Settlements

Prior to Eco 10, there was a single global government, and laws and decisions it made affected everyone globally. No longer. With this update, the world starts with no governments, and you must band together with your fellow Citizens to create them.

Homesteads

Each Citizen begins with the ability to create their own homestead. This is essentially a Tier-0 settlement, population 1. It allows a Citizen to claim a small amount of property around them, with no other government’s laws or taxes able to apply them. While this gives you total freedom to do as you wish (pollute up a storm if you like), it comes at a cost, because you’re limited in how much land you can claim. There’s only so much land that can be managed by a singular person. Although, someone from a town can give you claim papers to counter this, but you are still restricted from all actual things settlements can do.

Towns

To take the next step up and start claiming more land and create laws and taxes, a Town must be formed. To do so, you’ll need to find fellow Citizens who wish to create a Town with you, a minimum of 3. You’ll need to build a Town hall on new property to form the center of the Town, and you’ll need to ratify a Town Constitution which the majority of the initial Citizens agree to.

Countries

Eventually, Towns will start to feel cramped as they reach their max level of influence or push up against neighbor’s influence. The next step, once the required tech tier is reached, Citizens can start a Country. The process of forming a Country is similar to founding a Town, with the difference that instead of requiring a base number of Citizens to start, they require a base number of Towns. This means that in order to form a Country, you must get at least 2 Towns to agree and ratify a Constitution. You additionally must have a minimum amount of Culture to form a Country . Getting Citizens agree enough to start a Town is enough of a diplomatic challenge, but getting multiple Towns to agree to form a Country is a huge achievement.

The country has a separate government, which is not part of the member Town’s governments; rather, it lies atop those town governments. Both governments will continue to exist, with their own influence radiuses, and their laws and taxes only impacting their influenced land. This means that within a Country’s influence, you may have many Towns with different laws, and a set of federal laws/taxes that apply throughout.

Federations

The final tier of settlements is a Federation, which is akin to a United-Nations-like collection of countries. A Federation must have a minimum of 2 member countries ratify its constitution, and if getting several Towns full of Citizens to agree to form a Country is a huge achievement, getting several Countries, full of Towns full of Citizens to agree requires some superhuman diplomacy.

Once formed, the influence of a Federation can become large enough to cover the entire globe. At this advanced stage of a world, the ability to enforce laws globally may be critical to survival, preventing rogue Towns/countries from polluting and destroying the common resources shared among the many societies of the planet.

However, for those settlements that just won’t listen to reason, there is a way to enforce agreement once diplomacy fails.