Starting Guide

Welcome to StateKraft. This article should serve to help new players understand what's going on in the game.

Cities
Cities are hubs of population in your nation. You start with one city, your Capital City. We'll now breakdown the basic city mechanics.

Population
Your city's population is based on the amount of land you have in the city. Purchasing more land will increase the population cap for your city, but the amount the population increases per land area decreases as you buy more land. This is a function of decreasing returns to scale.

Population Growth
Your population will grow (or shrink) at a rate of 1 person per second. If your population capacity is higher than the current population, it will grow, and vice versa.

Infrastructure
Infrastructure in StateKraft is quite different than infrastructure in other games, like Politics and War. Infrastructure in StateKraft does not increase your population. Instead, it is more of a measure of how much capital there is in your city, in terms of, well infrastructure. Think the number of roads, bridges, buildings, etc. Infrastructure has a fixed cost of $1,000 and 10 Political Capital per level.

Maintenance Cost
For each level of infrastructure you build, you will pay a maintenance cost based on the depreciation rate. The depreciation rate is what portion of your infrastructure needs to be rebuilt each day. Your maintenance cost is based on the price of infrastructure * the depreciation rate * the amount of infrastructure you have. Thus, maintenance expenses is a linear function increasing with the amount of infrastructure you have.

What is Infrastructure useful for?
Infrastructure increases the total economic output of your city. More infrastructure = more economic activity. There will be an optimal level of infrastructure based on your population and other factors. Fortunately, the game calculates this value for you.

Land
Increasing the land area of your city will increase your population cap. This was touched on earlier in the population section. Land has a fixed cost of $10,000 and 25 Political Capital per level. There is no "optimal" level of land, and building more land is likely always beneficial, though at decreasing returns to scale as the amount of land you have increases.

City GDP
Your City GDP is the overall measure of economic activity in your city. It is based on a number of factors, including: Infrastructure, Population, Productivity, and the Tax Rate.

Positive Factors
Increasing your infrastructure, population, and productivity will all increase your City GDP. Infrastructure and population both increase the value at decreasing returns to scale, while productivity serves as a modifier that can dramatically change the City GDP with only a small increase in productivity.

Productivity
Productivity is determined by external factors, like having access to food, water, power, and luxury resources.

Negative Factors
The negative factor to your City GDP is your tax rate. Increasing the tax rate will negatively affect the economic activity or GDP of the city.

Maximizing Revenue
For any given set of population, tax rate, and productivity there is an optimal infrastructure level where building more infrastructure will actually decrease revenue because the increase in maintenance costs more than offsets the increased tax revenue. The game calculates this value for you, as the Optimal Infrastructure Level. The optimal level will change whenever your Population, Productivity, or Tax Rate changes. An increase in the tax rate will increase the share of economic activity the government takes in revenue, but will also decrease overall revenue as well.

Industry
Industry is where your nation produces resources. Each nation has access to 3 natural resources, depending on which region it is located in.

Forming a Company
To be able to extract resources, you must first establish a state run company for each natural resource. This is done on the Industry page.

Investing
To increase production of a resource, you can invest into your company. Investing costs money and political capital, and the returns on investment are of decreasing returns to scale. This means that as you purchase more levels, the increase per level you see decreases.

Abundance
Each region has a set of resources as well as a set of abundances for those resources. A higher abundance means it is easier to extract that resource. Abundance serves as a multiplier to the amount of money you have invested into your resource production company, and makes a large difference in the amount of resources that you produce.

Refineries
You can refine natural resources into the 6 manufactured resources: Aluminum, Gasoline, Munitions, Steel, Plastic, and Transistors. Refining operations require time and political capital to complete.

Religion
Each nation can select a state religion which will align it with other nations of the same religion.

Faith
Faith is a measure of religious devotion in a nation. It will be used to create Missionaries, which are units that can influence other nations' religions.

Missionaries
Missionaries are one-use units that can spread religion to other nations. When spreading religion to nations that follow a different state religion, it will decrease that nation's following percentage. When spreading religion to nations that follow the same religion, it will increase their following percentage.

Following Percentage
This is simply the portion of the population that follows the state religion. Having a state religion does not guarantee that the population will actually practice that religion, however, over time the number of followers of the state religion will increase. When a nation changes its state religion the following percentage is reset and Faith is set to 0.

Piety Bonus
Each religion has a Piety Bonus, determined by the number of its followers worldwide. To increase the total Piety Bonus, a religion must increase its followers, which can happen by converting new nations as well as increasing the following percentage in already converted nations.

The bonus that each converted nation receives is a portion of the total bonus, based on the converted nation's Faith to Total Faith of the religion ratio. For example, if a religion had a 2% Piety Bonus and 10 nations converted to that religion, and a total faith of 1000, then if one of the converted nations had a Faith of 200 it would get 200/1000 = 20% of the Total Piety Bonus, or 0.4%.

The Piety Bonus that nations get benefits them whenever a Random Number Generator is used. For example, in a battle, the odds of success would be modified by the nation's Piety Bonus.