A new look: a deep single-tone ocean with a light depth tint, a muted atlas palette, grey shaded relief showing through the country fills, thin dark borders without light halos. At strong zoom the rasters fade out and the map becomes flat and clean.
Coasts and borders are now detailed: the Balearics, Corsica, Crete, the Danish isles, Hawaii, fjords and bays are on the map. Inland seas and large lakes (IJsselmeer, Vättern, Balkhash) are water now. The Volga no longer breaks at its reservoirs. Trees are gone from the Political and Spheres modes.
Map tilt: zooming in lays the map into perspective, as in the big strategy games; country names lie on the ground, cities, trains and ships stand upright and shrink toward the horizon; the world view stays flat. Can be turned off in the map settings; turns itself off on machines without graphics acceleration.
Smooth zoom: the whole world is drawn into an atlas while the game is being prepared, so the map is not rebuilt while you scroll. Country names no longer jump into a corner.
Large countries are split into macro-regions along statistical divisions: nine US census divisions, eight Russian federal districts, fifteen Chinese regions, Europe's NUTS-1 and so on - 61 countries, 273 regions. A region is drawn by its borders, labelled at strong zoom and opens the country dossier on click; the dossier has a Regions block with output share, density and the gap between the richest and the poorest region.
Two new map modes, Economy and Population: output density and population density for the game year (Our World in Data), regions inside a country by their share. The mode bar moved to the bottom right, now icons, with a legend.
Satellite towns around large cities; stadiums and domes no longer stand in the water.
Explainability
A "Why?" button in the turn summary opens the chain of causes: inflation → channels → overheating → output gap → its channels → the turn's values (the rate against the rule, the lending rate and spread, the budget in force, asset prices, the exchange rate) → the lever and the tab it lives on. The demand composition, consumption included, is there too.
A panel opens as a column next to the rail instead of full screen: the map and pinned windows stay visible, so two charts can be compared.
Pinned windows resize by the corner and snap to the edges and to each other.
Statics: numbers on the axes; hovering any line (including the faint "initial" one and the dashed reference) or an axis symbol tells what it is.
Tooltips on yield, curve slope, FX q, assets and spread in the markets bar; explanations for PAYG, bequests, the capital levy, capital transparency and the fiscal council.
Model
Romer and Piketty mechanics are in the base model: a hybrid Phillips curve, Brainard caution, investment inertia, saturating forward guidance, Cagan seigniorage with a ceiling, top 10 % and 1 % shares with an r − g attractor, tax structure, wealth tax and capital levy, an investment tax credit, a fiscal reaction rule.
Third wave: a demographic transition by era, the social state as the era baseline, entitlements and a pension system, public capital, real wage rigidity, a rollover auction for public debt. The century campaign is recalibrated: the US debt curve by decade is closer to the record than ever.
New teaching scenario "Policy error (Bank of Russia, 2026)": inflation 6 % against a 4 % target, played as Russia, seven years; the four scenarios of the Bank of Russia analytical note can be played by hand, and the hint under the rate keeps the cumulative output loss against the rule path. New setup flag "Hyperadaptive expectations".
Games started on earlier versions keep playing by their own rules - nothing switches mid-game.
Advisor and interface
"Advisor drives" checkbox: the autopilot sets the MR-rule rate, light growth levers and a smooth consolidation under a debt overhang. You can take the levers between turns - handy for first games.
The Response button is now Forecast: the central-bank fan chart first, the impulse response second. Long fiscal levers moved to a new Treasury tab, so Budget no longer scrolls.
Your own setup templates: save a set of options under a name and apply it in later games.
Cleanup: chips without outlines, a zero without a dot in the indicators, a smooth entry into a game, the regime-change bar no longer squeezes the map, newspapers no longer dim the desk on routine spread shocks, dock tabs without scrolling in every language. The "GaR" indicator is renamed "gap lower bound".
Multiplayer works: turn-based, one quarter per turn.
Fixes
When zooming the map, ships sometimes turned into cars and cars on land into ships.
The Lorenz curve at low inequality bulged - the middle steeper than the top; now the per-capita share always rises from bottom to top. Axis ticks 0.25/0.75 are no longer rounded to 0.3/0.8.
The tax and spending "in effect" are now saved: after loading they are no longer set equal to the sliders.
The answer field on a study card, if a click gives it no caret, brings keyboard focus back to the window itself.
The Productivity and Capital K cards used to reset to 100 after loading a save; the index base is now the start of the game.
The Treasury labels update after the turn, the countdown to the next reform ticks down, and the pension-reform button is available again once the cooldown is over - no reload of the save needed.