Politics & Law
Parties, popular support, and a wall of national laws
Every country — democracy, one-party state, or military regime — runs on the same two numbers: how many people actually back a party, and how much power that party actually holds. What you get to do about it is a stack of real law choices, not a slider.
How it works
Support and power aren't the same thing
Popular Support is how much of the country currently backs a party. Governmental Power is how much of the state that party actually controls — seats, offices, the machinery of government. In a democracy, elections convert one into the other on a schedule. In an autocracy, power doesn't move on its own — it takes an event, a coup, or a deliberate decision from you to shift it.
The head of state is modeled as an office, not a person — a monarchy, a presidency, a ruling committee, a junta — so the same country can pass from one leader to the next without the game ever depicting anyone by name or face.
How it works
Laws you actually pick
National law is organized into five groups — agriculture and economy, political institutions, society and civil rights, welfare, and the military — and you hold exactly one option per group at a time. Swapping to a new one simply replaces whatever you had before. Your tax rate, military spending, research spending, and social spending are all built from whichever laws you've chosen, not set on a dial.
Some laws are only on the table for the countries they make sense for — License Raj only appears for the Indian subcontinent, the Homestead Act only in the Americas, Aliyah only for Israel.
How it works
Elections, when you allow them
Whether a country holds elections at all is itself a law. Where a country doesn't already run on a historical schedule, you set how often — every three, four, or five years. Abolish elections and any historical schedule is gone for good; restore them later and you start a fresh cycle on your own terms.
On election day, the Electoral System law decides how support turns into power: winner-take-all, first-past-the-post with a bonus for the leader, proportional representation, a mixed system, or a corporatist model where organized interest groups get seats directly. Whoever ends up holding the most power becomes the ruling party.
How it works
Political capital
Political capital is what you spend to change any of this. Your daily income depends on which factions back your government and how much real sway each of them has — a government propped up by a powerful faction earns more than one running on a shaky coalition. Income is capped, so stacking every possible reform into the same month doesn't work; you're always making a sequencing decision, not just a spending one.