Every kingdom has a council of twelve seats, filled once a term by the citizens of that country. It sits under the king rather than beside him: the dukes choose who wears the crown, the citizens choose who makes law, and neither body has any say in the other's election.
You will find it at Realm → Council.
What the council decides can now be felt in a purse. This section used to say the opposite, at length, and it was true when it was written.
A council mints its country's currency into its own treasury and puts some of it on the currency market by law. Whoever pays the gold that offer asks for walks away holding coins, and from there the whole chain works: an employer pays a wage in them, the work tax takes its share, and the worker spends what is left on the goods market, where the sales tax takes another. Every one of those numbers is a law of this council.
A treasury still has exactly one way to pay anybody, and that is somebody taking an offer the council put on the market, at a price the council set in public and the king could have refused. There is no salary, no grant and no expense account. A country cannot create gold at all: the gold in a treasury is gold players put there, by taking an offer or by buying a trading licence.
What the council is also still good for is the election: a seat, a faction, a term, and a majority you have to build out of other players.
A term is one great year: thirty world days.
day of term 1 ────────── 22 │ 23 │ 24 ──── 29 │ 30 │ turn
standing │ the │ ordering │ the │ counted
join a faction, │ pres│ each │ coun│ seats
stand for a seat │ vote│ president │ cil │ taken,
│ │ orders │ vote│ pay paid
settled on day 24
One day to vote, counted the next. That is the archive's rhythm and it is kept: the country president was voted on day 1 and counted on day 2, the party president voted on day 8 and settled on day 9, congress voted on day 15 and counted on day 16. A week between each.
The two elections are a week apart, and that gap is the point. A faction's presidency is decided on day 24; the council's ballot is not held until day 30. Those days between are what a newly elected president has to order the candidate list before the seats are filled from it. Settle both together and the list that fills the seats is always the outgoing president's, so winning the office would do nothing until the term after next.
The list is fixed on ballot day: a citizen voting for a faction is voting for the list as it stands.
A ballot is one day, and that has a cost worth knowing. A world day is a real day, so a citizen who does not log in on day 30 has no vote that term. The archive worked the same way. A longer window was tried and is worse in a different way: it stops a ballot being an occasion, and it leaves the list mutable while votes are being cast.
Nothing here depends on you logging in at a particular moment. The count happens when the world's clock reaches the turn, whether anybody is watching or not.
You vote for a faction, never for a person. The faction's president decides who those votes become, by ordering its candidate list.
The seats are shared out by a quota:
quota = all votes cast ÷ 12 seats
a faction's seats = how many whole times the quota fits its votes
Three things follow, and none of them is a fault:
Seats stay empty. Remainders are not shared out, so a twelve-seat council routinely seats ten or eleven. This is why a law needs a majority of the seats filled rather than of twelve: counting against twelve in a world this small would mean no council ever passed anything.
A faction can win more seats than it has candidates. It fills what it can and the rest stay empty for the term.
An election nobody voted in seats nobody, and that is not an error. With five countries and few players it is the ordinary early result.
A candidate who has died, or who has left the faction, is passed over at the count and the next name on the list takes the seat. Nothing is deleted when somebody dies: the world simply reads who is alive at the moment it counts.
A seat pays 30 gold to the advisor and 20 gold to their faction, once, when it is won. Both are new gold rather than money taken from anybody, which is the same thing the training ground does for a twelfth training.
A seat lasts the term and belongs to the character who won it. If they die, the seat is empty for the rest of the term: there is no by-election and no replacement, and their next character inherits nothing of it.
An advisor puts a law to the council, and it stands on the floor for up to three world days. It is counted when that window elapses, or sooner: the moment every living advisor holding a seat has voted, the motion is counted then and there. Then:
it passes ⟺ votes in favour × 2 > seats filled
An advisor who does not vote counts against it. That single rule is both the majority and the quorum, which is why there is no separate attendance rule to learn. A council of three needs two; a full council of twelve needs seven; six of twelve is a tie and a tie is not a mandate.
Because the count is against seats filled, an under-filled council legislates normally, and more easily than a full one. Seats no faction's quota reached are not obstacles; they are simply seats nobody won. A council of three needs two votes where a full one needs seven. The only council that can pass nothing is one with no seats filled at all.
Three days, where the archive gave one, and the reason is that the archive's passing rule was different: 2018 carried a motion on more votes for than against with no quorum at all, so one advisor acting alone was enough and a day was plenty. A majority of the filled seats needs several people to act, and a world day is a real day.
The three days are a deadline, not a wait. The window exists to protect an advisor who has not yet had a chance to vote; it does not hold up a council that has finished. Some consequences worth knowing:
The motion list says this in so many words: "counted in 2d 5h at the latest, or once every advisor has voted".
Open motions are listed under Realm → Council, each with what it proposes, who put it there, how the votes stand, how many votes it still needs, and how long it has left. Settled ones stay below them so you can see what the council has been doing.
If you hold a seat and a motion is waiting on your vote, the Realm tab in the top bar carries a number. That is the only number in the navigation, and it is there for one reason: not voting counts against a motion, so a law that fails because nobody noticed is worse than one that fails because nobody agreed.
A law that passes does not take effect at once. It waits up to one more world day, and during that window the king of that realm may refuse it, or put it into force at once. One day rather than three, because a motion needs a quorum to gather and a royal decision needs one man who knows he wears the crown.
Both choices are offered on Realm → Council beside a passed law, to the king and to nobody else, and both ask for confirmation, because both are final. A king who has decided cannot decide again, a former king cannot decide at all, and a king crowned while a law was waiting may decide it.
So a law is at most four world days from the floor to force, and the two bodies have to move in sequence. That is the only place in the game where they do. A council that all votes on the day and a king who ratifies that evening have a law in force the same day; the four days are what an absent advisor and an absent king are owed, not what a present one must wait.
The money supply
| what it does | bounds | |
|---|---|---|
| Create currency | adds to the country's own treasury | 1000 per term, both directions counted together |
| Destroy currency | removes it from that treasury | cannot take a treasury below nothing |
The market
| what it does | bounds | |
|---|---|---|
| Offer currency for gold | puts some of the treasury's own currency on the currency market at a stated price | the treasury must hold it |
| Offer gold for currency | puts some of the treasury's gold on that market, asking its own currency | the treasury must hold it |
| Withdraw the currency offer | takes the standing one down, its remainder returning to the treasury | there must be one standing |
| Withdraw the gold offer | the same, in the other direction | there must be one standing |
A country holds at most one offer in each direction at a time. Passing a new one replaces the standing one and refunds its remainder in the same act, so changing a price never leaves a gap. A withdrawal names no amount, since the direction is the whole of the address; one that finds no offer standing is recorded as having failed rather than doing nothing.
What a country charges
| what it does | bounds | |
|---|---|---|
| Set the work tax | the rate withheld from a wage paid here | 0 to 100% |
| Set the sales tax | the rate withheld from a seller on this country's goods market | 0 to 100% |
| Set the licence fee | what a foreigner pays, in gold, for the right to sell on this ground | 0 to 1000 gold |
All three are shown on Realm → any kingdom, for every country and not only your own, so a trader can compare them before deciding where to carry goods.
A country acts on its own currency and its own treasury, never another's.
War
| what it does | bounds | |
|---|---|---|
| Declare war | starts a war with another country | costs the treasury 500 gold, destroyed; refused while a non-aggression accord stands, checked again when the law takes effect |
| Open a front | starts a battle in one region of the enemy | that region must border ground this country holds, and each side holds one open front per war |
| Fund a war chest | commits gold to one front, at a rate in gold per 1000 damage | only a front this country opened; the rate is set by the first such law and can never be changed, though the chest may be topped up |
| Offer an accord | puts a peace or a non-aggression pact on the table for another country | peace needs a war standing; a pact refuses one |
| Accept an accord | takes an accord offered to this country | only one offered to you, and only while it stands |
These five are the first laws that name something rather than an amount: a country, a region, a front or an accord. The form gives you a list of what can be named rather than a box to type an id into, so a law that would be refused is usually not offered at all.
Faith
| what it does | bounds | |
|---|---|---|
| Set the state religion | adopts one of the world's three faiths for this country | costs the faith's current tax in gold when the law takes effect; fails if the country treasury is short |
The faith fixes this price, not the proposing council. A leader may change the tax while the motion stands, so the price paid is the tax when the law takes effect. A country may also ordinarily have no state religion.
Neither half of an accord touches the other country. Offering one writes a public record; accepting one consumes it. Nothing is inserted into anybody else's floor, and each king may veto his own council's half. What war does in person, and what a chest actually pays, is in War.
The per-term allowance counts creating and destroying together, so a council cannot churn the supply. It counts laws that actually took effect, so a law the king vetoed does not spend the allowance. None of the other thirteen laws touches that allowance, because none of them creates or destroys a single coin: an offer moves currency that already exists, a rate decides how a payment is divided, and every war law moves gold or moves nothing. A council that has minted its full cap can still set every rate it has and still go to war.
open_front says where the country
is fighting; it orders nobody there. Whoever turns up and swings decides a
battle, and a council that declares a war it cannot persuade anybody to fight
will watch it lapse.