The Tide Council

A weekly, ocean-wide, binding vote — the first mechanic in the game where other commanders move your numbers without fighting you. Here's exactly how far that reaches, and where it stops dead.

The weekly ballot

Once a term, the drowned parliament convenes. A shortlist of three decrees, plus the standing option to abstain (Let the Water Lie — the Council does nothing and nothing changes), is drawn from a bank of 50 authored decrees. Every commander in the ocean sees the identical three-decree slate that term — the question is shared even though the vote is individual. The decree that just finished its term is excluded from the very next slate, so the same decree can never win two terms running.

A term runs 7 tides. The vote needs a real mandate to bind anything: fall short of 5 ballots cast and the water lies on its own — a three-vote mandate over a whole ocean isn't one. Whichever decree wins the most votes binds every flotilla in the ocean, whether or not you voted for it, for the length of the following term.

Every decree gives and takes

The rule the whole system hangs on: a decree that only helps isn't a vote, it's a formality. If any decree on the ballot were a straight ocean-wide buff, every commander would pick the biggest number and the "politics" would just be arithmetic. So every one of the 50 decrees is authored to split the electorate — it helps the situation you're in and hurts the one you're not — and no two decrees pull the exact same pair of levers in the exact same directions, so a "better" decree never simply dominates a worse one on every axis.

The magnitude ceiling

A binding decree moves everyone's numbers without a fight, so its reach is capped harder than almost anything else in the game, split by what kind of lever it touches:

• Economic levers (income, build/military cost, upkeep, food, water, immigration, training time, manpower, wonder cost, birth rate, bed capacity) apply continuously to everything you own for the whole term, so they're capped tight — at most an 8% swing.
• Rate levers (how fast war exhaustion drains, how often pirates/refugees/salvage booms show up) move a discrete probability or a recovery speed rather than a continuous multiplier, so they're allowed a much wider 50% swing — holding these to 8% would make the cost statistically invisible, which is worse than no cost at all.
• Small additive nudges to unrest, happiness, health, and crime pressure each carry their own tight cap.

One more floor under all of it: no decree can push a flotilla into a failure state by itself. Every lever is a multiplier that stays close to neutral or a small additive nudge — none can zero out a production line, empty a treasury, or trigger bill-lock on its own.

Reading a standing decree

A decree that's currently binding shows up wherever the number it moves already has a breakdown — the bills card's civic discount line, the military price line, the happiness factor list, and so on — rather than as a single hidden multiplier you have to remember is active. The Council screen names whichever decree is standing and what it does in full; the breakdown lines elsewhere deliberately just say "the Council's standing decree," since the effect, not the title, is what's hashed into your saved state.