There has been a gap in the game since the day autocracy shipped. A party could order a single arrest and wear "Worryingly Autocratic" above its name for it. A party could legislate a state-controlled press, mandatory biometric ID, mass surveillance and a total protest ban — everything, in other words, that an autocracy actually consists of — and sail through the next election with a clean "Committed to Democracy" badge and the voters none the wiser.
One person's decree counted. A parliamentary majority doing the same thing, in public, on the record, counted for nothing. That is the gap this update closes.
The test: can the voters still get rid of you?
The obvious way to build this is to score autocracy off a party's Individual Liberty position — the number is already there, and authoritarian laws are illiberal, so surely that works. It does not, and it fails in both directions at once.
Sixty-six options in the catalogue sit at the illiberal end of that axis, and most of them are nanny-state laws: firework bans, junk-food advertising restrictions, alcohol prohibition. Scoring liberty would have branded a Nordic public-health party Terrifyingly Autocratic for banning rockets on New Year's Eve. Meanwhile "All channels replaced by state propaganda; private media outlawed" — the single most authoritarian option in the entire game — carries no Individual Liberty impact at all, and would have scored precisely zero.
Autocracy isn't about being harsh. It's about using state power against the people who could remove you from office.
So the scored list is hand-picked, and it turns on one question: does this law dismantle the mechanisms by which a government can be removed or held to account? A free press, the right to protest, privacy from the state, citizenship itself. Everything else — however brutal — scores nothing.
That exclusion is deliberate and it is worth being blunt about. The death penalty scores zero. So do hard-labour prisons, three-strikes sentencing, zero-tolerance policing, corporal punishment and every drug prohibition in the book. They are already priced into the game through Individual Liberty and Law & Order, where voters who care about them can punish you at the ballot box — and a party can campaign on any of them, win a fair election and govern legitimately. Having the game declare them anti-democratic would be the game taking an ideological position, rather than a structural one.
The three tiers
| Tier | What it does | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Dismantles political competition — protest banned, press state-produced, martial law, no citizenship | +20 |
| Tier 2 | Serious erosion — mass surveillance, universal curfew, government secret by default | +10 |
| Tier 3 | Weakens accountability — mandatory biometric ID, a captured anti-corruption commission, criminalising the filming of police | +5 |
| Restoration | Rolling an erosion back — free press, unrestricted assembly, government open by default | −5 to −3 |
For scale: ordering an arrest costs 25. A Tier 1 law costs 20. That gap is intentional — a law passes a legislature and an arrest is one person's unilateral act, so legislation sits just below executive fiat. It is still the most expensive thing you can do with a vote.
Everyone who voted yes pays
The party that proposed the bill wears the full total, because it wrote it. Every other party that voted yes wears half. Vote no, abstain, or don't turn up, and you pay nothing at all — which makes an authoritarian bill the sharpest coalition test in the game: your partner has to decide, in public, whether your majority is worth the stain.
Two details worth knowing before you go looking for a loophole:
- Holding no seats is not a defence. A party with zero seats that votes yes is stained exactly like one that carried the vote. A public position is a public position, whether or not it counted.
- An omnibus bill won't dilute it. A proposal bundling five authoritarian articles is capped at the cost of the worst single one, so the most a vote can ever cost you is the same 20 — and stacking them buys nothing.
You are told before you vote, not after
No proposal containing a scored article reaches a vote without saying so. The notice on the proposal page shows your party's own figure — full price if you are the proposer, half if you are not — and, in the same shape as the executive-actions confirm panel, what it does to your standing:
Nothing that happened before this update counts. Points are written the moment a law is enacted, from each world's own clock forward — so no party wakes up stained for a vote it cast under rules that didn't exist yet, and no proposal already open when this shipped is scored retroactively.
Erosion is charged once. Restoration has to be earned.
Both directions are scored on the move, not the destination, and that turns out to matter enormously.
Erosion is incremental. Moving surveillance from the moderate default straight to total surveillance costs the full 20. Moving it there from mass surveillance — already worth 10 — costs only the 10 of new damage. Shuffling between two options of the same tier costs nothing, and loosening a Tier 1 law to Tier 2 is free. You are charged for the ground you take, once.
Restoration only pays against damage that was actually done. A negative option pays credit only when the law is moving away from an option that itself carried points, and never more than that option carried. Without that clause there was a lovely little exploit waiting: take a law nobody had ever touched, flip it to "free press" for −5, flip it back for nothing, repeat, and launder an arrest into a clean record by lunchtime. Restoring a freedom nobody took away now pays exactly zero.
Everything else about autocracy works as it did: the score decays to nothing over about two years of game time, it costs you vote share continuously for as long as it lasts, and disbanding a stained party to refound it under the same owner doesn't wash it off.
Fifteen new laws — and three of them are scored
Which brings us to the other half of the update. The catalogue goes from 95 laws to 110, with 520 positions to fight over. These came out of a batch of thirty-two proposals; roughly half didn't survive review, mostly for being a law the game already had under another name, or a spending question the budget already owns. The fifteen that did:
- Health — Prescription Drug Pricing (what medicines are allowed to cost, as distinct from who pays for them), What Public Healthcare Covers (does the public system stop at core medicine, or run to dental, optical and cosmetic?) and Healthcare for Non-Citizens.
- Policing & justice — Police Body Cameras, Police Accountability (who investigates a complaint — the police, an ombudsman, or a civilian board that can sack officers) and Bail & Pre-Trial Detention, which decides who waits for trial in a cell.
- Government — Government Transparency and the Anti-Corruption Commission: what citizens may see, and who gets to prosecute the powerful.
- Environment — Carbon Pricing and Industrial Pollution & Water, both of which bite directly on your country's oil, mining, farming and car industries.
- And the rest — Social Housing (is the state a landlord?), Broadband & Digital Access, Drug Treatment & Harm Reduction, Paid Sick Leave and Adoption & Fostering.
Three of them sit inside the new mechanic. Government Transparency is the heaviest scored law in the batch at Tier 2 — state secrecy is the classic first move of a government that intends not to be held to account — and it pays credit back at the open-by-default end. The Anti-Corruption Commission scores a ministerially controlled watchdog at Tier 3, on the grounds that a captured watchdog is worse than no watchdog, because it looks like accountability while providing none. And Police Body Cameras scores the one rung where filming the police is a criminal offence.
Elsewhere in the new spicy-extreme collection: seizing the patents so the state manufactures all medicines, compulsory detention in treatment centres for every drug user, abolishing private landlords outright, closing any polluting plant on the spot, and a tribunal where officials must prove the lawful origin of their wealth or forfeit it.
One law starts somewhere interesting
A note for anyone who reads their country's statute book carefully. Every country now begins with its anti-corruption commission appointed and directed by ministers — which is a scored option.
That is on purpose, and it costs nobody anything: points are only ever charged to parties that vote a change through, never to a country's inherited position. The reason it starts there is that "establish an independent anti-corruption commission" is one of the most common real-world reform platforms there is, and shipping it already done would hand you a game where that campaign was won before anyone arrived. Now it is a fight you can pick — and the +5 can only be taken by a party that actively rolls it back, which is exactly what the points are for.
Nothing you built has moved
Every existing country has been seeded with all fifteen new laws at their defaults, presented the same way the last expansion did it — as how things have always been here, waiting for somebody to make an issue of them. No position you fought for has changed, and no credit you earned for changing one has been touched.
The wiki has the full scored list under Authoritarian laws, if you'd like to check exactly what a vote is going to cost you before you cast it. We would recommend that.