Every budget in Lawmaker has had the same quiet loophole: spending is popular, cuts are painless, and nothing remembers what you did last year. Slash the defence line to the bone and the army was exactly as ready the next month. That changes now. Your country has a memory, and it's measured in bridges.
A stock, not just a flow
A budget line says how much you spend this year. It never said what all that spending had built. So we added the missing half: a running level of national infrastructure in ten assets. Every month, each asset goes up by a fixed share of its budget line, and goes down by a fixed share of whatever level it's already at, because things wear out.
You still set the whole budget line, exactly as before. How much of it counts as capital investment is a fixed rule for each line, not a lever. The rest of the line is the cost of keeping things running, and it builds nothing lasting.
Ten assets, ten budget lines
Each asset is paid for by one budget line, and each line pays for at most one asset. Social Welfare, Retirement, Business Support, Arts, Culture & Media and Foreign Aid fund none, so cutting them is as cheap as it always was. For the other ten, here is how much of the line is capital, and how long the asset lasts.
| Asset | Paid for by | Capital share | Lifespan |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🎖️ Military readiness | Defence | 50% | 6 years |
| 🛣️ Roads | Roads & Highways | 75% | 12 years |
| 🔒 Prisons | Justice, Police & Internal Security | 25% | 15 years |
| 🏘️ Housing stock | Housing | 50% | 15 years |
| 🏥 Health estate | Healthcare | 10% | 20 years |
| ✈️ Ports & airports | Ports & Airports | 25% | 20 years |
| 🏫 Education estate | Education | 25% | 25 years |
| ⚡ Energy network | Energy Infrastructure | 50% | 25 years |
| 🚆 Rail network | Public Transport & Rail | 25% | 30 years |
| 🌊 Flood defences | Environment & Climate | 10% | 30 years |
Notice what the shares say about each line. Three-quarters of a roads budget is concrete. Only a tenth of healthcare is buildings. The rest is doctors and drugs, which is why a hospital estate moves much less than a road network for the same money.
Hold it steady, or let it go
Wear is a share of the level an asset is at, not of what it originally cost. That has one pleasing consequence: there is a funding level at which each asset holds exactly steady, where this year's investment matches this year's wear. Spend above it and the asset builds up. Spend below it and the asset decays, though more slowly the less of it there is left to wear out. Rebuilding a neglected asset is gradual too, at the same lifespan-driven pace.
That's the decision this creates. Cutting a line saves you money immediately. What it costs you shows up later, and it can be undone only at the same pace.
Slashing a budget line is a loan from the future. The interest is paid in potholes.
How slowly, exactly
The game clock runs a game day in a real hour, so a game month is about thirty real hours and a game year about two weeks. Here's what happens in the worst case, with the investment cut to nothing:
| Lifespan | After 1 game year (~2 real weeks) | After 6 game years (~3 real months) | Half gone after |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 years | 15% lost | 63% lost | ~2 months |
| 12 years | 8% lost | 39% lost | ~4 months |
| 15 years | 6.5% lost | 33% lost | ~5 months |
| 20 years | 5% lost | 26% lost | ~7 months |
| 25 years | 4% lost | 21% lost | ~9 months |
| 30 years | 3.3% lost | 18% lost | ~10 months |
So an unfunded army loses half its readiness in about two months, while a flood wall takes the best part of a year to lose half. Even the slow assets are slow. That's why the Infrastructure tab leads with the two numbers that react the moment a budget passes: whether your investment covers the wear, and where the asset will settle at your current funding. You don't have to wait for the stock to move to know which way it's going.
Where you start
Countries don't begin with a neutral stock. Each starts at the level its current budget would sustain forever, which is the line, times its capital share, times its lifespan. Keep the budget and you hold steady. It also means history matters from day one:
- A country that has been starving its army starts with a run-down one. The stock reflects the budget it's running now, not some generic average.
- A country on an IMF emergency budget starts with its assets run down. The emergency budget sets each line to a small share of the peer median, so wherever that is a cut, the asset decays under a programme. Being in debt hurts in the concrete. See Dispatch Nº002 for how a country gets there.
- Only the current budget counts. We haven't tried to reconstruct what past governments spent, so a starting level reflects the budget in force when infrastructure arrived, nothing earlier.
We wanted countries with problems, not countries that all look the same.
Where to look
There's a new Infrastructure tab on the country economy pages. For each asset it shows how much there is per person against your peers of the same economy type, whether this year's investment is keeping pace with wear, and where the asset is heading at your current funding. On the Budget page, any line that funds an asset carries a small marker linking you there. Nothing else about the budget screen changes.
What it doesn't do yet
We'll be honest about this: infrastructure is display-only in this release. A collapsing road network doesn't lose you votes. A strong military doesn't earn you any. It doesn't change growth, it doesn't feed voter demands or national moods, and it doesn't give the journalists anything to write about. Right now it's a scoreboard, and it's an honest one.
That's deliberate. Before voters react to it, we wanted the numbers on the table and the monthly history building up, so you can see what your own budgets have been doing. Voter reaction is planned, and the data is shaped for it, using exactly the comparison with peers and the direction of travel you can already see. Treat the next few weeks as a free look at how your country is really doing, before it starts to matter.
The full rules, with the table above, are in the wiki under Economy: Infrastructure.