Major Update: The Government Office System — Officials, Cultural Titles, and Local Governance

This August 6, 2026 update introduces the complete Government Office System: every state appoints a full roster of officials (by AI or by hand) whose competence directly affects the treasury, provincial output, rebellions, and battlefield command. Official titles change dynamically with culture and government form, backed by a full title editor and map-wide default titles. Also included: streaming-loading optimization for legacy saves.

The office system at a glance:

• AddedStates are no longer run by the ruler alonethree tiers and six offices have been added.

• Central offices (one per state): Chief Administrator, Treasurer, and Marshal.

• Local offices: the District Governor (governs a district) and the Governor (governs a single province).

• Wartime office: the War Commander, appointed per war and automatically discharged when it ends.

• Every office is held by a real character with skills and a family; officials age and die, and every office held is recorded permanently in the character's career history.

How officials shape the state:

• Treasury: the Chief Administrator and Treasurer together sway national income by up to ±12%.

• Local output and stability: Governors affect their province's output (±8%) and rebellion risk (±15%); District Governors benefit all owned provinces in their district (output ±5%, rebellion ±10%), and the two layers multiply — a court of the able and a court of the mediocre produce very different lands.

• Military command: battle command skill falls back through War Commander → Marshal → ruler; appointing the right commander for each war changes real battlefield performance.

How the AI picks officials:

• Candidates are weighed on administration, martial skill, diplomacy, and charisma according to each office, with an age curve (prime years 25–55).

• Also considered: culture and state-religion fit, family influence and local roots (local magnates more easily govern their home region, military dynasties more easily take command), government form, workload, and personal traits.

• Governance factor: state corruption and the ruler's own quality (administration and charisma) decide whether merit or connections prevail — clean, well-led courts appoint the able, while corrupt or poorly led courts fall to nepotism and favorites.

• Monthly filling: vacancies are filled central → district → province, up to 4 appointments per state per month.

• Annual review: an incumbent is only replaced by a clearly better challenger (the threshold varies by government form); tenures are protected, so offices do not churn.

Appointment rules:

• One central office per person, and central officials cannot hold local posts; one person may hold at most two local posts; one War Commander per war (emergency double duty only when nobody else is available).

• Governors are discharged when their province changes hands; a District Governor is discharged when the state loses its last province in that district.

• Districts are geographic and can span borders: every state owning provinces in a district appoints its own District Governor for its own share.

Take the reins: the office management panel:

• Browse every post and vacancy across the Central / District / Local / Wartime sections.

• Inspect each candidate's full scoring and a true-effect preview — see what they will actually contribute before appointing.

• Appoint, replace, lock (locked officials are never touched by the annual review), or fill all vacancies in one click.

• Turn off auto-appointment to govern entirely by hand.

• Character panels show current offices and the full career history (with dismissal reasons); province and district panels show the officials in charge.

Titles that follow your civilization:

• Titles are defined per culture and further per government form — within one culture, kingdoms, empires, and republics each use their own set; the six built-in cultures ship complete title sets in all 14 languages.

• Title editor: customize titles per government form × office × language × gender, with one-click auto-translation.

• State-level source: each state can inherit its culture's titles, follow the map default, or use fully custom titles — switchable at any time.

• Map default titles: define one default set for the whole map, saved with the save; cultures without configured titles fall back to it — handy for a unified fantasy setting.

• Import titles: copy any culture's (or the map default's) entire title set into a culture, a state, or the map default, then refine it.

• Mod-friendly: titles ship with culture data, so custom and Workshop cultures carry complete multilingual title sets.

Save loading optimization:

• Large legacy saves gain streaming loading: staged decoding, decryption, and decompression with far lower memory use, optimizing the save as it loads; saves under 30 MB load directly without prompts.

• Saves upgrade to a new binary format with faster reads and writes, guarded by migration regression tests.

Compatibility:

• AddedOld saves remain fully playableoffice vacancies fill automatically over the following months, titles upgrade to the new multilingual sets, and anything you cleared or customized stays untouched.

About the next update:

The next update may take longer than usual. I plan to redesign the map's underlying data structure: dropping the Voronoi diagram so the map's shape and size can be changed freely, map drawing is no longer bound to the Voronoi cells, and features like east–west map wrap-around become possible; the map editor will be rebuilt along the way. This attempt may not succeed — it depends on whether the new map data format proves viable — but I believe it is worth trying. In the meantime I will also keep designing the economy, trade, and resource gameplay, to be released once it runs stably. Thank you for your understanding.