The most consistent piece of feedback from the alpha: the legislative game was too small. With 37 laws on the books, a well-organised party could nudge every one of them to its preferred position inside a few election cycles — and then sit there, fully victorious and slightly bored, with nothing left to propose. A political simulation where the politics runs out is a problem.
So this week's update is about one thing: giving you more to fight over.
What's on the new order paper
Fifty-eight new laws, and they are not filler. Five whole new categories arrive — civil liberties, health, technology, drugs and gender — alongside major additions to justice, the economy, the environment, immigration, defence and the media. A taste of what your legislature can now tear itself apart over:
- Civil liberties — who may own a gun, how freely citizens may protest, whether the state issues mandatory biometric ID.
- Health — is healthcare public or private? Are vaccinations mandatory? Is there a legal market in organs?
- Technology — how fast AI is allowed to develop, whether it can replace workers, whether the state runs automated surveillance.
- Energy & environment — nuclear power, fossil-fuel extraction, rewilding, hunting, single-use plastics.
- Justice — three-strikes sentencing, the age of criminal responsibility, whether police carry guns.
- Defence — nuclear weapons, arms exports, autonomous weapons.
- And the rest — asylum and deportation, blasphemy law, sex work, banking regulation, nationalisation, divorce, childcare, Sunday trading…
Spectrums, not switches
None of these are on/off toggles. Every law is a spectrum of four to six positions running from one ideological pole to the other, and every new country starts at a sensible centrist default — so the interesting positions have to be legislated, clause by clause, vote by vote. And in the house tradition, almost every law carries one deliberately unhinged extreme at the end of the ladder: something for the zealots to chase, and for everyone else to campaign against.
Other entries in the spicy-extreme collection: public protest effectively banned, life imprisonment on a third strike, compulsory hunting education for all citizens, and a single-use plastics option that bans paper straws (finally, amirite?).
Built to split your coalition
Every option maps onto the same 16 political axes your voters already live on — so when you enact a law, each of the thousands of electors in your country reads it through their own convictions and moves accordingly. The new laws are deliberately designed to touch two to four axes at once: a nationalisation bill delights your workers'-rights wing while horrifying your free-marketeers; a tough asylum law wins the border-security vote and loses the multiculturalists. These aren't just more dials to turn. They're wedge issues — as useful for splitting the government benches opposite as for pleasing your own base.
Old laws, sharpened into new fights
Some existing laws were quietly conflating two arguments, so we split them. Housing policy is the clearest case: "build more homes" and "control rents" attract completely different coalitions, and now they're separate laws. Union recognition and the right to strike, weekly working hours and paid annual leave, economic migration and asylum, renewables and nuclear and fossil fuels — all now distinct battlegrounds.
The part you shouldn't even notice: if your party had fought to move a law off the default, that position — and the credit for enacting it — carries over. Every existing country was seeded with the 58 new laws at their defaults, presented as "how things have always been here", waiting for someone to make an issue of them. Your legislative record survives the expansion untouched.
Finding your next fight
Ninety-five laws is a lot of statute book, so the same update ships new ways to read it:
- The International Laws Explorer — pick any law and see, on one page, how every country in the world has settled it, chart included. Ideal for spotting that you're the only nation on the planet still without a lobbying register.
- A dedicated laws page for every country — the full statute book in one place, grouped by category, with the country page itself showing a cleaner summary.
- A Vote / View button on every law — see an open proposal on a law you care about, jump straight into the vote.
Whether that fight is a worthy crusade for universal mental-health care or a cynical wedge bill designed to detonate the coalition across the aisle is, as ever, entirely up to you.