Wages, Maps & the Living Electorate

0.4.0 is a structural release: the electorate is census-derived, corporations get tech trees and explicit wage costs, and US House seats are won district by district. Most of it is on now; three big systems will be enabled in phases as we soak each layer.

What you'll notice

• •States have real political texture. Voter archetypes are derived from each state's census makeup — race, age, education, wealth, and ideology — calibrated per era across the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Ireland, and Brazil. Evangelicals in Texas sit to the right of Evangelicals in Massachusetts; the same platform lands differently state to state. Goes live at the next era reset. See also Demographics & Targeting.
• •Corporate tech trees. Every corporation has a Tech tab: decade-tiered R&D with Corporate and Sector lanes, cash + R&D Score unlocks, and advanced operating strategies gated behind research.
• •Wages and workers. Labour is an explicit sector cost with a CEO wage slider and minimum-wage floors. Wage choices feed unemployment, migration, and median income.
• •US House gerrymandering is on. House elections resolve per congressional district. A state trifecta can redraw the map; district lean, compactness, and fairness laws bound how far a gerrymander can go. Auto-map presets and a composition summary make the editor usable.
• •Bond defaults are less punishing. Corporations that default on their bonds now automatically refinance when they can afford to — issuing a replacement bond instead of being forced to sell off sectors. Selling sectors only happens when refinancing isn't possible, and you're now notified either way so a resolution never happens silently.
• •Cleaner markets. AI-run (NPP) companies no longer clutter the exchange or your state's sector view — they're sorted below player companies and hidden behind a toggle on the stock list, and grouped into a single slice on state market-share charts. More of them now populate the world's economies as background competition.
• •Your corporations now show real commodity flows and market share. The Commodities tab lays out what each of your corporations produces and consumes every turn — per commodity, with a by-region breakdown and live market prices/stock. And Charts → Market Share shows your share and rank in every industry you operate in, at home. (Both were placeholders before; they're now wired to live data.)
• •Wiki updated for the new demographics model — Demographics and Demographics & Targeting.

Rolling out in phases

These ship in 0.4.0 but turn on gradually — no fixed schedule in the notes:

• •Unions — sector unionization, strikes, and the broader union gameplay loop.
• •Commodities & corporations — price-realized sector revenue and the deeper market tiers built for the corp rework: clearing (your output competes for real buyers — set your pricing posture, and revenue reflects how much actually sold) and capital (your growth budget becomes investment that builds productive capacity, and a company is valued for the capacity it owns, not just this turn's earnings). When a tier is switched on it fades in gradually — nothing changes on the first turn and valuations drift rather than lurch, so you have time to adapt. Each sector's detail page gains panels explaining exactly what's driving its revenue. See Market Tiers: Clearing & Capital.
• •Smarter NPPs — the graduated NPP-autonomy system (smarter bill votes, executive behavior, AI politicians that found and grow their own companies, and related depth).

Platform

• •Wire transfers capped at ₳50M per 24 hours (up from ₳5M). The limit is anchor-normalised so it applies identically across USD / GBP / JPY / EUR senders.
• •Broad bug-fix pass across elections, corporations, legislation, and UI edge cases.
• •Performance patches on hot paths (party pages, turn processing, map rendering).
• •Expanded error tracking and reporting — Sentry coverage on turn phases, API failures, and client error boundaries, with reference codes on error pages.