1.7: Windows worlds, primaries and faster turns

Local worlds on Windows work. A new world could sit at "still building the world" for minutes and then give up, while the same build started in seconds on Linux. The game server was being started on the launcher's own input and output handles, and on Windows that left it accepting connections without ever answering. It now runs on its own captured output and a fresh world is ready in seconds. Closing a world stops its database properly and waits for it, so the turn you just ended is on disk when you come back, and reopening a world straight after closing it works first time. If a start does fail, the launcher now says which step it was on and what the game reported.

The presidential primary got its own pass. The primary screen carries the state board, the carve-up of whichever state you pick, a calendar you can click into, and the campaign actions that used to live only on the per-party page. State operations gather camping, the home-state surge, Campaign Presence and canvassing in one place, and the field of rivals sits beside them: open a rival's row to run a local attack on their favourability or take a slice off their count in a state you name. The home-state surge now actually moves votes, which it had not.

Turns are lighter. The hourly turn reads 60 percent less data and makes far fewer database calls, so turns finish sooner on the server and much sooner in a local world.

Also in 1.7

Armies

What changed

• •Every country's starting army is written by hand, in every era. The United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, Ireland and China had no written order of battle, so the seeder invented random units for them. Ireland outgunned America in 1953 and France had the only aircraft carrier in the game. All six are authored across all seven eras, with the Soviet rosters for 1999, 2007 and 2023.
• •Editing a starting army no longer re-prices every army already in the field. A world remembers its own starting figures.
• •A war wrecks the ground it is fought over. Roads take damage, and the damage reaches the economy through transport efficiency and productivity.
• •Four fixes from the War for Germany post-mortem. An ally's supply train no longer stops your bullets. A front no longer runs to the pole before the other bloc can field an army. An army that has lost everything can rearm without a defence industry. Formations held in depth are neither punished nor rewarded for being out of the line.
• •Idle upkeep can no longer be priced at a running unit's full cost.
• •Defence appropriations settle atomically, so a treasury cannot be charged twice.

Elections

What changed

• •Maine and Nebraska stop voting three and four times. Each electoral district drew its electorate from the whole state.
• •Bundestag second votes are no longer a copy of the first votes. Split-ticket voting works, with era-appropriate rates.
• •Projected seats and resolved seats run the same apportionment code. They had drifted twice; there is now one.
• •Coalition weakness now means a group you are losing, ranked by your share against the field, not by how much of your support it makes up.
• •Getting to a state has a button. Travelling was a working mechanic with no way to trigger it, so canvassing outside your home state was gated behind an instruction you could not follow.

Government and economy

What changed

• •A country's surplus is the same number everywhere it is used. The stored figure had drifted from what revenue, spending and the treasury said, and it was deciding debt-ceiling checks and bond issuance.
• •Crisis GDP rate shocks survive the metric engine instead of being overwritten.
• •"Bring both sides to the table" now opens mediation during a nationwide strike instead of doing nothing while paying out its approval effect.
• •Covert nuclear programmes no longer survive a world reset.
• •NPP autonomy v5. Governments keep a bounded set of standing goals and are graded on them, and local-world difficulty splits into a resource half and a decision half, so a funding advantage is never presented as skill.
• •NPP bond purchases record their own financial transaction with balanced ledger entries.

Interface

What changed

• •Modal dialogs announce themselves and close on Escape.
• •Thirteen more routes show a layout skeleton instead of a blank page while the server works.
• •Public copy reads the playable country list and the version from the game, so the FAQ, about page and landing promo cannot go stale in different directions.