Game Systems/Economy

Population

Last updated 2026-08-28

Your nation is not a number. It is a collection of pops — cohorts of people in a province, each with a type (their class and occupation), a culture, a size, and money of their own. Pops earn, buy, grow, move, and change class. Almost every other system in the game either feeds them or is fed by them.

Pops are processed twice: a weekly pass that handles income and consumption, and a monthly pass that handles growth, promotion and migration.

The weekly pass: earning and buying#

Every week each pop earns, then shops.

Income comes from two places: passive income determined by the pop's type and size, and wages from the factory or resource site that employs it.

Then the pop tries to buy its needs, in three tiers and strictly in this order:

Life needs — food and the basics of survival.
Everyday needs — the ordinary goods of its class.
Luxury needs — what it buys when it can afford to.

A pop buys as much of each tier as its money allows before moving to the next. A pop that cannot afford its life needs never reaches everyday or luxury goods, no matter how rich the nation around it is. What it manages to buy becomes its needs met score, and that score is the single most important number attached to a pop: it drives growth, unrest, and promotion.

Prices come from the world market, and what a pop actually pays is the world price adjusted by your tariff setting. A high import tariff raises what your own pops pay for imported goods. This is the main way a trade policy is felt by ordinary people.

The monthly pass: growth, promotion, migration#

Growth#

Well-fed pops grow, badly-fed pops shrink. The needs-met score is the driver.

Promotion between classes#

Pops move between types over time, but promotion is not an unconditional drip — it follows the labour market:

Farm to factory. Promotion out of agriculture only happens while industry actually pays better. The game compares realized weekly pay per 1,000 workers on each side of the farm/factory divide. When raw goods get scarce and farm pay rises above factory pay, labour flows back to the land.
Craftsman to clerk to capitalist. Gated on real clerk vacancies. A factory's clerk capacity is 20% of its total capacity, so clerks can only grow where there are factories with room for them, and the chain needs a profitable factory in the state to pull people up it.
Into soldiers. Driven by how many soldiers the nation is asking for.

The general rule: promotion follows vacancies and wages. Building factories with no one to staff them, or expecting a clerk class in a state with no industry, will not work.

Migration#

Once a month the game scores every province and finds the most attractive destination in each nation, then moves people toward it. A province needs at least 50 openings to be considered a destination at all. Migration is internal movement toward opportunity, so it concentrates population where there is work.

Urbanization#

A state's urbanization is the total level of its factories relative to the number of provinces it holds. It is a consequence of industrialisation, not a setting.

What this means in play#

Feed people first. A pop that cannot buy food does not buy anything else, which means your luxury industries have no customers and your growth stalls. Food supply is the foundation of every other economic ambition.
Wages are a signal, not a leak. If agriculture is draining, look at whether factory pay is actually higher. If raw goods are scarce and expensive, the game will pull workers back to farms on its own.
You cannot promote your way to an industrial economy. Build the factories, make them profitable, and the clerks and capitalists follow. The capacity has to exist before the class does.
Population concentrates. Expect people to pile into your best provinces. That is migration working, not a bug.