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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.
  • Elected office (e.g. a presidency) — the party of the current holder acts. While the office is vacant the power is unavailable.
  • 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 act a party commits is written to a permanent public ledger, and the party's autocracy score is computed from that ledger. The ledger has three sources: executive actions (this page), authoritarian laws — voting for a narrow set of laws that attack the mechanisms of accountability — and restricting who can vote. 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.) This applies equally to points earned from authoritarian laws — it's the same ledger either way.

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 ban is not always a sentence served in full — whoever holds the gating power can lift it early, including a government that inherits the office from the executive that imposed it.

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.

Lift public events ban

The same Power to regulate political parties that silences a party can also free one. It costs 30 PP and, like a pardon, reduces the acting party's autocracy score — by 10 points.

  • Only a party currently serving a ban can be freed; the target picker lists them with the date each ban would otherwise have lapsed, and marks your own party if it is among them.
  • The ban ends immediately. The freed party can create, edit, move and copy campaign events again the same day, without waiting out the remaining months.
  • What's gone stays gone. Events the ban cancelled were deleted, along with the money and activist energy spent on them. Lifting the ban returns the right to organise, not the campaign that was destroyed.
  • Nothing stops the executive banning them again afterwards — at the usual price of 30 PP and 15 autocracy points. Since the lift's −10 is smaller than the ban's +15, cycling a rival in and out of a ban deepens an autocratic record rather than laundering it.
  • You can free your own party — a party that wins the office while serving a predecessor's ban is not condemned to sit the rest of it out — but doing so scores you nothing. The −10 is credit for freeing someone else; ending a ban on yourself costs the 30 PP and buys a way out, not a democratic record. (The ledger still records it, at 0 points, and the press still reports whose ban you lifted.)

As with a pardon, the score is floored at 0: freeing parties can offset autocratic acts you have already committed, but it never buys a party a vote bonus.

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 elected office holder (for example, the holder of a presidency) can't be arrested at all — only voted out at the ballot box. A candidate contesting an elected 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;
  • have their candidacy ignored — an arrested candidate doesn't count as their party's candidate for any elected office (it stays on file), so their party's votes for that office 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.

Authoritarian laws

Executive actions aren't the only way to earn autocracy points. Voting for a small, hand-picked set of laws stains your party too — but only laws that fit one specific test.

The boundary: does it stop voters removing the government?

The score has never been about being harsh, illiberal, or tough on crime — it fires when a party uses state power against the people who could remove it from office. The same test now applies to legislation. A law scores autocracy points only if it dismantles the mechanisms that let voters and rivals hold the government to account: press control, protest bans, mass surveillance, martial law, no citizenship rights, and similar.

Laws that are merely harsh — the death penalty, zero-tolerance policing, drug prohibition, restrictive dress codes, and the like — deliberately score nothing, however illiberal they read. A party can win a fair election on those positions and govern legitimately; the game already prices them through issues like Individual Liberty and Law and Order. Only laws that remove the means of losing power count here.

The three tiers

Only a curated set of options across the law catalogue carry points. Everything else — including every other rung of these same laws — scores 0.

Tier 1 — dismantles political competition · +20 points

Law Option
Media Censorship Total information control
Media Censorship Strict censorship
Public Broadcasting All channels replaced by state propaganda
Right to Protest Public protest effectively banned
Internet Freedom State-controlled intranet only
Surveillance Policy Total surveillance
Automated Surveillance Mass AI surveillance and social scoring
Police Powers Martial law
Citizenship Policy No citizenship rights

Tier 2 — serious erosion · +10 points

Law Option
Right to Protest Heavily restricted, easy to ban
Internet Freedom Heavy internet censorship
Surveillance Policy Mass surveillance
Automated Surveillance Broad facial recognition & predictive policing
Data Privacy Citizens must share all personal data with the state
Curfew Policy Universal curfew
Official Language Policy Mandatory state-constructed language
Government Transparency Government business secret by default; leaking a serious crime

Tier 3 — weakens accountability · +5 points

Law Option
Identity Cards Mandatory biometric ID + central register
Press Regulation Statutory press regulator with powers
Blasphemy Law Strict blasphemy laws
Police Body Cameras No cameras; filming the police is a criminal offence
Anti-Corruption Commission Commission appointed and directed by ministers

Restoration credit

Reversing an erosion pays credit back, the same way a pardon offsets an arrest:

Law Option Points
Media Censorship Free press −5
Right to Protest Unrestricted right to assemble −5
Government Transparency Open by default; contracts, meetings and expenses published −3
Anti-Corruption Commission Independent commission with its own prosecutors −3

The points above are charged for new erosion only. Moving a law from an unscored option to a Tier 1 option costs the full 20; stepping it up from a Tier 2 option to a Tier 1 option costs the 10 points of difference; and swapping between two options of the same tier, or loosening a Tier 1 law to Tier 2, costs nothing (and pays nothing back).

One law starts on a scored option: most countries begin with their anti-corruption commission appointed and directed by ministers. Starting there costs nobody anything — points are only charged to the parties that vote a change through, never to the country's inherited position. The +5 can only be taken by a party that actively rolls the law back from a more independent arrangement.

Restoration credit is only paid when the law is being moved away from an option that itself carries points — and never more than that option carried. Moving a moderate, unscored law straight to free press pays nothing, and moving it back doesn't cost anything either. That closes off the obvious farm: you can't toggle a law between an ordinary default and a restoration option to rack up free credit, because no erosion ever happened to restore.

Who pays, and how much

  • The proposing party pays the full points shown above.
  • Every other party that votes Yes pays half — because voting yes is endorsing the law too, just with less ownership of it.
  • This includes parties with zero seats. Their vote carries no weight and changes no outcome, but it's still a public recorded position, and it's stained the same as anyone else's.
  • An omnibus bill (multiple articles in one proposal) is capped at 20 points per proposal, applied before the halving above — so stacking five Tier 1 articles into one bill still costs the proposer 20 points, not 100.

Points are only written when a bill actually passes and changes the law. A vetoed bill, a failed bill, or an article that merely re-affirms the law a country already has scores nothing — the ledger records what was done to the country, not what was merely proposed or wished for.

The notice before you vote

Any proposal containing a scored article shows a notice before you cast your vote, naming your own party's point delta — full if you're proposing it, half otherwise — and the reputation band it would move you to if the bill passes. Nothing is hidden until after the fact: you always know the cost of a "Yes" before you commit to it.

Restricting the franchise

The third source feeds from the constitution rather than the law book. Amending who's allowed to vote — by gender, age, employment, income, education or housing — is priced the same way an authoritarian law is: fixed points per option, the proposing party pays in full and every other yes vote pays half, and points are only written once the change is actually applied. Loosening a restriction you've previously imposed pays some credit back, at a fifth of what the restriction cost, and a swap between incomparable options (such as men-only ↔ women-only suffrage) is always charged at the new option's full price rather than credited. There's no cap on the total, so stacking several restrictions into one package is charged for all of them. See Suffrage for the full points table, the transition rules and worked examples, and Suffrage Crisis for what happens when enough people lose the vote at once.

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