1.1: Money, and Who Answers For It

1.0 put the world on the board. 1.1 puts a counterparty on the other side of your money. Savings used to sit at the central bank, where they could not be lost; now they sit in a bank someone runs, and that bank can fail. An index fund now votes the shares it holds. A large merger crosses a minister's desk. A union contract needs the members' votes, not just the president's signature. Most of what was a number in 1.0 is now another player's decision.

Charter a bank

Own a financial sector and you can charter a bank. Post the capital, take deposits from households and from other players, lend part of them out, and set your deposit and lending rates. The gap between what you pay savers and what you charge borrowers is your business.

Players can move savings out of the central bank into any bank they like, and the interest comes out of your cash instead of being created. Households move toward whoever pays best. Every non-command country starts with two banks already trading, so there is a market from turn one.

What a bank may be is a matter of law. Where a country separates retail and investment banking, your charter is one or the other, and an investment bank takes no deposits and runs a trading book instead. Where banking is universal, one bank does both. Historical worlds start separated, modern ones universal. Either can be changed: the Banking Separation Act is a bill any seeded legislature can take up. Command economies charter no private banks.

How much you can lend is set by the central bank. The reserve requirement is its third lever, next to the rate and the money supply, and it is the one that reaches private banks directly.

Chartering costs you output. A chartered financial sector splits its capacity between branch network and ordinary financial services. More branches means a higher deposit ceiling and less production. You set the split, from 10% to 90%. One sector cannot pay you twice.

Watch the badge

Every bank publishes a confidence badge: green, amber or red.

Deposits leave an amber bank steadily and a red one quickly. A bank that stays red with too little capital fails and is wound up. The badge moves a full turn before deposits do, so there is always time to react.

Failure spreads. When a bank goes down, every other bank in that currency takes a panic hit for four turns whatever their own books look like.

Small depositors are protected. Every deposit-taking bank pays a premium into a national insurance fund each turn, priced by how thin its reserves are. When a bank fails, its remaining cash and capital form a recovery pool. Insured balances are kept whole, money above the cap takes a haircut, household deposits come back in full, and whatever the pool and the fund cannot cover falls to the Treasury, on the budget, where you can see it.

A regulator checks your work. Every bank is held to a capital standard and tested once a year against a downturn.

Borrow when you are short

A retail or universal bank can draw on the central bank's discount window, up to a quarter of its deposits. Banks can also lend each other spare headroom, and if the borrower defaults the lender eats it. Investment and universal banks run a proprietary book across equities, fund units, bonds and currencies, marked to market every turn, leveraged up to three times their equity base. Breach the cap and positions are liquidated at whatever the market is paying, and your confidence takes the damage.

Where you run it

Three surfaces cover all of it.

The /banking hub, in the World nav, is the market view. It lists every central bank and every operating private bank with its rates and its badge, holds your savings with a per-currency selector for who keeps them, and takes your loan applications. A personal loan credits your personal cash; a corporation loan credits that company's liquid capital. Neither lands in savings. Open loans and the credit destination are listed on Your accounts. How much you can borrow is the lowest of the bank's own cash reserves, leftover deposit headroom, and 35% of demonstrated income after existing private-bank payments — not the corporation's cash on hand, and not bond issuance headroom.

The Bank console is where you run one. Rate sliders set what you pay savers and charge borrowers, inside the corridor the central bank allows. The blacklist keeps borrowers you have learned about away from your loan book. The prop book shows every position your trading desk holds, marked to market, with your leverage against the cap. Interbank lending puts your spare headroom to work at another bank's risk. The discount window covers the turn your reserves run short. Recapitalize moves corporate cash into posted capital to cure a shortfall before the supervisor pulls your charter.

The central bank page is where the system itself is governed. The Reserve Requirement tab sets how much of every deposit stays locked, which is the ceiling on every private loan book in the currency. The Insurance Fund tab shows what stands between small depositors and a failure, and what each bank paid in. The regime panel shows whether your currency floats, holds a band, or holds a peg, what it costs to defend, and what the impossible trinity forces the bank to give up; a seated chair can change course. And the chair can be dismissed from here, at a price covered below.

A banking guide joins the wiki.

Prop trading and contagion each have a kill switch, so if either misbehaves in a live world we can turn that part off without taking banking away.

The central bank has something to lose

Credibility used to be a personal score that changed nothing. It now weakens the one thing a central bank does with words rather than money: talking inflation expectations down. A discredited bank keeps every mechanical lever and can still cool an economy. It just has to do it the expensive way.

Hold the stance your own rate corridor calls for for three turns running and credibility recovers, whether or not inflation has moved yet, and the chair's card counts the turns down for you.

Two things that used to be free now cost. Sacking the chair no longer wipes the slate clean, and setting the bank's rate from the finance seat is charged immediately. Waiting out a chair's term is always cheaper than firing them.

The committee really decides now. Where a rate-setting board is seated, an attempt to set the rate around it is refused and the rate card sends you to the committee room.

A currency has a regime. It can float, hold a band, or hold a peg, and capital can move freely or not. You cannot have a fixed rate, free capital movement and your own monetary policy all at once. Try to move your rate while defending a peg with the capital account open and the move is refused, with the reason spelled out.

Losing credibility costs money. Low credibility widens your sovereign spread, up to 1.5 extra points on what your government pays to borrow. It weakens your FX defense: at zero credibility an intervention holds only 70% of the band it should. And it sends depositors toward foreign currency: retention bottoms out at 80%, and every unit that leaves is a unit your banks cannot lend. All three are exactly zero at scrutiny 0, so a bank that behaves pays nothing.

Injecting liquidity now reaches the banks. The new money is advanced to the currency's chartered banks in proportion to their deposits, as debt they repay, which is what the label always claimed. Private bank deposits and loan books also enter the broad money aggregates, so a growing banking sector no longer makes measured M2 shrink and trick the policy engine into tightening.

The independence fight

A government can take control of its central bank. There are three ways in, each priced in scrutiny, the number that drives the credibility penalties above. Setting the rate directly from the finance seat costs 12, charged immediately. Dismissing the chair costs 18, and unlike a resignation or an expired term, which shed a quarter of the bank's accumulated scrutiny with the outgoing chair, a dismissal sheds nothing. Revoking independence by statute costs 22, and restoring it later refunds none of that.

Churning chairs therefore cannot wipe the slate: each dismissal stacks penalties on a score that only recovers one way, three consecutive turns of holding the stance the rate corridor calls for. A government that wants the rate badly enough can have it today; what it pays is the section above, dearer borrowing, a softer band, and depositors drifting to other currencies.

Index funds grow up

Funds vote. A fund holding a large slice of your corporation used to count toward the votes needed to pass anything while casting none, so the more the funds absorbed the closer a company drifted to deadlock. A fund has a ballot now. Hold at least half its units and you direct it, from a "Funds you direct" block on the vote card, and you can change or withdraw the instruction while the vote is open. An undirected fund mirrors the majority actually cast. With nobody to follow and no majority to mirror it abstains and leaves the count. Control is checked when the vote closes, so selling down drops your instruction rather than handing it to the buyer.

Getting into an index is something you earn. Any listed corporation used to qualify, however hollow. Inclusion now takes 15% of your shares in public hands, a market value at least 5% of the median of that index's other candidates, and a solvent balance sheet. The size bar is measured against your peers, so it means the same thing in 1953 as in a modern world. An existing constituent has to fail three checks in a row before the fund sells, and when it sells it names the standard you missed.

You can argue your way in. Petition the index committee, which is the cabinet officeholder who also rules on mergers. Petitioning costs corporate cash, paid on filing and never returned. If a player holds the seat the money goes to them and the record is public. If nobody does, the treasury takes it and the deadline decides on a fixed rule: a serious contribution against a shortfall close enough to the bar to be arguable. A cheque alone will not carry a shell into an index. You are re-measured when the decision lands, so fixing the problem while you wait is a valid answer. Insolvency cannot be waived. Waivers run for a fixed term.

The committee cannot throw out a company that meets every published standard. That power is deliberately not in this release.

Being held is worth something to you. Once index funds hold 10% of your stock your credit rating improves a grade and your share price carries a premium.

Sponsor a fund

Every fund used to be the system's. Now a financial corporation can run money for strangers and get paid for it, from the Deals tab.

The charter fee is 2.5M, paid to your country's treasury and never returned. Seed capital is 10M minimum, and it backs the fund's first units and stays at risk for the fund's whole life. You choose the mandate; the mandate picks the holdings, not you. Your income is the expense ratio you set, between 0.10% and 2.00% a year, skimmed off assets under management every turn. Set it high and you earn more per turn from a fund fewer people want to hold, because the fee is a real drag on the fund's value and the number is on the card.

You get no investor upside on the fund's holdings. The fee is the whole business, so your incentive is to attract holders and keep them, not to trade against them. If the fund cannot back at least 90% of its units, the fee stops until it can: your income shuts off exactly when your holders' position is impaired. Wind the fund up and holders are paid the realized value of what it actually holds, and your seed capital comes back last, after every one of them.

Fund dividends and fund gains are not taxed, for the same reason share dividends and share sales are not taxed per transaction. Taxing only funds would make holding a fund strictly worse than holding the same shares directly. The wiki now states the rule.

Your portfolio counts your fund units. Wealth held in funds was missing from your portfolio value and your wealth chart. Snapshots taken before this release show no fund figure rather than a zero, so your history does not show a fake jump. Funds in other currencies also valued shareholdings in one unit and cash in another, which underpaid their holders on dividends by the whole exchange rate. Every leg now uses one unit.

Groups, mergers, and the tax authority

Big mergers get reviewed. A deal that would hand you too much of a market is referred to the government instead of clearing on its own. What counts as too much is whatever competition law that country passed.

The reviewer can clear the deal, clear it with remedies, or block it. Remedies are measured by what happens to the market: spinning a division off into a company you still wholly own changes no concentration and discharges nothing.

The reviewer has an office now. Hold the seat and the referrals waiting on you appear on your cabinet office page under Merger Review, with the ones you have already decided beside them. You do not need to run a company. Company owners still see the referrals their own deals are caught in, and nobody else's.

A parent and its subsidiaries are one group. A formalized group gets a combined balance sheet, and a loss in one member can be set against profit in another, so carrying a loss-making subsidiary is a strategy rather than dead weight. Relief is capped at the group's profits, the tax it actually paid, and one country.

Groups get better slowly. Members converge 5% a turn toward the best performer, and never all the way. It only pulls upward, so a weak subsidiary does not drag the parent down. A company spun back out carries a penalty for roughly two years, so splitting and re-merging does not farm the bonus.

Pricing between your own companies is audited. Selling to your own subsidiary across a border at a price you invented builds exposure, and past a threshold the tax authority reprices the transactions at arm's length and adds a 40% surcharge. It is deterministic, not a random audit roll. Trades inside one country are ignored, because group loss relief already nets those out.

Ownership loops are refused at the point of purchase, and the message names the loop. The wiki also stops describing subsidiaries as automatic above 50%: profits do not consolidate without a formalized managed subsidiary.

Bargain with an employer

Unions could organise, strike and elect a president, but there was never anyone on the other side of the table.

A union leader opens a campaign against a specific employer, covering all that employer's matching workplaces in the country. You set a wage floor, how long the agreement runs, and how many of those turns are free of strikes. The CEO can accept, reject, or counter. Offers alternate, the history stays visible, and a rejection or a missed deadline creates a dispute.

A dispute starts with an overtime ban, grows into a selective strike, and can reach an industry strike. Each rung needs more member support than the last and costs real money out of the strike fund while it runs. An overtime ban you cannot afford ends itself. Either side can keep tabling offers throughout, and where labour law allows it either side can ask for government mediation, which builds a package out of both sides' real offers weighted by your leverage.

Leverage comes from the world, not a stat. It is recomputed every turn from how many workers are organised, how far pay trails what workers expect where they live, how tight the labour market is, what collective-bargaining law says, and how long the strike fund lasts. Organising during a dispute, losing members, or a law passed while you are out all move the offer on the table.

Settle and every covered workplace pays the negotiated floor until the agreement expires, then pay returns to the employer's own level. The floor feeds the same corporation costs, incomes and macro numbers as any other wage decision. Unresolved disputes temporarily weaken worker security and civic life.

Non-player union leaders and non-player CEOs use the same system. The old back channels are gone: no hidden wage concessions, no strikes written straight into the world.

Win a pension

This is a funded scheme won at the bargaining table, separate from any state pension.

A pension contribution is a term of the agreement, set as a percentage of the covered wage bill, up to 15%. Every turn the agreement runs, the employer pays it out of its own cash. If the employer cannot pay, nothing arrives.

Your members build up claims at 8% of covered wages a turn. Assets over claims is the funding ratio, and that is the number everyone argues about. Settle below the accrual rate and the scheme falls further behind every turn, so the rate you accept is a real decision in both directions.

Pensions get paid. Members who retire draw from the scheme every turn, out of the money that is in it. If the scheme is short, every pensioner takes the same proportional cut. The unpaid part is not forgiven: the claim stays on the books and the employer is asked for a top-up again next turn.

Schemes invest. A scheme puts its assets into the broad index for its country, or the global index if there is none. Not the sector its own members work in: a fund whose assets collapse the same week its employer does is not a pension. It keeps back enough cash for eight turns of benefits first, so investing can never be the reason a pension gets cut.

Union pages show wages, organisation, cooldowns and agreement protection local by local. Industrial action starts inside a dispute, and its preview names the affected locals, shows the exact treasury cost, and asks you to confirm before the money moves. Union leaders pick election candidates by name and can take a public position on live domestic bills. CEOs answer campaigns from an Industrial Relations panel in the CEO Office.

Organize a union without running one

If you were not a union president, the union page had nothing on it you could press. Now the organize drive is open to everyone, on any union in your country, whether or not it already has a president.

A drive costs 5 action points and adds 10 strength to the union. It also adds 10 to your own banked total, and that total is your vote weight when the presidency is open. A union needs 100 strength before it can elect anyone, so ten drives from a standing start, from one person or ten.

Strength decays 0.5% a turn, on the union and on every organizer. A union nobody works at loses its power. So does an organizer who stops showing up. Whoever organized first does not hold the union forever.

Your union tells you things now

A lot of the union system was working and simply never said so.

• •A union under a ban says so on its own page, instead of letting you press buttons that return an error.
• •Your president can post a public wage claim again. It binds nothing by itself. It is what the union brings to the table, and every employer in the industry can see it.
• •Holding an overtime ban costs money every turn. You now see what it costs before you escalate, how many turns your treasury can fund, and you get told when a ban ends because the money ran out.
• •When your leverage moves mid-campaign you can see which input moved it: coverage, grievance, the labour market, the law, or your strike fund. Your employer sees four of those five. They do not get to read your strike fund.
• •A pension scheme that cuts benefits says so plainly, and the fund's cash, invested value and unpaid benefits are all on the panel.
• •If an employer tries to break your union, you are told. So is every organizer. You are told when it backfires too.

Pensions were charging employers 24 times too much

A unit bug. Wage bills are stored on a daily basis and the pension charge read that as if it were a single turn, so every employer under a collective agreement paid 24 times the rate they agreed to, and the workers' claim grew 24 times too fast.

Both sides scale together, so funding ratios do not move. What changes is the cash: pension costs drop to what was actually bargained. CEOs also get two new lines under Operating Expenses, contributions and deficit top-ups, so the charge is no longer money leaving with no explanation.

Running a sector

Small states are cheaper to grow in. Holding most of a market used to cost the same to expand whether you had fought four rivals for it or were the only firm who ever showed up, so nobody built in quiet states and demand went unserved.

Power stations improve the grid. Building energy and utility capacity did nothing for a region's grid reliability, which moved only on infrastructure spending, so energy ministers were building plants for nothing. A region with enough energy capacity for the size of its economy now gets a more reliable grid, one running short pays for it, and building far past what a region needs helps less and less.

National corporations can change production methods, with the same retooling period as anywhere else, instead of being stuck with whatever they started with.

See what you made on your trades. Your portfolio has a Trade History section listing every share bought and sold, with profit or loss on each sale and a running total. Sales are matched against your oldest shares first, and stock splits are handled properly. Shares you still hold are not counted as profit until you sell. CEOs can see the company's book the same way.

Behind the Iron Curtain

East German elections stop pretending to be a contest. The Volkskammer is filled from a single National Front list on shares agreed in advance.

What the vote does decide is your standing inside your own party's block. A bloc party is a real place to build a career, and a strong campaign moves you up your party's list. If you want the split itself to change, that is a fight inside the ruling party's leadership. Seat projections now show the allocation you will actually get, and the vote pie shows real popularity.

East Germany is a real one-party state. The General Secretary faces the same internal party pressure the Soviet Premier does. Confidence drifts on what your government passes, the regime can escalate through discontent and crisis, and nationalising an industry carries political consequences. The bloc parties are described honestly too: National Front partners holding allocated seats, not an opposition.

Factions split for a reason

This one is not a DD rule, it applies to every one-party regime. When a regime reaches an internal challenge, the people who walk out are the ones who actually disagree with the party line, ranked on the same economic and social axes elections already use, so you can read your own position against your party's and predict who goes. They leave together: your caucus goes as a bloc, and the party you found stands where your people stand. Before this a breakaway took a random slice of the bench and copied its parent's positions word for word.

Campaigners can manage NPPs, once the committee says so

You asked for more than three or four people in a party to be able to do anything (suggestion #269). Campaigners now can.

A Campaigner used to be able to spend the party's national Political Strength to Build Org, and nothing else. They can now also use NPP Management: the influence actions, and moving an NPP between states. Recruitment still belongs to the chair and vice-chair, because that spends party money on new bodies rather than steering the ones you have.

The seat is no longer the chair's alone to hand out. The chair still picks the names, up to three, but each name goes to the National Committee as a nomination and takes the seat only when the committee confirms it. Removal runs the other way: the chair can fire a Campaigner instantly, no vote needed, and the National Committee can also strip one with a Remove Officer proposal. So the people doing the work are approved by the party, and anyone who goes rogue is out the same turn.

The chair and vice-chair keep everything they already had, regardless.

Your union votes on the deal

The president can no longer sign a contract on your behalf.

When the president accepts an employer's offer, it goes to the members. Every organizer who has run drives holds a ballot, weighted by the strength they have banked, exactly as in a leadership election. Ratify it and the agreement takes effect. Reject it and nothing is signed: the offer stays on the table, the clocks keep running, and the president has to move the package before asking you again.

You have three turns to vote. The vote ends early once a majority of all organizing strength has landed one way. If nobody votes, the president's acceptance stands.

Your weight is fixed when the vote opens, so it does not drift while you decide. The employer is told a vote is running and when it closes, and nothing else.

Choose your language

The interface now speaks more than English. Pick a language in Settings under Appearance and the menus, settings, tutorial, landing page, sign-in, your profile, and the elections hub follow. German is first, with more to come. In-game content such as news, mail, and legislation stays in English for now.

Also in this release

• •Picking a player or company in the bank console no longer breaks the panel. Selecting a search result called a function that had been renamed in a refactor, so the click threw instead of filling the field.
• •Multi-seat chambers are decided by votes again, not by how many candidates you ran. In any chamber that seats several members per region (the US House, the Commons, the Volkskammer and the rest), each candidate was drawing a full share of every voter group, and then the seats were pooled by party. A party that ran two candidates in a region therefore took about two thirds of its delegation on the same level of support, and a party that ran one was held to a third. In the 1953 founding House this ran both ways: one party took 22 of Pennsylvania's 30 seats on 62% of the House vote in a state where the same voters gave the other party 53-59% in every single-seat race that turn, and the mirror image happened in California. Support now sets a party's share and the party's candidates divide it between themselves, so an extra name on the ballot no longer buys seats. Strong candidates still help: a slate is judged on its average, so a weak running mate costs you.
• •Corporations in a formalized group get a group overview next to their subsidiaries: consolidated numbers, loss relief, and transfer pricing audits, all in one place.
• •Fund safety displays stopped claiming safety they did not have. A never-reachable auto-pause branch read as a live guard. Two simultaneous redemptions could also both spend the same fund cash, and now cannot.
• •Corporate deals are fully accounted. Acquisitions, hostile takeovers and spin-offs moved money without leaving a record, so the money-conservation checks read an ordinary acquisition as cash appearing and vanishing. The spin-off fee now goes to the treasury instead of being destroyed. The same pass covered loans, repayments, deposit interest, prop trades, insurance payouts and central bank advances.
• •Central bank margin interest is revenue. It was being destroyed rather than credited, and a bank that could not pay simply never paid, forever. It accrues now and counts against the collateral cap. A related bug meant a bank that borrowed only at the discount window paid no interest at all.
• •Italian politicians stop being renamed forever. Around 3% of generated Italian names use a compound surname like De Luca, and the check for whether a name belonged to its country split on spaces and decided it did not, so those characters were renamed on every cleanup run to another name that could be compound again. Verified across 64,000 generated names with no mismatches.
• •The index fund turn phase got noticeably faster. It was scanning the whole bond collection four times per fund and re-reading the exchange rate table once per bid.
• •Admin tools no longer show stale data after you change a filter.
• •Achievement pages stopped erroring for older awards. Achievements granted before characters and accounts were tracked separately made the recent-holders list fail outright. It now shows the character who earned it.
• •A corrupt image upload gives you a message, not a failure. A truncated or damaged file now returns a clear "re-save it and try again" instead of a server error.
• •Alt detection stopped running blind on part of the player base. The hourly scan had a candidate limit set before launch, and the active player base had grown past it, so some accounts were never compared against each other. The limit now sits well above the whole player base.
• •You can take back a vote for CEO. Voting was one way: you could switch your vote to someone else, but never withdraw it. Founding a corporation also casts a vote for yourself that you never chose and could not remove. The Voted marker on a shareholder is now the undo button, and the tally has a Withdraw control.
• •A CEO who moves house can still be voted for. Candidates have to live in the corporation's HQ state. That rule was being applied to the sitting CEO too, so a CEO who moved, or whose corporation relocated, could not be re-elected by their own shareholders while a rival in the right state ran unopposed. The incumbent is now exempt.
• •The corporation page stopped offering you a job you already have. Voting for the current CEO left a standing "you have been offered the CEO position" banner with no notification and nothing to accept.
• •The bank console says why its buttons are off. While private banking is frozen it told the CEO that only the CEO can issue a charter.
• •Your union page says who the president is. A union with a president showed no leadership section at all, so there was no name, no reason given for the missing election, and no way to see who else was organizing. It now names the president and lists every organizer with their banked strength and their share of the vote.
• •Legislators outside the US are paid for their seats. If you held a seat in the Volkskammer, the Supreme Soviet, the Dáil, the Sejm, or any other legislature outside the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Canada or China, your seat granted you no extra actions per turn and no national influence. The bonus table the turn processor read had only ever been filled in for a handful of countries, and every other office silently scored zero. Every elected office in every country now grants the generation its own country config lists.
• •The bank blacklist works in names now. It used to ask you to type 24-character database ids, which nothing in the game shows you, and the saved list came back as unreadable hex. Search for a player or a company, click to add, click the x to remove. Index funds are picked from a list by name. Your loan book and your interbank deals name the other side too.
• •Who your bank refuses is private. The list was readable by anyone who asked the server for it. Only you, an admin, or your currency's central bank chair can see it now.
• •The bank console tells you how the bank is doing. It opens with what the confidence band actually means, whether your capital clears the minimum and the stress test, whether reserves cover the requirement, and what is in arrears. The nine panels below it are grouped into Overview, Lending, Funding, Trading and Admin instead of stacked in one column.
• •NPP union presidents have names again. An NPC-run union showed the president as Unknown even though the seat was filled, and the link opened a character page for the wrong kind of id. It now shows the NPP's name and opens their politician profile.
• •Index fund subscribe and redeem show the same currency. Buying a global fund from East Germany quoted the price in Marks and the redeem payout in dollars, so a unit that cost M376 looked like it paid back only $79. Both sides now follow your wallet display preference.