Executive Actions & the Autocracy Score¶

The constitution decides who holds which powers. Executive actions are what turn those powers into concrete, devastating deeds. The current holder of a gating power can exercise a matching action from a country's Executive Actions page — silencing a rival, bending the state to their will — but every autocratic act is a public, permanent record that costs them for years to come.

The catalogue starts small and grows over time. Whatever the action, the design principle is the same: executive power has no cooldown and no hard cap. The only check is the governed — through a reputation score and a running vote penalty — and, for a monarch, the security of the throne.

Who can act¶

Each action is gated by one constitutional power (for example, the "Ban party from public events" action is gated by the Power to regulate political parties). Whoever currently holds that power may exercise the action. The holder is resolved live through the constitution:

Cabinet position — the current appointee's party acts, exercised by the party's owner.
Single-seat elected office (e.g. a presidency) — the office-winning party acts.
Monarchy — the reigning monarch acts (see the Crown's price below).
Multi-seat legislature — unavailable: the power is held collectively by the chamber, and there is no way to exercise it individually.
Non-partisan bureaucrats — unavailable: a power handed to the independent civil service is deliberately disarmed. Moving a power to bureaucrats through a constitutional change is how a country takes a dangerous action off the table.

The Executive Actions page shows the whole catalogue to everyone — seeing what the executive could do to you is part of the game — but the action button is only enabled for the office holder. Everyone else sees exactly why it's unavailable to them.

The autocracy score¶

There is no permission meter to fill or cooldown to wait out. Instead, every autocratic action a party takes is written to a permanent public ledger, and the party's autocracy score is computed from that ledger. Each act contributes its points, then decays linearly to nothing over 2 game years. A party that never acts autocratically sits at exactly 0 forever; a party that rules by force wears the stain until time launders it.

The score drives two visible things:

A reputation badge on the party, running from Committed to Democracy (score 0) through Autocratic Leanings and Worryingly Autocratic to Terrifyingly Autocratic. The badge's tooltip carries the live number, the current vote penalty, and roughly when it will fade.
A continuous election penalty. At every election, voters are less likely to choose an autocratic party — the penalty scales smoothly with the score (there are no threshold cliffs), up to a ceiling of half the party's vote preference at the extreme. Every day of good behaviour buys back a sliver of support.

Because the score is computed from the ledger rather than stored, it is always fully explainable: the ledger is the receipt.

You can't wash the stain by refounding

Disbanding a stained party and founding a fresh one doesn't reset the score — records committed by your disbanded parties follow you, their current owner, and keep decaying on the same 2-year clock. (A second, concurrently live party of yours is unaffected.)

Monarchs and the constitutional crisis¶

A monarch has no party to stain and no political power to spend, so the autocracy score can't touch them. Their price is the same one a royal veto carries: every royal executive action triggers — or, if one is already running, resets — a 90-day Constitutional Crisis on the country. While the crisis is active, the threshold to pass a pure abolish-the-monarchy change is halved and such a package skips the usual constitutional-change cooldown.

So the symmetry is deliberate: a party executive spends its own electoral standing; a monarch gambles the security of the throne. Repeat royal actions simply keep the abolition window open.

Every executive action costs the acting party a flat 30 PP (a monarch pays no PP — the constitutional crisis is their price). What differs between actions is the autocracy weight and the effect.

Ban party from public events¶

The holder of the Power to regulate political parties can silence a rival:

It costs 30 PP and adds 15 autocracy points to the acting party.
The target party is banned from organising public events for 6 months. Any of their scheduled campaign events inside the ban window are cancelled immediately, with no refund of money or activist energy.
While the ban runs, the target cannot create, edit, move or copy campaign events at all — their calendar shows the ban and disables those controls. They can still delete events to tidy up.
There is no stacking: a target already under a ban can't be re-banned until it lapses. When it does lapse, the party can organise again the next day, and the executive can pay the price to ban them afresh.

A single ban pushes the acting party to Autocratic Leanings; do it repeatedly and you climb toward Terrifyingly Autocratic, bleeding votes at every election until the ledger fades.

Order arrest¶

The holder of the Power to be Head of the Police can have a named politician detained. It costs 30 PP and adds 25 autocracy points — the most autocratic act in the catalogue. Any active party politician can be targeted, including colleagues in your own party — with two exceptions: you can't target yourself, and a sitting single-seat office holder (for example, an elected president) can't be arrested at all — only voted out at the ballot box. A candidate contesting such an office, and anyone holding a cabinet seat, remains fair game.

An arrested politician is detained for 12 months, during which they:

cannot run campaign events — and any campaign events they were scheduled to lead are cancelled immediately, with no refund;
are struck from election candidacy — removed as their party's nominee for any single-seat office, so their party's votes for that seat go elsewhere;
keep any cabinet seat but cannot exercise its executive actions — the office is held, but frozen, while they are detained;
cannot post to social media.

The state is shown by an Arrested trait on the character. There is no stacking — a detainee can't be re-arrested until they are released. An arrest lapses automatically after 12 months, restoring everything the next game day.

Issue pardon¶

The holder of the Power to grant pardons can release an arrested politician early. It costs 30 PP and, uniquely, reduces the acting party's autocracy score — by 10 points, a smaller swing than an arrest's increase, so a pardon can offset autocratic acts but never buy a party a vote bonus (the score never drops below 0). A pardon immediately undoes every arrest effect: the freed politician can run events, stand for election, exercise cabinet powers, and post again at once.

Next steps¶

Constitution — how powers are assigned to offices, and how to move (or disarm) them.
Hereditary Monarchy — the Crown, the veto, and the constitutional-crisis mechanic.
Campaign Events — what a public-events ban shuts down.