it spreads, and how fast someone can cure it:

Strain	Severity	Spread rate	Lethality	Cure cost (RP)	Character
Bacterial	14	Moderate	0.6x	2,600	Treatable once identified. Fast to cure, hard to keep down in the meantime.
Viral	22	Highest	1.0x	5,200	Spreads hardest and costs the most to cure. The default nightmare scenario.
Chemical	26	Lowest	1.4x	1,800	Brutal where it lands, poor at travelling. A localised horror, cheapest to cure.
Neurotoxin	30	Low-moderate	1.7x	3,400	The most severe strain, but burns out fastest of the severe ones.

You cannot just declare an attack with this. BIO_DEPLOY (fields: target, strain, optional potency 0.5-2) is REFUSED unless you already own a unit design with status:"production" that reads as an actual biological or chemical weapon (its name, description, or stats need to actually describe one. Submit it through Submit a Unit like any other design, and it has to finish research first). There is no generic "release bioweapon" button independent of owning the weapon itself.

Once released, you do not control where it goes next. It spreads on its own every turn along the same channels the rest of the sim already tracks. A shared land border is the strongest route, an active trade route a weaker one. Completely ignoring alliances or who's at war with whom. That includes back into your own neighbours and trading partners. There is no targeting beyond choosing where it starts.

While a population is actively infected, every turn it loses happiness, gains unrest and civilian hardship, takes a mortality hit scaled by the strain's lethality, and its workforce degrades (sick workers do not show up). None of this touches infrastructure or territory. It is purely about making a country miserable and expensive to run until it is cured.

Curing it takes real Laboratories: bioCureRate scales with your lab count and education, so a nation with zero Laboratories cannot cure anything on its own and is entirely dependent on someone else solving it first. Once a nation cures itself, it stops transmitting and becomes immune to reinfection from that strain, and its allies and active trade partners get a real discount toward their own cure (12% of the strain's full cure cost per turn, just for being connected to somebody who beat it), so alliances and trade really help here, not just militarily. Left completely unfought, a strain still decays a little each turn and eventually burns itself out on its own. Slowly enough that ignoring it is never the cheap option.

The retaliation is real and immediate, separate from the disease itself: using one instantly costs you 45 points of relations with the target and 12 points with every other nation in the world, the moment it's deployed. Before anyone even knows if it worked. This is a weapon a player is meant to regret using about four turns later, not something to reach for lightly.

Healthcare Industry vs. Health Quality

Health Quality is how healthy your own people feel today. healthcare_industry (0-100) is a separate national stat measuring whether your country can actually manufacture medicine when something new gets loose, at home or off-world.

It grows almost entirely from Hospitals ($3.5B, 3 turns to build, no siting restriction or per-nation cap; each one also counts toward tiered-slot production progress). Health spending gives a smaller secondary boost. War, corruption above 60 and unrest above 60 all pull it back down. There's no shortcut, it has to be built.

At home, every full Hospital returns recovering troops from reserve to active duty faster each turn. Off-world it matters more: below 40 healthcare_industry an established colony takes a real population toll every turn to disease it can't yet treat, with a higher outright loss risk on top; above 40, strong healthcare instead gives colonies a modest survival edge. Plan your medical industry before you plan your colony ship.

Autopilot

Autopilot is on for every new nation. On turns you send orders, it only steps in to fix a food, water or power shortage, a few buildings at most and only if you can afford them. On a day you miss, it plays a full turn for you: it fixes shortages, keeps research going, organizes new soldiers, signs treaties that cost you nothing, and spends spare money on a national project.

It never gives away land or money for you. You can turn it off on the Customize tab if you'd rather nothing happens without your say.

Tiered Unit Slots

You can research and own as many designs at every tier as you want. That part's free. What's limited is how many are actually official: producible in the field. Every nation starts with 3 Tier 1 slots; higher tiers open as your economy grows.

A design has to occupy one of your slots before you can even start researching it, and stays gated the same way for production afterward. Manage this from your nation page's Tier Slots tab:

Action	Cost
Filling an empty slot	Free. Pick any owned design of that tier and it's in.
Replacing an occupied slot	Real money. Tier² × $5B, so a Tier 1 swap is $5B and a Tier 6 swap is $180B. Steep on purpose: a late-game decision, not a routine tune-up.

Swapping never deletes anything. Units already built of the design you swap out stay exactly as they are, and research already running on it keeps running. The swap only changes what you can newly research or produce going forward.

Lowering corruption. Every real lever

Corruption isn't a number you set. Every turn it drifts 12% of the way toward a target computed fresh from your actual stats, so a fix takes a few turns to show up, not one. There are five real levers, and money alone moves none of them:

Lever	Effect on your corruption target
Rule of law ↑	every point above 60 pulls the target down (×0.35/point): Judicial Reform, below, is the only way to raise it
Bureaucratic efficiency ↑	every point above 55 pulls the target down (×0.30/point): Civil Service Reform raises it
Shadow economy ↓	every point above 20 pushes the target up (×0.25/point): Tax & Transparency Reform lowers it
Crime. Indirect	crime itself doesn't feed the formula directly, but Policing Reform needs rule of law ≥50 first, so it's downstream of the same fix
War economy footing ↓	Off adds nothing; Partial +5, Full +10, Total +16 to your target. Stand down if you don't need it
Military share of population ↓	active_mil above ~0.6% of population adds ×10/point over that line. An oversized standing army for your population size is read as corruption risk
Join (and stay in) an official alliance	up to −9, scaling with ally count. See Alliances

The corruption losses line on your ledger (a cut of your current treasury, not your income. See Where your treasury actually moves) shrinks two ways at once when you lower corruption: a smaller percentage, AND every turn you're not sitting on a huge un-spent pile in the first place.

Governance Reforms

Reforms are the only way to actually move rule of law, bureaucratic efficiency, the shadow economy, or crime. You can't just pay your way through it: only one reform can run at a time, each costs $8B to start, takes several turns to complete, and has a genuine side effect while it's running. No refund if you cancel early.

Reform	Effect on completion	While it's running
Judicial Reform	+20 rule of law	briefly slows your own bureaucracy while the courts bed in
Civil Service Reform	+20 bureaucratic efficiency	briefly raises unrest as patronage networks get cut out
Tax & Transparency Reform	−20 shadow economy	briefly dents happiness as the informal economy people relied on gets squeezed
Policing Reform	−20 crime	requires rule of law ≥50 to even start. Policing without courts to back it up doesn't lower crime, it just becomes state predation with extra steps

Inflation

Inflation drifts each turn (12% of the way) toward a target driven by real factors -- it's not GM-set. A weak currency, high corruption, a heavy shadow economy, and an aggressive war economy footing all push the target up.

Driver	Effect on target
Weak currency (below 50)	+0.12/point below 50
Corruption (above 40)	+0.08/point above 40
Shadow economy (above 20)	+0.05/point above 20
War economy footing	Off adds nothing; Partial +2, Full +5, Total +9

Above 5% inflation, every BUILD order costs more (+2%/point of inflation above 5, on top of the usual repeated-building escalation). Above 15% it starts eating into your happiness ceiling, and above 25% that penalty gets steeper still. Check your nation's Governance panel for the itemized breakdown of exactly what's driving your current number.

Public debt

Order ISSUE_DEBT to borrow: the amount lands in your budget immediately, but it's not free money. It adds a flat ~12%/year daily interest charge (simple, not compounding) to your debt_service_day, deducted automatically from your budget every single turn from then on. It never pays itself off; the principal just sits there generating interest until you choose to run a surplus and pay it down yourself (there's no dedicated paydown order. The debt figure is a running total the GM can adjust for a genuine repayment). You'll be refused if your total public debt would exceed 150% of your GDP. No lender extends further than that.

Submitting a unit idea

Got a unit idea but don't want to fill out a full stat sheet? Submit a Unit Idea takes plain language. Describe it however you want. One submission per nation per day, gated by your nation's own login passphrase.

Submissions land in a GM review queue. Getting marked "approved into the pool" is not the same as being added to the live unit database. Balancing and tiering is a deliberate separate pass the GM does across the whole pool, not automatic. There's no notification when yours gets handled, so check your nation's unit list every so often after submitting.

Bridges & river crossings

River crossings gate movement, formation transport and stationing orders. A crossing only exists where a nation actually builds one. Order BUILD Bridge @ [grid] on the river grid you want to cross; each nation can have up to 3 standing at once. Remove one with BRIDGE_DEMOLISH if you need the slot back or want to deny a crossing to someone else.

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 night at 7:30 PM Eastern. Anything you haven't submitted by then simply does not happen, so send something even if it's small.