1.1: Money, and Who Answers For It

1.0 put the world on the board. 1.1 puts a counterparty on the other side of your money. Savings used to sit at the central bank, where they could not be lost; now they sit in a bank someone runs, and that bank can fail. An index fund now votes the shares it holds. A large merger crosses a minister's desk. A union contract needs the members' votes, not just the president's signature. Most of what was a number in 1.0 is now another player's decision.

Charter a bank

Own a financial sector and you can charter a bank. Post the capital, take deposits from households and from other players, lend part of them out, and set your deposit and lending rates. The gap between what you pay savers and what you charge borrowers is your business.

Players can move savings out of the central bank into any bank they like, and the interest comes out of your cash instead of being created. Households move toward whoever pays best. Every non-command country starts with two banks already trading, so there is a market from turn one.

What a bank may be is a matter of law. Where a country separates retail and investment banking, your charter is one or the other, and an investment bank takes no deposits and runs a trading book instead. Where banking is universal, one bank does both. Historical worlds start separated, modern ones universal. Either can be changed: the Banking Separation Act is a bill any seeded legislature can take up. Command economies charter no private banks.

How much you can lend is set by the central bank. The reserve requirement is its third lever, next to the rate and the money supply, and it is the one that reaches private banks directly.

Chartering costs you output. A chartered financial sector splits its capacity between branch network and ordinary financial services. More branches means a higher deposit ceiling and less production. You set the split, from 10% to 90%. One sector cannot pay you twice.

Watch the badge

Every bank publishes a confidence badge: green, amber or red.

Deposits leave an amber bank steadily and a red one quickly. A bank that stays red with too little capital fails and is wound up. The badge moves a full turn before deposits do, so there is always time to react.

Failure spreads. When a bank goes down, every other bank in that currency takes a panic hit for four turns whatever their own books look like.

Small depositors are protected. Every deposit-taking bank pays a premium into a national insurance fund each turn, priced by how thin its reserves are. When a bank fails, its remaining cash and capital form a recovery pool. Insured balances are kept whole, money above the cap takes a haircut, household deposits come back in full, and whatever the pool and the fund cannot cover falls to the Treasury, on the budget, where you can see it.

A regulator checks your work. Every bank is held to a capital standard and tested once a year against a downturn.

Borrow when you are short

A retail or universal bank can draw on the central bank's discount window, up to a quarter of its deposits. Banks can also lend each other spare headroom, and if the borrower defaults the lender eats it. Investment and universal banks run a proprietary book across equities, fund units, bonds and currencies, marked to market every turn, leveraged up to three times their equity base. Breach the cap and positions are liquidated at whatever the market is paying, and your confidence takes the damage.

Where you run it

Three surfaces cover all of it.

The /banking hub, in the World nav, is the market view. It lists every central bank and every operating private bank with its rates and its badge, holds your savings with a per-currency selector for who keeps them, and takes your loan applications. A personal loan credits your personal cash; a corporation loan credits that company's liquid capital. Neither lands in savings. Open loans and the credit destination are listed on Your accounts. How much you can borrow is the lowest of the bank's own cash reserves, leftover deposit headroom, and 35% of demonstrated income after existing private-bank payments — not the corporation's cash on hand, and not bond issuance headroom.

The Bank console is where you run one. Rate sliders set what you pay savers and charge borrowers, inside the corridor the central bank allows. The blacklist keeps borrowers you have learned about away from your loan book. The prop book shows every position your trading desk holds, marked to market, with your leverage against the cap. Interbank lending puts your spare headroom to work at another bank's risk. The discount window covers the turn your reserves run short. Recapitalize moves corporate cash into posted capital to cure a shortfall before the supervisor pulls your charter.

The central bank page is where the system itself is governed. The Reserve Requirement tab sets how much of every deposit stays locked, which is the ceiling on every private loan book in the currency. The Insurance Fund tab shows what stands between small depositors and a failure, and what each bank paid in. The regime panel shows whether your currency floats, holds a band, or holds a peg, what it costs to defend, and what the impossible trinity forces the bank to give up; a seated chair can change course. And the chair can be dismissed from here, at a price covered below.

A banking guide joins the wiki.

Prop trading and contagion each have a kill switch, so if either misbehaves in a live world we can turn that part off without taking banking away.

The central bank has something to lose

Credibility used to be a personal score that changed nothing. It now weakens the one thing a central bank does with words rather than money: talking inflation expectations down. A discredited bank keeps every mechanical lever and can still cool an economy. It just has to do it the expensive way.

Hold the stance your own rate corridor calls for for three turns running and credibility recovers, whether or not inflation has moved yet, and the chair's card counts the turns down for you.

Two things that used to be free now cost. Sacking the chair no longer wipes the slate clean, and setting the bank's rate from the finance seat is charged immediately. Waiting out a chair's term is always cheaper than firing them.

The committee really decides now. Where a rate-setting board is seated, an attempt to set the rate around it is refused and the rate card sends you to the committee room.

A currency has a regime. It can float, hold a band, or hold a peg, and capital can move freely or not. You cannot have a fixed rate, free capital movement and your own monetary policy all at once. Try to move your rate while defending a peg with the capital account open and the move is refused, with the reason spelled out.

Losing credibility costs money. Low credibility widens your sovereign spread, up to 1.5 extra points on what your government pays to borrow. It weakens your FX defense: at zero credibility an intervention holds only 70% of the band it should. And it sends depositors toward foreign currency: retention bottoms out at 80%, and every unit that leaves is a unit your banks cannot lend. All three are exactly zero at scrutiny 0, so a bank that behaves pays nothing.

Injecting liquidity now reaches the banks. The new money is advanced to the currency's chartered banks in proportion to their deposits, as debt they repay, which is what the label always claimed. Private bank deposits and loan books also enter the broad money aggregates, so a growing banking sector no longer makes measured M2 shrink and trick the policy engine into tightening.

The independence fight

A government can take control of its central bank. There are three ways in, each priced in scrutiny, the number that drives the credibility penalties above. Setting the rate directly from the finance seat costs 12, charged immediately. Dismissing the chair costs 18, and unlike a resignation or an expired term, which shed a quarter of the bank's accumulated scrutiny with the outgoing chair, a dismissal sheds nothing. Revoking independence by statute costs 22, and restoring it later refunds none of that.

Churning chairs therefore cannot wipe the slate: each dismissal stacks penalties on a score that only recovers one way, three consecutive turns of holding the stance the rate corridor calls for. A government that wants the rate badly enough can have it today; what it pays is the section above, dearer borrowing, a softer band, and depositors drifting to other currencies.

Index funds grow up

Funds vote. A fund holding a large slice of your corporation used to count toward the votes needed to pass anything while casting none, so the more the funds absorbed the closer a company drifted to deadlock. A fund has a ballot now. Hold at least half its units and you direct it, from a "Funds you direct" block on the vote card, and you can change or withdraw the instruction while the vote is open. An undirected fund mirrors the majority actually cast. With nobody to follow and no majority to mirror it abstains and leaves the count. Control is checked when the vote closes, so selling down drops your instruction rather than handing it to the buyer.

Getting into an index is something you earn. Any listed corporation used to qualify, however hollow. Inclusion now takes 15% of your shares in public hands, a market value at least 5% of the median of that index's other candidates, and a solvent balance sheet. The size bar is measured against your peers, so it means the same thing in 1953 as in a modern world. An existing constituent has to fail three checks in a row before the fund sells, and when it sells it names the standard you missed.

You can argue your way in. Petition the index committee, which is the cabinet officeholder who also rules on mergers. Petitioning costs corporate cash, paid on filing and never returned. If a player holds the seat the money goes to them and the record is public. If nobody does, the treasury takes it and the deadline decides on a fixed rule: a serious contribution against a shortfall close enough to the bar to be arguable. A cheque alone will not carry a shell into an index. You are re-measured when the decision lands, so fixing the problem while you wait is a valid answer. Insolvency cannot be waived. Waivers run for a fixed term.

The committee cannot throw out a company that meets every published standard. That power is deliberately not in this release.

Being held is worth something to you. Once index funds hold 10% of your stock your credit rating improves a grade and your share price carries a premium.

Sponsor a fund

Every fund used to be the system's. Now a financial corporation can run money for strangers and get paid for it, from the Deals tab.

The charter fee is 2.5M, paid to your country's treasury and never returned. Seed capital is 10M minimum, and it backs the fund's first units and stays at risk for the fund's whole life. You choose the mandate; the mandate picks the holdings, not you. Your income is the expense ratio you set, between 0.10% and 2.00% a year, skimmed off assets under management every turn. Set it high and you earn more per turn from a fund fewer people want to hold, because the fee is a real drag on the fund's value and the number is on the card.

You get no investor upside on the fund's holdings. The fee is the whole business, so your incentive is to attract holders and keep them, not to trade against them. If the fund cannot back at least 90% of its units, the fee stops until it can: your income shuts off exactly when your holders' position is impaired. Wind the fund up and holders are paid the realized value of what it actually holds, and your seed capital comes back last, after every one of them.

Fund dividends and fund gains are not taxed, for the same reason share dividends and share sales are not taxed per transaction. Taxing only funds would make holding a fund strictly worse than holding the same shares directly. The wiki now states the rule.

Your portfolio counts your fund units. Wealth held in funds was missing from your portfolio value and your wealth chart. Snapshots taken before this release show no fund figure rather than a zero, so your history does not show a fake jump. Funds in other currencies also valued shareholdings in one unit and cash in another, which underpaid their holders on dividends by the whole exchange rate. Every leg now uses one unit.

Groups, mergers, and the tax authority

Big mergers get reviewed. A deal that would hand you too much of a market is referred to the government instead of clearing on its own. What counts as too much is whatever competition law that country passed.

The reviewer can clear the deal, clear it with remedies, or block it. Remedies are measured by what happens to the market: spinning a division off into a company you still wholly own changes no concentration and discharges nothing.

The reviewer has an office now. Hold the seat and the referrals waiting on you appear on your cabinet office page under Merger Review, with the ones you have already decided beside them. You do not need to run a company. Company owners still see the referrals their own deals are caught in, and nobody else's.

A parent and its subsidiaries are one group. A formalized group gets a combined balance sheet, and a loss in one member can be set against profit in another, so carrying a loss-making subsidiary is a strategy rather than dead weight. Relief is capped at the group's profits, the tax it actually paid, and one country.

Groups get better slowly. Members converge 5% a turn toward the best performer, and never all the way. It only pulls upward, so a weak subsidiary does not drag the parent down. A company spun back out carries a penalty for roughly two years, so splitting and re-merging does not farm the bonus.

Pricing between your own companies is audited. Selling to your own subsidiary across a border at a price you invented builds exposure, and past a threshold the tax authority reprices the transactions at arm's length and adds a 40% surcharge. It is deterministic, not a random audit roll. Trades inside one country are ignored, because group loss relief already nets those out.

Ownership loops are refused at the point of purchase, and the message names the loop. The wiki also stops describing subsidiaries as automatic above 50%: profits do not consolidate without a formalized managed subsidiary.

Bargain with an employer

Unions could organise, strike and elect a president, but there was never anyone on the other side of the table.

A union leader opens a campaign against a specific employer, covering all that employer's matching workplaces in the country. You set a wage floor, how long the agreement runs, and how many of those turns are free of strikes. The CEO can accept, reject, or counter. Offers alternate, the history stays visible, and a rejection or a missed deadline creates a dispute.

A dispute starts with an overtime ban, grows into a selective strike, and can reach an industry strike. Each rung needs more member support than the last and costs real money out of the strike fund while it runs. An overtime ban you cannot afford ends itself. Either side can keep tabling offers throughout, and where labour law allows it either side can ask for government mediation, which builds a package out of both sides' real offers weighted by your leverage.

Leverage comes from the world, not a stat. It is recomputed every turn from how many workers are organised, how far pay trails what workers expect where they live, how tight the labour market is, what collective-bargaining law says, and how long the strike fund lasts. Organising during a dispute, losing members, or a law passed while you are out all move the offer on the table.

Settle and every covered workplace pays the negotiated floor until the agreement expires, then pay returns to the employer's own level. The floor feeds the same corporation costs, incomes and macro numbers as any other wage decision. Unresolved disputes temporarily weaken worker security and civic life.

Non-player union leaders and non-player CEOs use the same system. The old back channels are gone: no hidden wage concessions, no strikes written straight into the world.

Win a pension

This is a funded scheme won at the bargaining table, separate from any state pension.

A pension contribution is a term of the agreement, set as a percentage of the covered wage bill, up to 15%. Every turn the agreement runs, the employer pays it out of its own cash. If the employer cannot pay, nothing arrives.

Your members build up claims at 8% of covered wages a turn. Assets over claims is the funding ratio, and that is the number everyone argues about. Settle below the accrual rate and the scheme falls further behind every turn, so the rate you accept is a real decision in both directions.

Pensions get paid. Members who retire draw from the scheme every turn, out of the money that is in it. If the scheme is short, every pensioner takes the same proportional cut. The unpaid part is not forgiven: the claim stays on the books and the employer is asked for a top-up again next turn.

Schemes invest. A scheme puts its assets into the broad index for its country, or the global index if there is none. Not the sector its own members work in: a fund whose assets collapse the same week its employer does is not a pension. It keeps back enough cash for eight turns of benefits first, so investing can never be the reason a pension gets cut.

Union pages show wages, organisation, cooldowns and agreement protection local by local. Industrial action starts inside a dispute, and its preview names the affected locals, shows the exact treasury cost, and asks you to confirm before the money moves. Union leaders pick election candidates by name and can take a public position on live domestic bills. CEOs answer campaigns from an Industrial Relations panel in the CEO Office.

Organize a union without running one

If you were not a union president, the union page had nothing on it you could press. Now the organize drive is open to everyone, on any union in your country, whether or not it already has a president.

A drive costs 5 action points and adds 10 strength to the union. It also adds 10 to your own banked total, and that total is your vote weight when the presidency is open. A union needs 100 strength before it can elect anyone, so ten drives from a standing start, from one person or ten.

Strength decays 0.5% a turn, on the union and on every organizer. A union nobody works at loses its power. So does an organizer who stops showing up. Whoever organized first does not hold the union forever.

Your union tells you things now

A lot of the union system was working and simply never said so.

• •A union under a ban says so on its own page, instead of letting you press buttons that return an error.
• •Your president can post a public wage claim again. It binds nothing by itself. It is what the union brings to the table, and every employer in the industry can see it.
• •Holding an overtime ban costs money every turn. You now see what it costs before you escalate, how many turns your treasury can fund, and you get told when a ban ends because the money ran out.
• •When your leverage moves mid-campaign you can see which input moved it: coverage, grievance, the labour market, the law, or your strike fund. Your employer sees four of those five. They do not get to read your strike fund.
• •A pension scheme that cuts benefits says so plainly, and the fund's cash, invested value and unpaid benefits are all on the panel.
• •If an employer tries to break your union, you are told. So is every organizer. You are told when it backfires too.

Pensions were charging employers 24 times too much

A unit bug. Wage bills are stored on a daily basis and the pension charge read that as if it were a single turn, so every employer under a collective agreement paid 24 times the rate they agreed to, and the workers' claim grew 24 times too fast.

Both sides scale together, so funding ratios do not move. What changes is the cash: pension costs drop to what was actually bargained. CEOs also get two new lines under Operating Expenses, contributions and deficit top-ups, so the charge is no longer money leaving with no explanation.

Running a sector

Small states are cheaper to grow in. Holding most of a market used to cost the same to expand whether you had fought four rivals for it or were the only firm who ever showed up, so nobody built in quiet states and demand went unserved.

Power stations improve the grid. Building energy and utility capacity did nothing for a region's grid reliability, which moved only on infrastructure spending, so energy ministers were building plants for nothing. A region with enough energy capacity for the size of its economy now gets a more reliable grid, one running short pays for it, and building far past what a region needs helps less and less.

National corporations can change production methods, with the same retooling period as anywhere else, instead of being stuck with whatever they started with.

See what you made on your trades. Your portfolio has a Trade History section listing every share bought and sold, with profit or loss on each sale and a running total. Sales are matched against your oldest shares first, and stock splits are handled properly. Shares you still hold are not counted as profit until you sell. CEOs can see the company's book the same way.

Behind the Iron Curtain

East German elections stop pretending to be a contest. The Volkskammer is filled from a single National Front list on shares agreed in advance.

What the vote does decide is your standing inside your own party's block. A bloc party is a real place to build a career, and a strong campaign moves you up your party's list. If you want the split itself to change, that is a fight inside the ruling party's leadership. Seat projections now show the allocation you will actually get, and the vote pie shows real popularity.

East Germany is a real one-party state. The General Secretary faces the same internal party pressure the Soviet Premier does. Confidence drifts on what your government passes, the regime can escalate through discontent and crisis, and nationalising an industry carries political consequences. The bloc parties are described honestly too: National Front partners holding allocated seats, not an opposition.

Factions split for a reason

This one is not a DD rule, it applies to every one-party regime. When a regime reaches an internal challenge, the people who walk out are the ones who actually disagree with the party line, ranked on the same economic and social axes elections already use, so you can read your own position against your party's and predict who goes. They leave together: your caucus goes as a bloc, and the party you found stands where your people stand. Before this a breakaway took a random slice of the bench and copied its parent's positions word for word.

Campaigners can manage NPPs, once the committee says so

You asked for more than three or four people in a party to be able to do anything (suggestion #269). Campaigners now can.

A Campaigner used to be able to spend the party's national Political Strength to Build Org, and nothing else. They can now also use NPP Management: the influence actions, and moving an NPP between states. Recruitment still belongs to the chair and vice-chair, because that spends party money on new bodies rather than steering the ones you have.

The seat is no longer the chair's alone to hand out. The chair still picks the names, up to three, but each name goes to the National Committee as a nomination and takes the seat only when the committee confirms it. Removal runs the other way: the chair can fire a Campaigner instantly, no vote needed, and the National Committee can also strip one with a Remove Officer proposal. So the people doing the work are approved by the party, and anyone who goes rogue is out the same turn.

The chair and vice-chair keep everything they already had, regardless.

Your union votes on the deal

The president can no longer sign a contract on your behalf.

When the president accepts an employer's offer, it goes to the members. Every organizer who has run drives holds a ballot, weighted by the strength they have banked, exactly as in a leadership election. Ratify it and the agreement takes effect. Reject it and nothing is signed: the offer stays on the table, the clocks keep running, and the president has to move the package before asking you again.

You have three turns to vote. The vote ends early once a majority of all organizing strength has landed one way. If nobody votes, the president's acceptance stands.

Your weight is fixed when the vote opens, so it does not drift while you decide. The employer is told a vote is running and when it closes, and nothing else.

Choose your language

The interface now speaks more than English. Pick a language in Settings under Appearance and the menus, settings, tutorial, landing page, sign-in, your profile, and the elections hub follow. German is first, with more to come. In-game content such as news, mail, and legislation stays in English for now.

Also in this release

• •Picking a player or company in the bank console no longer breaks the panel. Selecting a search result called a function that had been renamed in a refactor, so the click threw instead of filling the field.
• •Multi-seat chambers are decided by votes again, not by how many candidates you ran. In any chamber that seats several members per region (the US House, the Commons, the Volkskammer and the rest), each candidate was drawing a full share of every voter group, and then the seats were pooled by party. A party that ran two candidates in a region therefore took about two thirds of its delegation on the same level of support, and a party that ran one was held to a third. In the 1953 founding House this ran both ways: one party took 22 of Pennsylvania's 30 seats on 62% of the House vote in a state where the same voters gave the other party 53-59% in every single-seat race that turn, and the mirror image happened in California. Support now sets a party's share and the party's candidates divide it between themselves, so an extra name on the ballot no longer buys seats. Strong candidates still help: a slate is judged on its average, so a weak running mate costs you.
• •Corporations in a formalized group get a group overview next to their subsidiaries: consolidated numbers, loss relief, and transfer pricing audits, all in one place.
• •Fund safety displays stopped claiming safety they did not have. A never-reachable auto-pause branch read as a live guard. Two simultaneous redemptions could also both spend the same fund cash, and now cannot.
• •Corporate deals are fully accounted. Acquisitions, hostile takeovers and spin-offs moved money without leaving a record, so the money-conservation checks read an ordinary acquisition as cash appearing and vanishing. The spin-off fee now goes to the treasury instead of being destroyed. The same pass covered loans, repayments, deposit interest, prop trades, insurance payouts and central bank advances.
• •Central bank margin interest is revenue. It was being destroyed rather than credited, and a bank that could not pay simply never paid, forever. It accrues now and counts against the collateral cap. A related bug meant a bank that borrowed only at the discount window paid no interest at all.
• •Italian politicians stop being renamed forever. Around 3% of generated Italian names use a compound surname like De Luca, and the check for whether a name belonged to its country split on spaces and decided it did not, so those characters were renamed on every cleanup run to another name that could be compound again. Verified across 64,000 generated names with no mismatches.
• •The index fund turn phase got noticeably faster. It was scanning the whole bond collection four times per fund and re-reading the exchange rate table once per bid.
• •Admin tools no longer show stale data after you change a filter.
• •Achievement pages stopped erroring for older awards. Achievements granted before characters and accounts were tracked separately made the recent-holders list fail outright. It now shows the character who earned it.
• •A corrupt image upload gives you a message, not a failure. A truncated or damaged file now returns a clear "re-save it and try again" instead of a server error.
• •Alt detection stopped running blind on part of the player base. The hourly scan had a candidate limit set before launch, and the active player base had grown past it, so some accounts were never compared against each other. The limit now sits well above the whole player base.
• •You can take back a vote for CEO. Voting was one way: you could switch your vote to someone else, but never withdraw it. Founding a corporation also casts a vote for yourself that you never chose and could not remove. The Voted marker on a shareholder is now the undo button, and the tally has a Withdraw control.
• •A CEO who moves house can still be voted for. Candidates have to live in the corporation's HQ state. That rule was being applied to the sitting CEO too, so a CEO who moved, or whose corporation relocated, could not be re-elected by their own shareholders while a rival in the right state ran unopposed. The incumbent is now exempt.
• •The corporation page stopped offering you a job you already have. Voting for the current CEO left a standing "you have been offered the CEO position" banner with no notification and nothing to accept.
• •The bank console says why its buttons are off. While private banking is frozen it told the CEO that only the CEO can issue a charter.
• •Your union page says who the president is. A union with a president showed no leadership section at all, so there was no name, no reason given for the missing election, and no way to see who else was organizing. It now names the president and lists every organizer with their banked strength and their share of the vote.
• •Legislators outside the US are paid for their seats. If you held a seat in the Volkskammer, the Supreme Soviet, the Dáil, the Sejm, or any other legislature outside the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Canada or China, your seat granted you no extra actions per turn and no national influence. The bonus table the turn processor read had only ever been filled in for a handful of countries, and every other office silently scored zero. Every elected office in every country now grants the generation its own country config lists.
• •The bank blacklist works in names now. It used to ask you to type 24-character database ids, which nothing in the game shows you, and the saved list came back as unreadable hex. Search for a player or a company, click to add, click the x to remove. Index funds are picked from a list by name. Your loan book and your interbank deals name the other side too.
• •Who your bank refuses is private. The list was readable by anyone who asked the server for it. Only you, an admin, or your currency's central bank chair can see it now.
• •The bank console tells you how the bank is doing. It opens with what the confidence band actually means, whether your capital clears the minimum and the stress test, whether reserves cover the requirement, and what is in arrears. The nine panels below it are grouped into Overview, Lending, Funding, Trading and Admin instead of stacked in one column.
• •NPP union presidents have names again. An NPC-run union showed the president as Unknown even though the seat was filled, and the link opened a character page for the wrong kind of id. It now shows the NPP's name and opens their politician profile.
• •Index fund subscribe and redeem show the same currency. Buying a global fund from East Germany quoted the price in Marks and the redeem payout in dollars, so a unit that cost M376 looked like it paid back only $79. Both sides now follow your wallet display preference.

Also in 1.1

Bug fixes and improvements

• •The 1953 Commons is 625 seats, not 650. Downing Street and the Commons page still showed a 650-seat maximum on a 1953 world after the chamber had already been seated at the 1950-55 size (625). They now use the live era size, so the panel reads 625 of 625 with majority 313.
• •Whips are signed by the right person. A state chair's whip used to show as issued by Admin, and chamber leaders' whips did the same. Whips now name the chair of the org that issued them; Admin only appears on an actual admin override.
• •Foreign budgets show a dollar figure. Soviet outlays printed as руб566B with nothing telling you the scale. National budgets in other currencies now show an approximate USD equivalent alongside.
• •Campaigners can actually manage NPPs. The tab opened for a confirmed Campaigner, then every action bounced with "Only the National Chair or National Vice Chair can use party influence." That inner check now matches the tab: confirmed campaigners can boost and move NPPs. Recruitment is still chair and vice-chair only.
• •State pool cards name the parties. The Org Pool and Registration Pool lists showed a coloured dot and an abbreviation. They now show each party's logo and full name, with the abbreviation kept beside it.
• •NPC companies run themselves properly. NPC-led corporations used to sit on piles of idle cash and never sign supply agreements, prospect, or adjust wages. They now invest their surplus, negotiate supply deals, prospect for resources, and pay competitive wages, so the companies around you behave like companies.
• •Soviet players can submit bills again. Bill submission checked your chamber against a fixed list that only covered the US and UK layouts, so a Supreme Soviet member's proposal was rejected before it reached the floor. Chambers are now read from your own country's legislature.
• •Moving house no longer costs you the presidency. Relocating within your own country vacated every office you held, including President, Vice President and cabinet seats. In-country moves now only give up offices tied to a specific state, such as governor or your House and Senate seats. Moving to another country still gives up everything.
• •NPC companies invest instead of hoarding. The spending rules NPC firms follow were written for a modern-money economy and never re-scaled for 1953, so most of them were stuck below the minimum cash to expand, pay a dividend or build. They sat on cash while their share price slid, even with healthy factories. The thresholds now match the era, so those companies put money back to work and pay their shareholders.
• •State Elections is in the state menu. Reaching a state's races meant opening the state page, then Politics, then the Elections tab. There is now a direct link between Economy and Legislature.
• •The status bar stopped covering modal buttons on phones. On a tall form like Propose Legislation, the bottom status bar painted over the Cancel and confirm buttons. Modals now sit above it.
• •Assigning a navy unit no longer kicks you back to Ground. The defence roster used to reload after every assignment and land on Ground again. It now stays on the branch you were working in, and you can assign an entire branch to one general in one order.
• •Interstate haul now counts as freight demand. Haul between states was showing on the logistics map but never entered the market your terminals sell into, so a state could look busy while logistics sat idle. That haul now moves freight prices and sold %, state by state. The map itself is unchanged.

Banking

Borrowed money is not capital. A bank's capital ratio counted cash borrowed from the central bank as its own capital, so a bank close to breaching its capital requirement could fix the problem by borrowing from the emergency lending window — the facility that exists for banks already in trouble. Capital is now what the bank actually owns, less what it owes. Drawing on the window raises your cash and your debt together and leaves your ratio where it was.

One consequence to plan around: making loans now costs you capital ratio rather than adding to it. Lending is funded by your deposits, so a bigger book needs more capital behind it.

Your depositors' money is no longer yours to spend. A chartered bank's cash and its parent corporation's cash were the same pot, so the parent could spend depositor money on anything a corporation does. Banks now hold a reserve floor against their deposits that the corporation cannot spend below. If you hit it you will be told it is the floor stopping you, not that you are out of money.

Retail and investment banks can switch. You are no longer stuck with the charter you picked at founding. A bank can change type from the console, with a 24 turn cooldown afterwards. Switching to an investment charter returns your entire deposit book: player savings go back to the central bank and household deposits return to circulation. Nobody loses a penny, but you lose the funding base you spent turns building and have to build it again if you switch back. Settle any outstanding discount window or margin borrowing first.

The loan book, by credit rating. The household side of your loan book used to be a single implied number. It now breaks out by rating from AAA down to CCC, showing the balance, the rate you are charging, and the expected default rate in each band. You can also set a lending stance — conservative, balanced, or aggressive — deciding which ratings you lend to going forward. It changes nothing about loans already on your book; those keep the rate and rating they were written at.

Aggressive is not a free win. Lending to everyone gets you a much bigger book and more income, on a thinner margin and with a book that fails the supervisor's stress test, and failing that test bars you from paying out to your owner. Conservative earns the best margin on the smallest book. The stress test is now weighted by what you actually lent into, so a prudent book is no longer shocked as hard as a reckless one.

• •House primaries pick one winner again. A party's House primary sends one candidate to the general, and that candidate holds the party's seats in the state. For a while the primary advanced three per party, which meant the party's own NPC candidate stayed on the ballot after you beat it and then took a share of your delegation. Founding election results have been corrected: where you shared your party's seats with an NPC, those seats are yours.
• •Looking at a House race no longer changes who holds the seats. The projected seat count on a live House page was being saved as the real result, so a state's delegation could change while an election was still running. Seats held by NPCs were also showing as vacant on the district map. Both are fixed, and the district maps have been rebuilt from the founding results.

Your bank's money and your company's money are now separate. A chartered bank used to keep its cash in the same pot the parent company spends from, so there was nothing between depositor money and the company's shopping. The bank now holds its own balance.

Moving money into the bank is unrestricted: it is your money going in behind your depositors. Moving money out is limited to whatever the bank holds above its reserve requirement, and only when the supervisor rates it adequate. A bank that failed its stress test cannot pay its owner until it clears.

One consequence when this lands: your bank's cash and your company's cash are split apart, with the bank keeping what it was holding. Company revenue still flows to the company as normal, and if your bank is above its reserve requirement you can withdraw the surplus straight away.

Banks no longer die for doing well. A new bank grew its deposits, went amber, went red, and failed within a handful of turns no matter how it was run. Deposits were being counted as an obligation without the money actually arriving at the bank, so the reserves you were judged against were reserves you could never have held. Deposits now bring their cash with them. A well-run bank stays green, and lending is limited by the cash you actually hold above your reserve requirement.

Investment banks are worth chartering now. They had no way to earn: no deposits, no lending, no per-turn income, and they were still losing part of their financial sector's output to a branch network they are not allowed to use. Investment charters can now lend to corporations, keep their full sector output, and post a third of the capital a retail bank does.

Chartering costs less. The capital a bank must post has been cut, and an investment charter costs a third of a retail one.

The console tells you what is about to go wrong. A reserve gauge showing the line a bank run actually fails at, your confidence score broken into the three things that make it up with the lever that moves each one, and a warning on the last turn where you can still do something about it.

The build queue counts what you actually ordered. A construction order used to be described in capacity units ("545 of 726 units built") while the card right above it counted branches. You order branches, plants and stores; the units are what one of them produces per day. The queue, the arrival rate and the "Being built" figure now all count the thing you bought, using the right word for your sector.

• •House vote counts no longer exceed 435. An open bill's card showed Aye/Nay totals bigger than the House (250-215) because The Count used a cached counter that still included members who had lost their seats. It now counts only the people who currently hold the seats.

The steel strike

• •

  Court rulings now open a readable law page. When the Supreme Court (or a UK judicial review) hands down a ruling that changes policy, the "Bill Enacted" announcement links to the enacted law. That link used to hit a "Not found" page because the ruling applied its policy change without ever creating the law record behind the link. The ruling now writes a proper enacted-law page, showing the case, the policy it changed, and the seated vote.

• •

  Admin-launched crises now hit the wire. A crisis started by an admin showed up as a decision to answer but posted no news event and sent no notification, so it could arrive with no announcement. Every crisis now posts to the wire and notifies affected players the moment it begins, however it was started.

• •

  You can change your bank's charter type from the console. Switching between retail, universal, and investment charters was possible in the rules but had no button, so a chartered CEO could not find it. The Admin tab of the bank console now has a "Change charter type" control. Moving to an investment charter returns your whole deposit book, and a 24-turn cooldown applies after a switch. The move posts no new capital and keeps your charter history.

• •

  A nationwide steel strike. The steelworkers walk out and the shutdown spreads to everything that runs on steel: autos, defense, construction, and power all feel the supply dry up while the mills stand idle. It is a crisis the President has to answer, and every answer has a cost.

• •

  Four ways to break it, each with consequences.

  • •Nationalize by executive order. Seize the mills at once and run them as state enterprises. Fast and decisive, but the order is challenged in the Supreme Court, and a bench that leans against you can strike it down and hand the industry back.
  • •Send Congress an emergency bill. Nationalize at fair value with no court risk, if it passes. You need the votes, and the strike burns on while the floor debates.
  • •Bring both sides to the table. Open government-brokered talks between the steelmakers and the union. The industry stays private and you earn goodwill, but a deal is not guaranteed.
  • •Concede the wage demands. Impose the union's wage floor and the furnaces relight the same day, at the price of higher costs and inflation from then on.
  • •Or hold firm and let the strike run. You concede nothing and set no precedent, while the economy bleeds.
• •

  Crises that actually do things. The steel strike is the first crisis built on a new system where a decision can reach into the rest of the game, not just move a number. Choosing to nationalize really seizes the mills; the court case is a real case the Justices decide; the emergency bill is a real bill Congress votes on. Future crises will be built the same way.

• •

  "Room for 0" was counting supply you can never compete with. When you looked at building a new sector, the game measured demand against world supply. That total included goods locked behind embargoes and goods produced in countries that do not trade with anyone. So a market running a real shortage could report itself oversupplied, and every state on the map showed room for nothing.

  Take oil. World figures said supply beat demand, so the answer everywhere was "oversupplied, expect your output to go unsold". But almost all of that surplus was Soviet oil that American companies are embargoed from touching. The market a US oil company can actually sell into was running a shortage with tens of thousands of barrels a day going unmet.

  Build advice now measures each market against the demand your company can really reach: your home country's own buyers, minus what imports already serve, plus what you can export. It is the same calculation the turn engine uses when it decides what your plants sell, so the advice and the result finally agree.

• •

  The commodities board has a Reachable view. The shortage list and the world map both gained a lens that shows what your country's producers can actually sell into, rather than production against consumption inside the borders. The older views are still there and now say what they measure, so a shortage that imports already cover no longer reads as a gap to fill.

• •

  What this changes for you. Sectors that looked closed may now show room, and a few that looked open will show less. Both directions are the same fix: the number now describes your market rather than the whole planet. Nothing about your existing plants, cash or contracts changed.

You can build against imports

• •

  Importing a good no longer means "no room to build". 1.1.2 started measuring each market by what your country can actually reach, which was the right idea and the wrong number. It counted demand that imports were already serving as demand that was taken, so any good your country buys from abroad reported room for nothing at all. Food showed zero room in the United States, Britain, Japan, Italy and China at the same time, no matter how much each was importing.

  That was backwards. Your own factories and farms sell before any import does, so building at home pushes imports out one for one. What a country imports is not a wall, it is the size of the opening.

  American food is the clearest case: the United States buys over a million units a day of grain from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. That is now what the build screen shows as room, because a US farm would take that business rather than sit unsold.

• •

  Nothing opened up that was not really open. Markets in a genuine glut still show no room, and countries that already feed themselves are unchanged. Only the demand currently being met from abroad is counted, and only for goods your country actually imports.

State broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain

• •

  Eastern bloc media makes state broadcasting now, not adverts. Advertising exists because rival firms compete for your custom. Behind the Iron Curtain there are no rival brands and no marketing budgets, yet every Warsaw Pact state had been running a full commercial advertising industry. The result was absurd: Hungary was producing over a thousand times more advertising than anyone there wanted to buy, and Poland was putting out nearly five times as much as the United States.

  All of it piled into the world market and dragged the price to the floor, so media companies everywhere, including yours, were selling a tiny fraction of what they made at a heavy discount.

  Bloc broadcasters, presses and cinemas now produce state information and culture instead, which is what they actually were, and their governments fund it out of the education budget. Their output is unchanged in value: it has been re-pointed, not cut.

• •

  What you will notice. If you own media anywhere, the advertising price should recover and more of what you make should actually sell. Bloc media companies gain a reliable state customer in place of a market that was never going to buy from them.

Take your company back from a caretaker

• •You can take your company back from a caretaker. Handing day-to-day operation to an NPP caretaker was hiding your CEO tab, which is where the Resume Control button lives, so there was no way to reclaim the company you still owned. Your CEO tab now stays put while a caretaker runs things, and the Resume Control button is right there whenever you want it back.
• •A short wait before handing off again. After you resume control, you now wait 3 days before you can hand the company to a caretaker again. The card tells you how long is left.

Times now show in your local timezone

• •Timestamps show in your local time. Election deadlines, vote closing times, transaction times, and the other dates shown around the game were written in the server's timezone, so a time that said "closes 6:00 PM" meant 6:00 PM somewhere else, not where you are. Every one of these now shows in your own local timezone, so the time you read matches your clock.

A revoked bank charter returns your money

• •

  Losing a charter no longer loses your money. When the supervisor revokes a bank charter for missing the recapitalization deadline, the bank's cash and its trading book now come back to your corporation, the same as any other charter revoke. Investment banks, whose value is in their trading book rather than in deposits, were the ones hit hardest by the old behavior. Banks that still owe depositors pay those depositors first, as before.

• •

  National Corporation profits now add up on the page. The corporation overview showed one large number labelled as money sent to the budget, but it was really the corporation's whole operating profit. It did not subtract the share the CEO keeps in the corporation, and it did not account for cash the corporation does not have on hand, so the page could show a large profit while the budget received little. The page now walks the money through each step: profit, the part kept as working capital, the part remitted (limited by cash on hand), debt service, and what actually reaches the treasury. The remitted figure now matches the budget's state-enterprise line, and when cash limits the remittance the page says so.

• •

  Union pages now show total membership. A union page listed a Unionization percentage per employer but never added them up, so you could not see how many workers the union actually represented. The stats strip now shows a Members count with the union's density (its share of the whole workforce) underneath, and each sector row shows its worker count. This reads coverage, which is kept separate from Strength so a large union is not mistaken for a powerful one.

• •

  National Corporation sector money now uses clear, consistent labels. The Holdings tab called daily sector revenue and operating profit "per turn", while the sector page mixed daily totals, hourly figures and per-unit averages. Holdings now says "per financial day," the sector page clearly separates each period and scope, and both pages explain that sector operating profit is not the amount remitted to the treasury. Holdings also has a direct Open sector link, so you no longer need to open the build window just to reach a sector.

• •

  Party officers no longer keep their post forever when nobody stands. If a national party leadership election ended with no candidates, the sitting officer stayed in the job and the party had no way to vote them out. Now, if the officer does not stand for re-election, their term ends when the cycle closes, the seat becomes vacant and a fresh election opens. Standing unopposed still keeps the seat: an uncontested race is not a defeat. Officers already in post are unaffected until their current cycle finishes.

Prices reflect real markets, and your company's numbers finally add up

This release folds ten patches into one entry. The substance of every change is kept below.

Your corporation's numbers

• •Your income statement adds up. Two cost lines, your wage bill and regulatory compliance, were charged against your income but never shown on the waterfall, so the total did not match the rows above it. Every cost now has a row, and the total is worked out from those rows, with anything unexplained shown as an Other line instead of hidden.
• •Your margins show what you actually earn. Corporation and sector screens showed a theoretical margin instead of the one the engine really charges you every turn. A sector could look profitable while genuinely losing money. All money screens, including borrowing capacity and credit ratings, now use your real figures.
• •The sector page agrees with the corporation page. The sector detail page used to compute its own version of your margin, so a sector could show a healthy profit on its own page while the corporation page showed the opposite. Both now read the same real number.
• •Being in debt no longer prices you like a bond fund. Companies carrying debt had their real business earnings discounted almost to nothing, because the market compared bond income against income that was already shrunk by interest payments. Borrowing to grow no longer tanks how the market values your actual business.

Prices and trade

• •What things cost to make now reaches what they sell for. Commodity prices used to come from supply and demand alone, so an industry squeezed by expensive inputs like fertilizer and freight had no way to recover, even though the goods it made were badly needed. Producer costs now lift a commodity's own price, so farmers and other squeezed producers get a real path back to profit. Share prices also stopped swinging with every central bank meeting.
• •Prices reflect the market you can actually trade in. Supply sitting behind closed borders no longer drags down your local prices. Millions of units of food from economies that trade with nobody were crushing world food prices while the West went hungry; prices now come from the goods that can really reach you.
• •The iron curtain closes. Planned economies now trade only with each other. Their surpluses stop reaching Western markets, Western prices reflect Western supply and demand, and the bloc runs on state-administered prices at home. The curtain lifts country by country on its historical date: China in 1978, most of Eastern Europe in 1989 to 1990, the Soviet republics in 1991.

Computer-run competitors

• •The economy answers shortages everywhere. Computer-run corporations in every industry, not just mining, now retool toward whatever is scarce. Chemical plants are already pivoting to fertilizer production as shortages start to heal instead of festering.
• •The economy builds what everyone is short of. Freight is needed by almost every industry but made only by logistics companies, and computer-run firms would never build it unless they were already in that industry. Now they build critically short essentials wherever the shortage is, regardless of their own industry.
• •Computer-run firms retool without a phantom cost spike. When a computer-run mine or factory changed what it made, its operating costs could jump for no reason you could see. That is fixed, and computer-run mines now read local prices instead of the world average when deciding what to switch to. A strategy you set on your own company is never touched by this.

Margin bonuses now pay what they say

What was wrong

When the plants economy replaced the old margin formula, your real costs (inputs, wages, upkeep) took over the books, and the old percentage margin modifiers were folded into a leftover accounting line. On sectors where that leftover line was negative, which was most of the world, the effect flipped: a margin bonus made the sector slightly poorer, and a penalty made it slightly richer.

What changed

• •Margin bonuses are now a direct line on your sector's books. Each point of margin modifier is worth one percent of that sector's realised revenue, earned or charged every turn. A bonus always helps and a penalty always hurts, on every sector.
• •This covers the whole stack: research tech margin bonuses, government subsidies, tariff protection and exposure, home state and specialization bonuses, state conditions, and state-owned enterprise efficiency.
• •No progress is lost and no back charges are made. Researched tech, active subsidies, and your sector's books all carry forward unchanged. The fix only changes how the bonus is applied from now on.

If a sector of yours was deep in penalties and seemed oddly comfortable, or you researched margin tech and saw nothing move, this was why.