🎌 Doctrines, policies and national identity

Your Customize tab now lets you shape how your country actually runs, not just how it looks.

National doctrine

Pick one of eight grand strategies: Total Mobilization, Fortress Nation, Industrial Arsenal, Scientific State, Merchant Republic, People's Welfare, Shadow State or Iron Discipline. Each one moves real numbers every turn (GDP, research, building output, manpower, build costs, upkeep, attack, defence, happiness, corruption or spy reach), and each has a cost as well as a strength. You can change doctrine once every 6 turns.

National policies

Pick up to three of fourteen smaller levers, like Free Universities, Anti-Corruption Courts, Conscription Lottery, Public Housing, Export Drive or a Foreign Spy Network. They stack with your doctrine. You can change your set once every 3 turns.

National identity

Official name, motto, capital name, leader and title, currency, language, faith, anthem, national animal, holiday, sport, the name of your armed forces, a battle cry, uniform colours and your city names. All of it shows on your public nation page, which anyone can open from the nations list.

Make it look like yours

Upload a banner for the top of your pages, a coat of arms, a leader portrait, a war ensign and your national anthem (it plays on your public page). Pick a background texture, a title font for your nation's name and a second colour. You can also name your own armies, and the new names show everywhere your armies do.

📖 The Lore Bible (beta)

The whole canon history of Aridexia is now readable on the site under Lore Bible in the top menu. It's a working draft and will keep changing. You can read it page by page, jump between chapters, or download the PDF.

✚ The Healthcare Industry

Every nation can already dig mines and raise armies. Almost none of them can reliably keep a colony of twenty-five thousand settlers alive on a world with no name for what's making them sick. That's the gap this system closes.

healthcare_industry (0-100) is a new national stat, separate from Health Quality - Health Quality is how healthy your own people feel today; healthcare_industry is whether your country can actually manufacture the cure when something new gets loose, at home or a hundred million kilometers away.

How it grows

Almost entirely from Hospitals. A new buildable, ordered the normal way:

BUILD Hospital @ [grid]
# $3.5B, 3 turns to complete, no siting restriction, no per-nation cap
# counts toward your tiered unit-slot progress too

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.

What it buys you

At home: every full Hospital returns recovering troops from your reserve to active duty faster each turn.

Off-world. The real point: once you colonize another body, your colony's survival depends on it. Below 40 healthcare_industry, an established colony takes a real population toll every turn to disease your country can't yet treat, and its outright loss risk climbs. Lose one at that level and the report will say exactly why: an uncontained disease outbreak, not a vague "environmental failure." Above 40, strong healthcare instead gives colonies a modest survival edge. Plan your medical industry before you plan your colony ship.

🛰 Space & the APS System

Launching anything now takes a real Booster and a real Payload. Matched by role (probe/flyby, lander, outpost module, mining rig, colony ship), with a payload-capacity check against the booster you're flying. No more launching cargo out of nowhere.

What a probe or lander actually teaches you about a body now depends on the instruments it carries. Imaging suite, spectrometer, magnetometer, radar sounder, thermal IR, audio/seismic - graded against real hardware, not a flat knowledge tier. See the 🛰 Space tab for the graded intel reports once logged in.

Naked-eye visibility was quietly showing every nation several bodies before they'd earned them. Fixed. The sun is the only thing you start knowing about. Everything else takes real observatory investment.

⚙ Military & Infrastructure

Bridges are real now: river crossings gate movement, formation transport, and stationing orders, and a crossing only exists where a nation actually builds one. Capped at 3 per nation, sited on the exact crossing, removable with BRIDGE_DEMOLISH.

Hospitals. See the Healthcare Industry section above.

🎯 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 of them are actually official: fully producible, in the field. Every nation starts with 3 Tier 1 slots; the next tier opens once you have 4 non-military buildings standing, and growth from there scales the same way. Earned through your economy, not your army.

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 own nation page's new Tier Slots tab:

• Filling an empty slot is free. Pick any owned design of that tier and it's in.
• Replacing an occupied slot costs real money. Tier² × $5B, so a Tier 1 swap is $5B and a Tier 6 swap is $180B. Steep on purpose: this is a late-game decision for an economy that can actually absorb it, not a routine tune-up.
• Swapping never deletes anything. Units you've 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.

🛠 Autopilot

Stepping back from turn-by-turn micromanagement doesn't have to mean your country falls apart. Turn on Autopilot from your Customize tab and the engine watches food, water, and power the same way the normal deficit check does. The moment one is a REAL shortage that turn, it builds the single cheapest missing piece of that supply chain, at most one building per turn, only if the budget covers it.

That's the whole feature. It never builds ahead of a shortage, never touches research or military, and never grows your country. A nation on autopilot survives, it doesn't get ahead. Turn it off any time to take the wheel back.

⚖ Governance Reforms

Corruption, and how high your happiness can even go, have always been driven by four stats. Rule of law, bureaucratic efficiency, the shadow economy, and crime. That nothing in the game ever actually moved. That's fixed now, but not with a button you can just fund your way through.

Only one reform can run at a time. A real priority call, not a shopping list - and each has a genuine cost while it's running, on top of the money to start it:

• 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 entrenched 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 at 50 or higher to even start. Policing without the courts to back it up doesn't lower crime, it just becomes state predation with extra steps.

$8B to start, several turns to complete, no refund if you cancel early. The fix has to be real, and it has to be sequenced right.

📝 Submit 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 so it's really you.

Submissions go into a queue the GM reviews periodically; there's no notification when yours gets handled, so check your nation's unit list every so often after submitting.

🏳 Nation Identity

Every nation can upload a flag and edit its own founding lore from the Customize tab, once logged in. No GM step required for either.

🗺 The New Map & Joining

Season 4 runs on a new map: nine continents: Savorus, Candrasia, Blukenia, Korut, Korvandria, Durvus, Pan-Anestria, Numaria, and the Okoma Island Group. Carved into 39 claimable plots for this first release. Roughly 60% of the map stays unclaimed on purpose, so there's room to grow for a long time yet.

Every plot carries founding lore grounded in the Third Aridexian War and the postwar resettlement that followed, with real hooks into the wider world: Christonia, Luluke, the Anestrian successor states, the All-Finian remnant, DS-HP itself.

Picking a nation happens on the Join tab: a real clickable map, colored per plot, showing continent, size, river frontage, and lore. Never resources, so what you're choosing is a starting point, not a shopping list. Picking a plot doesn't create your nation outright; it files a request for GM approval, and one Discord account can only ever have one active request in at a time.