Today’s update builds on the last week’s amazing changes, and adds some welcome improvements to gameplay!
We’re delighted to announce that as an example of the local council simulation we can offer, the Isle of Wight’s Council and Cornwall Council are coming to the game. Our eventual plan over the next few updates is to progressively add more and more city and unitary authorities, with options to enable/disable more layers of government for your playthrough.
Adding large numbers of extra councils WILL affect performance. This is an inevitability. We are working on ways of scaling this before we add any more, but we wanted to show people what’s coming!
We’ve also fixed some long standing issues with laws in devolved polities, including a new chain of events allowing you to pass laws with approval of the UK government if they conflict with precedent. This should alleviate the dreaded ‘you can’t do that message’ of versions prior!
In preparation for the judicial system that will be coming in later updates, there is a bit of back and forth with the courts as part of devolution. This will be fleshed out in the future but it’s worth knowing that we’re thinking about it.
Cornwall Council's last election was in 2025, but I'm sure with enough simulated fighting you can cause an early election before then!
Cornwall is not a devolved country of the UK but it has its own political culture, groups and parties. We’re keen to ensure their beliefs - not the individual people - are represented. Independent Councillors are now much more likely to be elected and stay elected provided they are both locally engaged and popular. If you live in Cornwall or work in Cornish politics, we'd like to hear from you about what we can do to improve it!
We've also include the Isle of Wight as a proof of concept - we're adding far more to IoW in the future!
These improvements have been made working in collaboration with modders working on custom scenarios (pictured here is CGY1997’s wonderful Singapore mod!). We’ve added support for much more flexibility with alliances and coalitions, including:
Full joint list support
Better coordination for parties targeting specific polities
Improved projection and polling result support for coalitions
We’ve introduced new forecasting and prediction tools throughout the engine, with an eye for increased depth and reliability when it comes to the voting behaviour sim. We’re adding more and more features to this with each update so we’re looking forward to adding more!
Polities and legislatures now have separate polling data, reflecting the different voting behaviours present when you vote - also giving us a lot more flexibility as people gear up to build equally complex sims of other countries!
There are plenty of cases where a candidate from another party beats the reputation of the rosette and wins a council seat in a way that would never happen in a general election, and starting today Governance clearly supports that in a way that makes sense to players.
Fixed several contracted ward names in the UK
Improved balancing issues
You can now ring up MPs and ask them to support upcoming legislation
We've improved the looks of laws in the Laws tab
Several UI bugs have been fixed and reworked, including several issues with the Game Editors.
We’ve added several new effects for declaring independence and holding referendums: call_independence_referendum and declare_independence . We’re also building a comprehensive list of every effect the Events system can
So get playing and let us know how you get on. We have BIG things planned for 0.7.10 next week!
Our new blazing fast 3DX renderer has been added to the game!
We've added a new HUD to aid with showing who you are and what's going on!