Money & the Budget
Where revenue comes from and where it goes
Your tax rate, military spending, research spending, and social spending are never sliders — they're the sum of whichever laws you've chosen, capped by how much your state can actually administer, and eaten into by unrest, war, and devastation before a dollar reaches the treasury.
How it works
Rates come from your laws
Every relevant law you pick — how you tax, how you fund defense, recruitment, education, healthcare, pensions, family support — adds its own contribution to your national rates. There are hard ceilings: taxes can't exceed 60% of GDP, military spending caps at 20%, research at 5%, social spending at 50%. Getting to those ceilings takes deliberate policy, not a dial you can just turn up.
How it works
What you're owed isn't what you collect
The headline rate is only the starting point. Unrest cuts directly into how much taxable output you can actually reach, war devastation erodes it further, and a country exhausted by prolonged war loses a further chunk nationwide. A wealthy country in the middle of an unpopular war can find its real revenue is far below what its tax rate on paper suggests.
How it works
You see exactly where money goes
The budget breaks spending into real categories instead of one lump sum — research, for instance, separates what policy sets aside for research, what it costs just to keep your research centers running, and what your active projects are currently costing. Every research center beyond your free capital one is a running monthly bill, not a one-time expense.
How it works
A record you can look back on
Every country keeps a monthly history — treasury, total output, population, wealth per person, education, unrest, and every active national effect — going all the way back to the game's opening month. Click any country statistic to open its history and see how it's ranked, province by province.