1.2.0: Vietnam, defence procurement, and corporation specializations

Corporation specializations

Corporation research lanes now contain 15 technologies per decade instead of nine. Completing either branch opens one of three specializations:

• •Scale cuts costs: cheaper inputs, lower wages, cheaper growth.
• •Premium raises what your output sells for and strengthens your brand.
• •Resilience shields you from dominance penalties and tariffs and makes expansion cheaper.

You can choose one specialization per decade. Its effects feed directly into the plants economy through price, inputs, output, wages, expansion costs, and penalty protection. Specializations cost twice the decade's base research cost, and capstones cost three times as much.

• •Everything you have researched stays researched, at the price you paid.
• •Past decades still grant their baseline technologies free to new corporations, but not their specializations.
• •Computer-run corporations pick specializations under the same rules you do.

The Vietnam War

Between 1955 and 1975, Vietnam can progress through six stages: advisors, materiel support, a naval incident, an air campaign, a ground commitment, and a prolonged war.

The United States and Soviet Union receive separate decisions with a 24 hour real-time deadline. Each administration may increase support, hold, or pull back. If a player does not respond, their government holds its current course.

Increasing support spends treasury funds based on GDP and reduces approval among anti-war voters. Pulling back costs approval among hawks. These effects increase with the level and duration of the conflict.

The current stage sets DEFCON, bloc cohesion, war weariness, procurement demand, and the detente penalty. These values now come from the server, so players see the same Cold War state.

At the air-campaign stage, the ladder opens a real conflict between North and South Vietnam. It appears on the map and uses the normal combat system. The superpowers remain patrons rather than belligerents. Dropping below the threshold winds the conflict down, and reaching level zero ends it without restarting the chain.

Every opening and stage change is reported through the in-game news and wire, the Discord news channel, and the national channels for both superpowers.

New 1960s crises

The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies can face a reform movement from 1960 onward. Suppression, tolerance, and reform affect international standing, regional stability, and the chance of follow-up unrest or a hardliner backlash.

The United States can face civil-rights marches, campus unrest, urban unrest, and anti-war protests. Responses can change approval among different voter groups, introduce legislation, or produce a follow-up crisis.

Defence procurement

Contracts now reserve their full cost against the defence appropriation when they are awarded. New orders cannot exceed the uncommitted balance. Delivery draws down the contract's reservation, while cancellation, decline, and completion release any remainder.

Suppliers now pay the commodity and overhead cost of each delivered lot. Contract prices follow current input prices, so a contract can become unprofitable after it is signed. A supplier without enough cash to fund that loss stops delivery and records the reason.

Ministers can choose a price within a server-validated band and select the equipment grade. Contractors assign up to four production lines per plant across their orders. More lines increase throughput without changing the price per lot.

Both order books now show lots ordered, built, carried, delivered, paid, and still committed. They also state why an order has stalled. Awards to a company owned by the minister are disclosed on the contract and public wire and reduce the minister's standing.

Recruitment and upgrades spend only uncommitted appropriation. An emergency admin switch can pause new procurement without interrupting deliveries or cancellations on existing contracts.

Banking integrity

Private banking remains disabled. This release does not switch it back on.

The banking model now uses one balance-sheet calculation for equity, regulatory capital, reserves, deposit limits, run risk, and confidence. Household deposits, which move cash into a bank, are separated from player savings balances, which remain on the character.

Money movements now use a shared, idempotent record with guarded debits and a repair queue for partial writes. Deposit-book closure, charter changes, revocation, and failure share one creditor waterfall.

On failure, secured central-bank facilities are settled first, followed by household deposits, interbank creditors, and then the owner. Loans issued by a failed bank continue to amortize, with payments going to the estate or deposit insurance fund as appropriate.

The bank console now explains its enforced limits using the same inputs and formulas as the server.

Markets, logistics, and inventory

Computer-run corporations now compare local demand, prices, and available resource deposits when choosing where to build. A home state remains a preference, but no longer overrides a better market.

Plants that repeatedly sell less than half their output stop receiving normal replacement investment. Computer-run corporations may close a non-core stranded plant after 12 low-fill turns. Player plants are never closed automatically and receive a warning after six low-fill turns.

Electricity and natural gas now use national price pooling. Freight capacity adapts to each state's recent mix of bulk and specialized cargo, with a minimum share reserved for both classes.

Corporation sectors can now retain unsold storable goods. Inventory spoils, has a carrying cost, and sells down when fresh production clears. The default remains sell-all, and computer-run corporations do not stockpile.

Commodity pages now show where a resource is in local shortage, where supply is stranded, and where unused extraction capacity remains.

Navigation and presentation

Country pages now lead with a grouped directory for Politics, Government, Economy, and Nation. Rows include live figures such as active elections, budget balance, GDP, legislation, and the prime rate. Inapplicable entries are omitted, and individual figures fall back cleanly when data is unavailable.

The state economy page now puts the sector selector and selected-sector detail first. The broader sector board and national model remain available in collapsed sections.

Union-ban strikes

Enacting a union ban in a country with organized labour now starts a general strike across major industry, ports, and freight. The executive can suppress it, negotiate concessions, wait it out for up to 24 turns, or repeal the ban. Each response carries its own fiscal, political, and economic cost.

Other fixes

• •Brazil's 1953 inflation target and exchange-rate ceiling now use the intended era calibration, and Finland has its missing 1953 monetary row.
• •Career-history dates now use the world's founding-calendar offset.
• •Attorney General buildings affect the state where they are located rather than only the national aggregate.
• •Sector Maintenance credits are displayed as credits instead of a negative value inside parentheses.
• •US governors can propose state tax-rate bills again.
• •Bill fiscal rows now show current law before the proposal and use labels that match the direction of each figure.

Also in 1.2

Vietnam front dates and map

What changed

• •Conflict open years follow the game calendar, including the founding-phase offset. A war opened on turn 214 in 1956 no longer reads as 1957.
• •The Vietnam front map shows North and South Vietnam together, advances north-south, and uses a denser coastline in place of the blocky 110m outline.

Power crosses state lines, and freight congestion has a price

Electricity and gas travel now

• •Power and gas have their own freight class. Energy and natural gas move between states by wire and pipe, alongside the bulk and special classes that move by road, rail, and sea.
• •They use no haulage capacity. A grid delivery never competes with steel, food, or vehicles for a state's freight, and a spike in the freight price no longer moves the price of electricity. The wheeling charge on a grid delivery is set as a share of the seller's own price.
• •Distance costs units as well as money. Every state line crossed loses 3% of what was sent to transmission and pipeline loss, so six crossings lose about 17%. Generating close to the load still wins, and long-distance wheeling is an expensive option rather than an impossible one.
• •Their price reads the market they can reach. Energy and natural gas now blend state, national, and world prices the same way as every other good that physically moves. A state with spare generation can sell it, and a state that is short can buy.

Freight capacity is a price, not a wall

• •A busy state keeps shipping. A state's network hauls up to one and a half times its nominal capacity for a freight class. Units above that pay a 35% surcharge on the shipping part of their landed price.
• •The buyer decides where it stops. Goods stop moving when the landed price passes what the buyer will pay, which is the local price plus 35%, instead of when a capacity counter reaches zero. A short haul into a congested state usually still clears at a higher price. A long haul prices itself out.
• •Freight capacity pays off in price. Building or buying capacity in a busy state lowers what everyone there pays to move goods, and a state with no freight network of its own still ships nothing.

Sectors say when output could not be delivered

• •A sector offers what the network can place. Your clearing offer is capped by the amount the freight network could actually deliver to a buyer, so a sector is no longer credited with sales that no route existed for.
• •Selling percentage separates two problems. Sectors report the share of output that was produced and offered but could not be delivered. Where that share is real, the sector row carries a Freight tag and the sector page says how many units had no freight to carry them. Low sales without the tag means the market did not want the goods. Low sales with it means the goods had no way to reach buyers who did.
• •What to do when a sector is delivery limited. Build or buy freight capacity out of that state, or site new production closer to the demand you are selling into. Grid output is the exception: it needs neither, because wire and pipe carry it.

Your company's colour on your company's charts

Shareholder charts read as your company

• •Slices are shades of your corporation's colour. The ownership and voting charts used a fixed set of twelve colours that had nothing to do with the company you were looking at. They now tint every holder off your own brand colour, so the chart looks like your company at a glance. The shades are spread far enough apart to tell one holder from the next.
• •Every new company is given a colour. Companies founded from now on are assigned one at founding, including spin-offs and companies run by non-player parties. Older companies without one keep a fixed colour worked out from their identity, so a company never changes colour between visits.
• •Large cap tables stay readable. A company can have hundreds of shareholders, and the chart drew a slice and a legend entry for every one of them. It now names the ten largest holders and totals the rest into a single slice. Shares held by the public float are still shown on their own, in grey.

Building capacity is quicker to drive

• •Type the number you want. The count field can be cleared and typed into. Before, it snapped back to a minimum of one on every keypress, which ate the first digit of anything you tried to enter.
• •Plus and minus ten. New buttons either side of the count move it ten at a time, next to the existing single steps.
• •Hold a key to move faster. Holding shift multiplies any step by ten, and holding ctrl multiplies it by a hundred. That works on the buttons and on the arrow keys, so ctrl and the plus ten button move a thousand at once.