What’s New

0.4.1 gives the corporate economy three new layers of depth: a reputation that keeps your customers when a rival undercuts you, a quality score for the goods you make, and private contracts between companies. These shipped in phases, and as of this update all three are switched on and live.

The new corporate layers

• •Brand loyalty. Your corporation earns a reputation by pricing consistently and reliably delivering — and a slice of each market's customers will keep buying from you, at your price, even when someone cheaper exists. It only pays off when your loyalty beats your rivals', so it comes from their slipping: gouging, failing to deliver, or losing a factory. Gouging your own customers is the fastest way to torch it. You'll never see the raw number — just one of five tiers, from Unknown up to Iconic.
• •Output quality. Every corporation now makes goods of a certain quality, built from four pillars: your tech (R&D), the quality of the inputs you buy, the wages you pay (paying well makes a better product — the efficiency wage), and your Logistics & Operations strength. The pillars cover for each other — strong tech and wages can turn ordinary materials into an excellent product — so you reach the quality you want by whatever path is cheapest for you. Quality flows up the supply chain: a good supplier makes your goods better. Raw mines and wells have no quality (ore is ore). You'll see an Average Quality number and a chart of it over time on every corporation.
• •Supply agreements. Two corporations can sign a private supply contract: a supplier commits to sell a commodity straight to a buyer, filled before the open market. The supplier's leftovers still flow to market, and if they fall short the buyer just tops up on the market as usual. Both sides have to agree, either can cancel, and the price has to stay within ±35% of the going market rate — no disguised gifts or gouging. Deals can be exclusive, and a guaranteed contract helps your delivery, which feeds your brand loyalty.
• •Logistics is now "Logistics & Operations" — the same capability, with a bigger job: it's one of the four pillars behind your product quality.

Now live

Brand loyalty, the loyal customer slice, output quality, and supply agreements are all switched on. The loyalty slice is the part that pays: a share of each market's customers now buys from the corporation they trust, at that corporation's posted price, even when someone cheaper exists. Reputations built during the shadow period are already in effect, so pricing consistently and delivering reliably pays off today. The groundwork for a fuller premium-demand system, where high quality itself commands a price premium beyond your loyal customers, is in place and coming in a later package.

Two more market systems shipped in this cycle and are staged dark for a later switch-on:

• •Resource prospecting and extraction contracts. Extraction corporations will be able to commission geological surveys to grow a state's resource capacity, with success odds and yield scaling with their R&D strength. Governments (national or state) can survey too, and can issue extraction contracts to corporations operating in their states: a share of capacity, a per-turn royalty paid into the treasury, a signing fee, and a term. Both sides have to agree, and government-issued shares are capped so no state can be fully contracted away. A new Resource Extraction Authority Act decides whether licensing power sits with the federal government, the states, or both. Full UI ships with it: a Prospect action on corp sectors, a Contracts tab, issuance from Congress, and headroom bars on state resource pages.
• •A cap on legacy stockpiles. Some markets carry enormous stock hoards from the old market system. Once this switches on, stock above roughly 400 turns of cover spoils faster, gradually working off the overhang instead of letting it flood the market. Nothing changes until we flip it.

Elections: campaigning now matters

The biggest political change in this update. An audit of the election engine found that ideological positioning was overwhelmingly dominant: the distance curve was so steep that favorability, party organization, money, and ground game were nearly irrelevant, and about half of all races resolved as landslides. We rebalanced it.

• •The positioning curve is compressed. Being closer to the voters still wins you votes, but it no longer drowns out everything else. The flat "same side as the voter" tribal bonus was also cut, and the party-organization advantage flattened. Validated against real resolved races: competitive races (decided by 10 points or less) up about 8 points, landslides down, while almost never changing who wins a race that was not close.
• •Votes are strictly conserved in crowded races. In multi-party races the engine could mint phantom votes when several parties peeled from the same pool. Outflows now rescale so a party can never lose more votes than it has to give.
• •State party organization and home-state advantage now work in general elections. The general-election engine was silently ignoring both, so presidential ground-game investment and home-state strength did nothing. They now apply, with the same caps as before.
• •Coattails: the display and the engine now agree. The engine and the election card used different rules for which parties get presidential and governor coattails, so the card could show a coattail the engine never applied, and vice versa. One rule now.
• •The persuasion panel shows honest numbers. Driver bars used to show raw values before the engine applied its persuadable-slice multiplier, overstating real impact by 5 to 20 times. The panel now shows the actual effect on the persuadable slice, with coattail tilts broken out separately.
• •Campaign-strength contributions are presidential-only, and the game now says so. Down-ballot races never consumed campaign strength, but the Campaign Manager happily took your money and actions and showed a fake vote boost. Contributions to non-presidential races are now rejected before any money moves, and the panel explains why.
• •Infamy now really drains favorability. The tooltip always claimed infamy costs favorability every turn. No engine code applied it. It does now, exactly as displayed: 60 infamy costs 2 favorability per turn.
• •Approval no longer whipsaws. State approval now moves at most 2 points per turn toward its metric-driven target instead of jumping several points overnight, and coattails read the damped value.

The right lane: metrics that respond when you govern from the right

This started in the badge and funding-bill rebalance and has grown into a real system, so it deserves its own section. The engine now has first-class metrics the political right campaigns on, and they respond to actual policy:

• •Economic Freedom is a live scored metric, computed from regulatory burden and small business formation. Cut regulation and the small-business rate climbs, and Economic Freedom follows.
• •Small Business Formation now moves when you legislate. Nearly 200 funding bills across every playable country carry a right-side tradeoff: spending on healthcare, education, welfare, and infrastructure trims economic freedom, so cutting it genuinely frees resources for the private sector. Defense spending stimulates defense-sector small business. R&D funding lifts formation too. Minimum-wage laws now tick small business formation as well.
• •These metrics now score approval with the voters who care. Economic freedom, regulatory burden, military readiness, national pride, civil liberties, and state media control each carry an axis affinity, so a deregulation drive lands with right-leaning voters specifically rather than vanishing into a national average.
• •Four new right-coded approval badges: Fiscal Hawk, Small Government, Deregulator, and Border Hawk, alongside the recalibrated Strong Defense and National Confidence badges. Strong Defense and National Confidence used to fire nearly everywhere because their thresholds were below the seeded values; they now require genuinely high military readiness and national pride. High Immigration Pressure was set so high it never triggered; it now activates at a realistic migration rate.
• •Two new state metrics: Firearm Rights and Border Security. Every state now tracks how broadly civilians may lawfully own and carry firearms, and how tightly entry at the national border is enforced. Firearms laws and immigration laws move them in both directions, and each direction has a real cost: restricting firearms trades rights for a measure of public safety, and tightening the border trades a little economic freedom for control. Right-leaning electorates reward high scores here the same way left-leaning electorates reward low poverty, so governing either way is a viable strategy. Two more approval badges, "Secure Border" and "Broad Firearm Rights," mark states that commit to the enforcement lane.

Stability

A quality wave under the hood: we restored our automated test gate and fixed the failures it had missed, cleared every outstanding type error, and root-caused a batch of dormant bugs that surfaced in the process (including a frozen education-secretary effect and a vote-tracking suggestion that could never complete). Region pages also load faster after an indexing fix, coming shortly. You should notice fewer oddities, not new features.

Also new

• •The Commodities tab now shows you what the world is short on, at a glance. The stock market's Commodities tab opens with a heat map that ranks every commodity from most scarce to most oversupplied. Anything glowing hot at the top is in short supply, which means it is selling above its normal price, so whoever produces it is getting paid a premium on every unit. Think of it as your shopping list for what to build. You can switch the view between the whole world, a single country, or one state, so you can see exactly where each thing is scarce and aim your production right at the shortage. Spot what is scarce, set up production, and become the supplier everyone has to buy from. The full price and supply table is still right below it.
• •Spot the shortage, be the supplier, get paid. Mining is one of the fastest ways to get rich in the game, and the sector page now hands you the map. If your own mine's deposits are nearly tapped out, you are leaving money on the table every turn, so the Resource Availability panel now points you straight to the states with the most room to grow for that resource, each linked to its region, so you can place or move a mine where the ore actually is. And when the whole world is short on a resource, its price climbs to a premium, so the company that steps in to fill that gap earns a premium on every unit. Find the deposits with headroom, plant your mines there, and become the supplier everyone has to buy from.
• •Your corporation's Financials tab now shows exactly what each sector earned. Gross Revenue per sector is the revenue that sector actually realized last turn, after unsold output, input shortages, capacity limits, and embargoes. Before, the page took one company-wide realization rate and applied it to every sector, so a sector selling everything and a sector selling almost nothing looked too similar, and a sector suspended by an embargo still showed a share of the average instead of the zero it actually earned. Each sector now reports its own real number, so the Financials tab matches your revenue chart and tells you which sectors are carrying the company and which are stalled.
• •Central bank chairs can reallocate forex revenue into lending (and back). Once per day, the chair can move up to half of the forex spread-revenue pool into lending reserves to expand line-of-credit capacity — or move spare lending reserves back into the forex war chest. Transfers that would leave outstanding loans uncovered are blocked.
• •Bill names now pass the same language filter as character and party names. Bill titles end up on public pages and in wire-service news, so slurs and strong profanity are no longer accepted in them (summaries and bill text still allow ordinary swearing). Automated wire-service one-liners also no longer appear in search-engine indexes — real player journalism still does.
• •Registering now requires accepting the Terms of Service on the server, not just in the form — closing a loophole where a hand-crafted signup request could skip it.
• •R&D pays off more for extraction companies. Breakthroughs now give a bigger revenue bump (up to 10%, from 3%), and the capacity boost scales with how large the state's existing resource pool is — a breakthrough in a rich deposit grows it much faster than before. R&D also now targets the sector that's most constrained by capacity limits, so the boost goes exactly where it's needed.
• •You can now attack NPP-run corporations directly. They used to be lumped into one uneditable slice of the market pie — now each shows up as its own target in the state economy view.
• •Broadband no longer collapses on older-era worlds. Games that began in an earlier decade — before home broadband existed — were keeping broadband pinned at its historical starting point instead of letting it grow with the times, so it showed up as almost nothing. It now catches up to where the era expects it, and affected worlds have been corrected.
• •Zoom a commodity all the way down to one state. The commodity detail page already let you switch between the global market and a single country. Now, once you have picked a country, you can pick a specific state to see its local price, supply, and demand, so you can spot exactly where a shortage or price spike is happening instead of just knowing which country it is in.
• •Groundwork for demographics to become real consumers in the economy (off by default while we tune it).
• •Presidential Primary bug fixes and balance changes.