Today I am going to discuss the other elements important to the composition of your country and your stability economy, Factions and Culture.


Factions are governed by loyalty and power. A loyal faction grants bonuses, while a disloyal faction takes them away. Most factions at any given time are neutral towards you, but it is easy to woo one faction to your side, at the expense of the loyalty of many others. For this reason, it is impossible to obtain loyalty from all of your factions, so the game becomes to empower loyal factions and marginalize the others.

To this effect, privileges are able to both increase the loyalty and power of a single faction at the cost, generally, of the loyalty and power of another. In addition, they grant bonuses that improve your country and incentivize a certain playstyle, depending on your alignment.

Laborer faction privileges and effects.

Each faction also has a maximum number of privileges determined by your reforms. This limits the amount of bonuses you can stack from each faction, and also determines the relative worth of each faction to your cause.

There is also the ruling coalition, whose size is determined by the form of your government. Ruling factions are generally more loyal and powerful, but their influence on the cost of reforms is much more significant. Ruling factions can drastically increase the cost of reforms they disagree with, or make them cheaper otherwise, so pick them wisely.

But from where does a faction draw its power? Faction power is gained from multiple places, including modifiers, population, and controlled regions and units. Each of these factors in to the total calculation, and then each faction is allocated a percentage of the total power based on their share (the total power of all factions is always 100%).

From the population, factions derive power from specific population types and demographics. Soldiers, for example, are loyal to the military faction, whereas engineers are of the middle class. As you have significant influence over the general demographic makeup of your country, you can influence the power distribution of your politics by building different projects in order to obtain political power for certain factions you agree with.

This also means that each type of country will have a different attitude towards each element of its population. As a general rule, the productive element of the population (laborers and middle class), who provide the industrial capacity necessary for the production of resources, are loyal to factions who fall in the blue part of the alignment circle. Countries following the green, orange, red, or purple paths must therefore be more cautious about the influence of these populations, and therefore correct by spending stability resources on suppressing them, or modifying their political power through reforms and faction privileges.


Culture provides some important and hard to come by bonuses to your country that are somewhat unique to you. Each culture in the world has 3 traits and all are different from each other in at least one way. Your primary culture determines which culture's bonuses you obtain, but your country can have many accepted cultures which allows you to efficiently administer the territories that culture inhabits.

Culture trait screen, yellow halo indicates this trait is possessed by the current culture.

Traits are organized into rings, with the innermost ring being the "religion" the culture is based on. Religion is in quotation marks because that does not mean that everyone in the culture follows that religion, it merely indicates the closest match for the overall value system the culture utilizes - most of which come from religions. You will notice however some of the traits in this category are not religions, at least by the usual definition. Marxism, occultism, etc. are represented as religions in this context because they are wide reaching value systems which are mutually exclusive with others.

The outer two rings are miscellaneous traits which each give some interesting bonuses. While it is not impossible to switch your primary culture, it is difficult, and therefore you can think of culture as being kind of a country specific buff that you carry for the entire game. Ideally, every culture has some kind of trait synergy that makes that culture unique and interesting to play.

Overall, the idea behind the stability economy is to provide you with a limited resource you can use for the advancement of your country, and therefore is the most important resource in the game. Next time, I will illustrate one of the ways that you can spend stability to grow your civilization: War and Peace. That will not be next week though, as I have other things to do that weekend.

Perhaps the most important consideration in geopolitics is the internal political and stability situation in each country - minor deviations in course here can drastically impact how countries operate on the world stage. In Twilight of Modernity, this is represented by the political system, which is the primary economy for the resource stability.

Politics is controlled by two elements: Factions and Reforms, and one currency: Stability.

Stability is the most important currency in the game. It controls a lot of what you do and how your country operates. You gain stability from keeping your factions happy, as well as being in alignment with their goals. Sometimes, you can gain stability from modifiers or other areas, but those are generally secondary to factions or dependent on faction approval.

Stability is spent on Reforms, Faction Privileges, Research, Diplomacy, and War Exhaustion, all of which are important factors for determining your success against other countries. War exhaustion, in particular, in many ways defines how war ready you are, as wars will often become meat grinders where the winner is the last man standing.

Running low on stability is not advisable, as low stability enables disloyal factions to revolt against your rule. When your stability is below a certain threshold (the combined power of all disloyal factions), a revolt timer will begin, and if that timer reaches zero, every disloyal faction will rally against you and you will enter a civil war.

I appear to be in a bit of a predicament.
Rebellions are sometimes easy to quash in these games, however in Twilight of Modernity they are very dangerous. As mentioned last week, Regions are controlled by factional interests, and each region and unit controlled by a disloyal faction will rise up against you. If it happens that your military is largely controlled by rebel interests, you are essentially out of the game, although you can see ahead of time what interests control the pieces of your empire, so this can, and should, be avoided.

Reforms represent the characteristics of your country's government. They are choices that you make in regards to which factions you want to be empowered, as well as which population types you want to be in abundance in your regions (although economics is more effective in the latter). The idea is that your choices of reforms determine two things: your Alignment, as well as the general power distribution of factions in your country.

Alignment is a summary of where you stand on political issues in comparison to the other nations of the world. Your alignment is a vector of three axes, liberal (blue), marxist (red), and traditional (green). Each of these combines to represent your politics as a neat color, which you can see using the alignment mapmode.

Reforms and choices.

You can see that the American Dominate is an Imperial system which has a variety of reforms, all of which combine to give it a conservative alignment (cyan). Another may have a different set of reforms giving it a fascist or communist alignment, and this would greatly impact how that country plays. You can also see formable nations in this image, but that is something I will get to in the future.