How the game works.

Parties, unions, industrialists, the army, churches, minority movements and separatists all run on one model: where they dominate, how much influence they hold, and how agitated they are.

A national focus is the one big thing your country is committed to right now: a long-running decision drawn from trees that open and close with the history of the era.

Every country, democracy or one-party state, runs on the same model: parties and factions competing for popular support, a government holding real power, and a wall of national laws you change through slow, costly reforms.

Every province's machinery and productive capital ages each year. Whether a country replaces it fast enough is a slow policy choice whose consequences show up a decade later.

Revenue and spending are never sliders. They are rates of GDP set by the laws a country holds, collected from the provinces it actually controls, and settled each month into a single treasury figure that can run deep into debt.

Every province grows or shrinks its own economy each month. A country's output is the sum of its provinces, and the province, not the nation, is where growth, disruption and unrest are decided.

Every land province has a resident population that grows or shrinks each month. Population drives economic output, military manpower and political weight, and its growth follows a modelled demographic transition shaped by health, education, urbanization and policy.

A planned system that would move people between provinces every month: within a country toward opportunity and away from hardship, and across borders according to how freely countries let people leave and how readily others take them in. Designed, not yet built.

Research centers are the institutions that carry out research. Each one is a slot that runs one project at a time; the first is free, and every further center is a recurring charge on the budget that scales with the size of the economy.

Research is organized into six categories and sixteen trees holding about two hundred projects, from postwar electrification to late-century genetics and stealth. A project's cost and duration depend on the size of your economy, how far ahead of its time you attempt it, your research speed and your research partners.

The land army: brigades are formations you train, march province to province, fight with and keep supplied. They hold ground, suppress unrest where they stand, and occupy enemy territory in wartime.

How wars are fought and decided: effective military strength rather than headcount, a commitment level each side chooses, front lines that move only when brigades take ground, and wars that end at the negotiating table or in a frozen stalemate.

How countries measure their standing, feel about one another, choose sides and act abroad: prestige, directional opinion, bloc alignment, postures, ambassadors and the handful of unilateral diplomatic actions, with diplomats, treaties and organizations doing the rest.

Intelligence penetration of each foreign country is built by diplomats on infiltration missions and spent on operations: stealing technology and atomic secrets, intercepting diplomatic traffic, assessing arsenals, extracting defectors and hunting moles. Counterintelligence defends automatically.

The UN, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, Comecon, the World Bank and the OEEC as standing institutions with real membership, benefits for members, an agenda steered by their leader, voted policies and treaties that bind every member.

Persistent, named agreements negotiated clause by clause, from recognition and non-aggression to free trade, arms control and peace. Every party must come out ahead, compensation can close the gap, and a diplomat carries the talks.

Every focus, event, law, diplomatic option and faction action in the game is written as content rather than built into the engine. That is why the 1946 campaign can follow decades of changing history, why the game can always show you why something is locked, and why the AI plays by the rules you can see.

Singleplayer and multiplayer run on the same foundation: one authoritative session host, with every player commanding only their own country. Multiplayer itself is still in development and isn't part of the first public demo.

The world map is built from real geography: more than twelve thousand land provinces, named rivers, real borders and roads. It shows who holds what, what each province is for, and where the Cold War is running hot, and it opens already in motion.