Growth in Lawmaker used to be honest but a little dull: every country had an annual growth rate, seeded from its economy type, wobbling by half a point or so each month. It worked, but it explained nothing. Two countries with an identical 2% rate could be nothing alike underneath — one an oil exporter, one a software cluster — and the game had no way to show you that, or to let a tech boom feel different from a mining boom. The dial moved. Nobody knew why.
That's fixed now. This week we shipped simulated industries: growth no longer comes from one number, it comes from twelve.
Your economy is now a portfolio
Every country's GDP is built from up to twelve industries — Agriculture & Food, Oil & Gas, Mining & Metals, Technology, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Goods & Retail, Automotive, Aerospace & Defence, Tourism & Hospitality, Media & Entertainment, and Professional Services. Three of them — Agriculture, Consumer Goods, and Professional Services — exist in every country, however small a slice they hold. The rest are present or absent depending on the country: not every nation drills for oil, and not every nation needs to.
Each industry has its own story playing out across the whole world at once, and your country's growth each month is simply the blend of how its own mix is doing — weighted by how much of the economy each industry actually is. Lean heavily into an industry that's having a good decade, and you outgrow an otherwise identical rival that doesn't. Lean into one that's slumping, and you feel that too. It's the same total unpredictability as before, just now it has a shape you can actually read.
| Industry | Share | Growth this month |
|---|---|---|
| Technology · Specialism | 24.6% | +6.4% |
| Professional Services | 18.9% | +1.9% |
| Consumer Goods & Retail | 17.4% | +1.4% |
| Financial Services | 11.3% | +3.0% |
| Oil & Gas | 6.8% | −1.6% |
| Agriculture & Food | 4.2% | +0.8% |
Choose what your country is built on
The best part is you don't just inherit a mix — you can shape it. Every country creation (and country proposal) form now has an Economic focus selector: ten preset identities, each guaranteeing the country's headline industry is present and boosted into a genuine specialism, badge and all. Everything else about the mix still generates at random underneath, so no two Technology Powerhouses look identical — they just share the one thing that defines them.
Nothing about tax, budgets or elections changes because of a focus — it purely shapes where your growth comes from. But it's a real strategic choice: a Petrostate rides the highs and the lows of one volatile industry, while a Balanced Economy spreads its bets across whatever the world hands it. Neither is objectively better. They're just different bets on a world that keeps moving.
The industries you lean on today decide who your country becomes tomorrow.
Specialisms compound
A country's industry mix is set once, at founding, and after that it only moves by growing or shrinking — nothing resets it, nothing rebalances it back to normal. Which means a fast-growing specialism doesn't just help this month's number: it becomes an ever-larger share of the whole economy over time, and an ever-larger share of next month's growth too. A Technology Powerhouse that keeps leaning into a technology boom becomes, gradually and organically, more of a technology economy than it started out as. The identity you picked at founding sharpens with age instead of fading into the average.
See it on the world stage
The International Economy page now carries a Global industries section — every industry's current worldwide run, boom or slump, at a glance — and each one drills down into a full ranking of which countries have the largest sector in that field. Wondering who actually runs the world's technology sector, or who's betting everything on oil? Now you can just look.
| # | Country | Share of economy | Technology GDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Columbia | 29.1% | $612B |
| 2 | Avalon | 24.6% | $398B |
| 3 | Rheinland | 19.8% | $301B |
| 4 | Marianne | 12.3% | $188B |
The old rules still apply on top
None of the machinery that already touched growth got removed — it just moved downstream. Regular readers will remember Dispatch Nº002: when the IMF takes over a country, it forces a year-long recession as part of the punishment. That still happens, technology boom or not — a recession now takes three percentage points a year off every one of your industries at once. A genuine boom sector softens the blow; nothing makes you exempt. The industries explain where your growth normally comes from, and they decide how hard you land when the world decides to make an example of you.
Every country already in play was quietly seeded with a balanced industry mix behind the scenes, so nothing changed under your feet — your GDP is exactly what it was before this shipped. What's different from here on is that its growth now has a reason, and you can go and look at it.
Found a country, pick your focus, and go build an economy that's actually about something.