v1.1.2Aug 13, 2026·8 min readBeta 2

1.1.2: The steel strike

A nationwide steel strike the President must break, with real choices: nationalize by executive order and face the Supreme Court, rush an emergency bill through Congress, broker talks, or concede the wage demands.

Majorcrisisunionsexecutivelegislationeconomybankingtrademarketcorporations

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Court rulings now open a readable law page. When the Supreme Court (or a UK judicial review) hands down a ruling that changes policy, the "Bill Enacted" announcement links to the enacted law. That link used to hit a "Not found" page because the ruling applied its policy change without ever creating the law record behind the link. The ruling now writes a proper enacted-law page, showing the case, the policy it changed, and the seated vote.
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Admin-launched crises now hit the wire. A crisis started by an admin showed up as a decision to answer but posted no news event and sent no notification, so it could arrive with no announcement. Every crisis now posts to the wire and notifies affected players the moment it begins, however it was started.
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You can change your bank's charter type from the console. Switching between retail, universal, and investment charters was possible in the rules but had no button, so a chartered CEO could not find it. The Admin tab of the bank console now has a "Change charter type" control. Moving to an investment charter returns your whole deposit book, and a 24-turn cooldown applies after a switch. The move posts no new capital and keeps your charter history.
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A nationwide steel strike. The steelworkers walk out and the shutdown spreads to everything that runs on steel: autos, defense, construction, and power all feel the supply dry up while the mills stand idle. It is a crisis the President has to answer, and every answer has a cost.
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Four ways to break it, each with consequences.
- •Nationalize by executive order. Seize the mills at once and run them as state enterprises. Fast and decisive, but the order is challenged in the Supreme Court, and a bench that leans against you can strike it down and hand the industry back.
- •Send Congress an emergency bill. Nationalize at fair value with no court risk, if it passes. You need the votes, and the strike burns on while the floor debates.
- •Bring both sides to the table. Open government-brokered talks between the steelmakers and the union. The industry stays private and you earn goodwill, but a deal is not guaranteed.
- •Concede the wage demands. Impose the union's wage floor and the furnaces relight the same day, at the price of higher costs and inflation from then on.
- •Or hold firm and let the strike run. You concede nothing and set no precedent, while the economy bleeds.
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Crises that actually do things. The steel strike is the first crisis built on a new system where a decision can reach into the rest of the game, not just move a number. Choosing to nationalize really seizes the mills; the court case is a real case the Justices decide; the emergency bill is a real bill Congress votes on. Future crises will be built the same way.
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"Room for 0" was counting supply you can never compete with. When you looked at building a new sector, the game measured demand against world supply. That total included goods locked behind embargoes and goods produced in countries that do not trade with anyone. So a market running a real shortage could report itself oversupplied, and every state on the map showed room for nothing.

Take oil. World figures said supply beat demand, so the answer everywhere was "oversupplied, expect your output to go unsold". But almost all of that surplus was Soviet oil that American companies are embargoed from touching. The market a US oil company can actually sell into was running a shortage with tens of thousands of barrels a day going unmet.

Build advice now measures each market against the demand your company can really reach: your home country's own buyers, minus what imports already serve, plus what you can export. It is the same calculation the turn engine uses when it decides what your plants sell, so the advice and the result finally agree.
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The commodities board has a Reachable view. The shortage list and the world map both gained a lens that shows what your country's producers can actually sell into, rather than production against consumption inside the borders. The older views are still there and now say what they measure, so a shortage that imports already cover no longer reads as a gap to fill.
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What this changes for you. Sectors that looked closed may now show room, and a few that looked open will show less. Both directions are the same fix: the number now describes your market rather than the whole planet. Nothing about your existing plants, cash or contracts changed.

You can build against imports

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Importing a good no longer means "no room to build". 1.1.2 started measuring each market by what your country can actually reach, which was the right idea and the wrong number. It counted demand that imports were already serving as demand that was taken, so any good your country buys from abroad reported room for nothing at all. Food showed zero room in the United States, Britain, Japan, Italy and China at the same time, no matter how much each was importing.

That was backwards. Your own factories and farms sell before any import does, so building at home pushes imports out one for one. What a country imports is not a wall, it is the size of the opening.

American food is the clearest case: the United States buys over a million units a day of grain from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. That is now what the build screen shows as room, because a US farm would take that business rather than sit unsold.
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Nothing opened up that was not really open. Markets in a genuine glut still show no room, and countries that already feed themselves are unchanged. Only the demand currently being met from abroad is counted, and only for goods your country actually imports.

State broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain

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Eastern bloc media makes state broadcasting now, not adverts. Advertising exists because rival firms compete for your custom. Behind the Iron Curtain there are no rival brands and no marketing budgets, yet every Warsaw Pact state had been running a full commercial advertising industry. The result was absurd: Hungary was producing over a thousand times more advertising than anyone there wanted to buy, and Poland was putting out nearly five times as much as the United States.

All of it piled into the world market and dragged the price to the floor, so media companies everywhere, including yours, were selling a tiny fraction of what they made at a heavy discount.

Bloc broadcasters, presses and cinemas now produce state information and culture instead, which is what they actually were, and their governments fund it out of the education budget. Their output is unchanged in value: it has been re-pointed, not cut.
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What you will notice. If you own media anywhere, the advertising price should recover and more of what you make should actually sell. Bloc media companies gain a reliable state customer in place of a market that was never going to buy from them.

Take your company back from a caretaker

•You can take your company back from a caretaker. Handing day-to-day operation to an NPP caretaker was hiding your CEO tab, which is where the Resume Control button lives, so there was no way to reclaim the company you still owned. Your CEO tab now stays put while a caretaker runs things, and the Resume Control button is right there whenever you want it back.
•A short wait before handing off again. After you resume control, you now wait 3 days before you can hand the company to a caretaker again. The card tells you how long is left.

Times now show in your local timezone

•Timestamps show in your local time. Election deadlines, vote closing times, transaction times, and the other dates shown around the game were written in the server's timezone, so a time that said "closes 6:00 PM" meant 6:00 PM somewhere else, not where you are. Every one of these now shows in your own local timezone, so the time you read matches your clock.

A revoked bank charter returns your money

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Losing a charter no longer loses your money. When the supervisor revokes a bank charter for missing the recapitalization deadline, the bank's cash and its trading book now come back to your corporation, the same as any other charter revoke. Investment banks, whose value is in their trading book rather than in deposits, were the ones hit hardest by the old behavior. Banks that still owe depositors pay those depositors first, as before.
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National Corporation profits now add up on the page. The corporation overview showed one large number labelled as money sent to the budget, but it was really the corporation's whole operating profit. It did not subtract the share the CEO keeps in the corporation, and it did not account for cash the corporation does not have on hand, so the page could show a large profit while the budget received little. The page now walks the money through each step: profit, the part kept as working capital, the part remitted (limited by cash on hand), debt service, and what actually reaches the treasury. The remitted figure now matches the budget's state-enterprise line, and when cash limits the remittance the page says so.
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Union pages now show total membership. A union page listed a Unionization percentage per employer but never added them up, so you could not see how many workers the union actually represented. The stats strip now shows a Members count with the union's density (its share of the whole workforce) underneath, and each sector row shows its worker count. This reads coverage, which is kept separate from Strength so a large union is not mistaken for a powerful one.
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National Corporation sector money now uses clear, consistent labels. The Holdings tab called daily sector revenue and operating profit "per turn", while the sector page mixed daily totals, hourly figures and per-unit averages. Holdings now says "per financial day," the sector page clearly separates each period and scope, and both pages explain that sector operating profit is not the amount remitted to the treasury. Holdings also has a direct Open sector link, so you no longer need to open the build window just to reach a sector.
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Party officers no longer keep their post forever when nobody stands. If a national party leadership election ended with no candidates, the sitting officer stayed in the job and the party had no way to vote them out. Now, if the officer does not stand for re-election, their term ends when the cycle closes, the seat becomes vacant and a fresh election opens. Standing unopposed still keeps the seat: an uncontested race is not a defeat. Officers already in post are unaffected until their current cycle finishes.

You can build against imports

•

Importing a good no longer means "no room to build". 1.1.2 started measuring each market by what your country can actually reach, which was the right idea and the wrong number. It counted demand that imports were already serving as demand that was taken, so any good your country buys from abroad reported room for nothing at all. Food showed zero room in the United States, Britain, Japan, Italy and China at the same time, no matter how much each was importing.

That was backwards. Your own factories and farms sell before any import does, so building at home pushes imports out one for one. What a country imports is not a wall, it is the size of the opening.

American food is the clearest case: the United States buys over a million units a day of grain from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. That is now what the build screen shows as room, because a US farm would take that business rather than sit unsold.

•

Nothing opened up that was not really open. Markets in a genuine glut still show no room, and countries that already feed themselves are unchanged. Only the demand currently being met from abroad is counted, and only for goods your country actually imports.

State broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain

•

Eastern bloc media makes state broadcasting now, not adverts. Advertising exists because rival firms compete for your custom. Behind the Iron Curtain there are no rival brands and no marketing budgets, yet every Warsaw Pact state had been running a full commercial advertising industry. The result was absurd: Hungary was producing over a thousand times more advertising than anyone there wanted to buy, and Poland was putting out nearly five times as much as the United States.

All of it piled into the world market and dragged the price to the floor, so media companies everywhere, including yours, were selling a tiny fraction of what they made at a heavy discount.

Bloc broadcasters, presses and cinemas now produce state information and culture instead, which is what they actually were, and their governments fund it out of the education budget. Their output is unchanged in value: it has been re-pointed, not cut.

•

What you will notice. If you own media anywhere, the advertising price should recover and more of what you make should actually sell. Bloc media companies gain a reliable state customer in place of a market that was never going to buy from them.

Take your company back from a caretaker

•You can take your company back from a caretaker. Handing day-to-day operation to an NPP caretaker was hiding your CEO tab, which is where the Resume Control button lives, so there was no way to reclaim the company you still owned. Your CEO tab now stays put while a caretaker runs things, and the Resume Control button is right there whenever you want it back.

•A short wait before handing off again. After you resume control, you now wait 3 days before you can hand the company to a caretaker again. The card tells you how long is left.

Times now show in your local timezone

•Timestamps show in your local time. Election deadlines, vote closing times, transaction times, and the other dates shown around the game were written in the server's timezone, so a time that said "closes 6:00 PM" meant 6:00 PM somewhere else, not where you are. Every one of these now shows in your own local timezone, so the time you read matches your clock.

A revoked bank charter returns your money

•

Losing a charter no longer loses your money. When the supervisor revokes a bank charter for missing the recapitalization deadline, the bank's cash and its trading book now come back to your corporation, the same as any other charter revoke. Investment banks, whose value is in their trading book rather than in deposits, were the ones hit hardest by the old behavior. Banks that still owe depositors pay those depositors first, as before.

•

National Corporation profits now add up on the page. The corporation overview showed one large number labelled as money sent to the budget, but it was really the corporation's whole operating profit. It did not subtract the share the CEO keeps in the corporation, and it did not account for cash the corporation does not have on hand, so the page could show a large profit while the budget received little. The page now walks the money through each step: profit, the part kept as working capital, the part remitted (limited by cash on hand), debt service, and what actually reaches the treasury. The remitted figure now matches the budget's state-enterprise line, and when cash limits the remittance the page says so.

•

Union pages now show total membership. A union page listed a Unionization percentage per employer but never added them up, so you could not see how many workers the union actually represented. The stats strip now shows a Members count with the union's density (its share of the whole workforce) underneath, and each sector row shows its worker count. This reads coverage, which is kept separate from Strength so a large union is not mistaken for a powerful one.

•

National Corporation sector money now uses clear, consistent labels. The Holdings tab called daily sector revenue and operating profit "per turn", while the sector page mixed daily totals, hourly figures and per-unit averages. Holdings now says "per financial day," the sector page clearly separates each period and scope, and both pages explain that sector operating profit is not the amount remitted to the treasury. Holdings also has a direct Open sector link, so you no longer need to open the build window just to reach a sector.

•

Party officers no longer keep their post forever when nobody stands. If a national party leadership election ended with no candidates, the sitting officer stayed in the job and the party had no way to vote them out. Now, if the officer does not stand for re-election, their term ends when the cycle closes, the seat becomes vacant and a fresh election opens. Standing unopposed still keeps the seat: an uncontested race is not a defeat. Officers already in post are unaffected until their current cycle finishes.