This week we're launching Executive Actions — a new page where whoever currently holds a power can actually use it. You'll find it on your country page, under Characters → Executive Actions. Three actions are live from day one: ban a rival party, arrest a politician, or pardon one. They're the first entries in a catalogue that's going to keep growing.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ban public events | A rival party can't organise for six months |
| Order arrest | A politician loses a year of their public life |
| Issue pardon | Undoes an arrest, and eases your own reputation |
Ban a rival party and it's shut out of public events for six months — nothing already on its calendar survives, and it can't even pencil anything else in until the ban lifts.
Order an arrest and a politician disappears from the game for a full year: no campaigning, no candidacy, no social media, though a sitting president or equivalent single-seat officeholder is safe from it — you have to beat them at the ballot box instead.
Issue a pardon and an arrest ends immediately, the politician's year restored on the spot. It's the one merciful move on the list, and the only one that works in your favour rather than against you.
Whoever actually holds the power gets to press the button — the party in the cabinet seat, the party that won the presidency, the Crown itself for a monarchy. There's no cooldown and no daily limit. Nothing stops an executive from banning every rival in the country in a single afternoon, except one thing: they'll pay for it.
Introducing autocracy
Every one of these powers is a shortcut around the ballot box, and shortcuts like that shouldn't be free. So alongside Executive Actions, we're introducing autocracy — a new reputation score that follows your party around. Use these powers aggressively and your autocracy score climbs; govern with a lighter touch, or issue a pardon, and it eases back down. It shows up right on your party page, with a plain-English label running from "Committed to Democracy" up to something considerably less flattering.
Autocracy isn't just a badge — it costs you at the ballot box. The higher your score, the less voters want to back you. Crack down hard enough and you can end up handicapping yourself out of the very election you were trying to secure.
The good news for anyone who slips up once: autocracy fades on its own. Every action's contribution to your score decays gradually, disappearing entirely after roughly two years of game time. A party that ordered one arrest a long time ago and has behaved since will find that stain has all but healed. A party that keeps reaching for the same lever keeps the score topped up.
A party executive spends its standing with voters. A monarch spends the crown itself.
Monarchs pay in a different currency — a Crown holds no party standing and no political power to spend, so every royal use of an executive power instead triggers (or refreshes) a constitutional crisis, the same instability a monarch's veto has always caused, making the throne itself easier to abolish for as long as it lasts.
A couple of guardrails, so the system holds up under pressure: pardoning can bring your score all the way back down, but never into a bonus — the floor is a clean slate, not a reward. And disbanding a tarnished party to found a fresh one under the same owner in the same country doesn't wash the record either. Autocracy is meant to be a real cost, not a speed bump.
More powers waiting
Martial law, treaty ratification, declaring war — the rest of your constitution's powers are still sitting inert on the page, but they're not off the roadmap. Each one will plug into the same Executive Actions page, the same public record, and the same autocracy score, so nothing about your country needs to change shape as the catalogue fills in — it just grows.
Ban, arrest, and pardon are enough to start finding out whether the trade-off feels right: real power, in exchange for a reputation that follows you home. Go check the Characters → Executive Actions page on your country and see who's actually holding the levers.