1.18: Groups, markets and honest books

Dev diary by the Lakeside Games team, 23 October 2026.

TL;DR

• •Changed: group-wide costs and limits now count every corporation in a group, not just the parent. Management overhead, dominance and undercutting tolls, merger review and the monopoly nationalization trigger all read the whole group.
• •New: competition law has teeth. Authorities can order a dominant group to sell down, review mergers across the whole group, and screen foreign takeovers where the law says so.
• •New: every country can pass competition, subsidiary and foreign investment laws. Groups over a country's limits must give up control within 48 turns or their stake is sold at book value.
• •Changed: balance sheets are honest. Share buybacks cannot overdraw the treasury, construction loans and overdrawn cash count against a company, and pass-through companies are taxed like the real thing.
• •New: losses carry forward against future tax, and a Market Adjustment event lets a government respond to a measured downturn.
• •Changed: jobs follow what funded plants actually run, and the producer market keeps the funded-cost work.
• •Changed: turns and the twenty slowest pages are faster, and the hourly turn reads less and stops retrying dead settlements.
• •New: a market switch is being prepared. The groundwork ships dark; no gameplay changes until it is switched on.
• •Fixed: a long list of corporation page confusions, from idle colours and spin-off cooldowns to private share orders, FX corridors and a Soviet split that could not complete.

The story

Most of this release is about the difference between a company and a group. A parent with a dozen subsidiaries was, for cost and competition purposes, mostly treated as a dozen unrelated companies. That let a group carry more market power than its balance sheet admitted and pay less than its share for the size it had become.

1.18 makes the group the unit. Management overhead, the dominance and undercutting tolls, merger review and the monopoly nationalization trigger all count the whole group now. The same release gives competition authorities something to do with that view: break up a dominant group, review a merger on both sides, and screen a foreign takeover where the law requires it.

The other thread is honest books. A buyback could previously overdraw a treasury, construction loans sat outside the measures that decide whether a company was in trouble, and pass-through companies were not taxed the way their structure implies. Those are fixed, losses now carry forward, and a government facing a measured downturn has a Market Adjustment to respond with.

The rest is speed and clarity. The hourly turn reads less, writes less and stops waiting on the disk after every write; the twenty slowest pages load faster. And the corporation pages got a pass over the small things that made players think a feature was broken when it was not.

Corporate groups and competition

The group is the unit

• •Management overhead counts every corporation in the group, not just the parent.
• •The dominance toll, the undercutting limit and the commodity build toll all count the whole group.
• •Merger review counts both sides of the deal as groups, not as single companies.
• •The monopoly nationalization trigger counts the whole group.
• •Corporate strength now has to be maintained rather than being a one-time purchase.

Competition law

• •Where the Competition Act is at structural enforcement or higher, a dominant group can be ordered to sell down.
• •Every country can pass competition, subsidiary and foreign investment laws.
• •Foreign takeovers are screened where the law says so.
• •Groups over a country's limits must give up control within 48 turns, or their stake is sold at book value.

Costs of size

• •Size costs carry over to the funded market, and state-owned corporations pay for the size of the state sector.
• •Lighter size and dominance costs apply where the group is small.

Honest books and the market

• •Share buybacks can no longer overdraw a company's treasury.
• •Construction loans and overdrawn cash now count against a company.
• •Pass-through companies are taxed like the real thing.
• •Losses now carry forward against future tax.
• •Jobs follow what funded plants actually run.
• •Steadier inflation when commodity prices swing.
• •A Market Adjustment event gives a government a measured downturn to respond to, and the approval cost follows what actually happened rather than which button was pressed.
• •Closing funds pay out queued withdrawals before they delist.
• •Index funds no longer skip their daily rebalance, and drop wound-down companies straight away.
• •The producer market shadow totals spend per fill.

Elections and government

• •Big CEO pay rises need a shareholder vote.
• •House of Councillors Election Night shows the whole chamber, including the seats not up for election.
• •Founding presidential terms do not count toward the term limit.
• •Regional economic bill proposals are available, and eligible cabinet members can browse proposals during an active bill.
• •Nomination voting deadlines are shown.
• •NPP CEOs now have careers and want to be paid.

Faster turns and pages

• •The hourly turn reads a third less, no longer waits on the disk after every write, and rides out slow database moments.
• •Turns no longer stop on a hard production plan.
• •The twenty slowest pages load faster, including the banking hub.
• •Manual turns run in the background turn processor instead of the website.
• •Turn announcements reach Discord again.

Fixed in this release

• •Waiting on inputs and demand limited no longer share a colour, and every idle cause has its own colour with a matching legend dot.
• •A spin-off warns about its seven day cooldown before you commit and counts it down while it runs.
• •Private companies no longer take order book trades that only the CEO could see.
• •A share price chart is coloured by the window it draws, and says how long that window is.
• •A released subsidiary names its owner as a controlling shareholder, not a parent.
• •A failed sector abandon can be retried, and says whether the sector is reserved or still financed.
• •A winding-down fund cancels its leftover orders and refunds queued subscriptions instead of stalling forever.
• •Obsolete sector strategies fall back to the standard recipe instead of a locked future one.
• •Cost-plus quotes no longer spiral when a plant runs a fraction of its capacity.
• •A far-off FX corridor says how long defence will take, or that it will not arrive within a game year.
• •A ratified Soviet split no longer fails every turn on its retained ground units.
• •Broken manifesto pledges now bleed UK government confidence each turn.
• •1979 worlds score income against their own era.
• •Continue with Discord sends the redirect host the app registers.
• •The sector split planner explains upfront and ongoing costs before you commit.

What is not switched on yet

The market switch groundwork ships dark. It prepares a transition with options, and nothing about it changes gameplay until it is switched on. Several rules above, including the CEO pay vote, the Market Adjustment event and parts of the competition law, are also behind their own switches and will be announced when they open.