Feature

Wars don't end when the fighting stops

In most strategy games, casualties are a number on a screen. In NationFall, they are a number subtracted from your population, and the population doesn't grow back this turn. Or this decade. The army you spent on a campaign is missing from the next one - and from the workforce that was supposed to fund it.

Every weapon system, every bombing campaign, every escalation tier carries a demographic bill. The game tracks it.

Combat drains people, not units

When a unit is destroyed in NationFall, the engine converts that loss to population: unit_loss × 200. A division wiped out is forty thousand fewer people. A long campaign with steady losses is a generation gone.

Manpower comes from a finite pool: 1.5% of base population is available for recruitment. A hundred-million-nation has 1.5M reservists, and that pool refills slowly. Outrun your population and your army stops being a number you can rebuild.

A dampening floor protects against total collapse: as population falls below 50% of pre-war, casualty conversion scales down proportionally. The model accepts that a country running out of people stops generating soldiers - but the cost is everywhere else.

Strategic bombing, by the formula

Civilian casualties from strategic bombing are not a flat hit. They are computed from target population, escalation tier, bomber count, anti-air defenses, and a diminishing-returns curve:

casualties = pop × tierMult × bomberScale × (1 − aaReduction) × diminishing

• TIER 2 (STRATEGIC)0.3× rate. The escalation that opens civilian targets without crossing into total war.
• TIER 3+ (TOTAL WAR)1.0× rate. Cities are targets. Every bomber that lands on a city counts.
• BOMBER SCALEmin(1, count / 500). 500 bombers caps the campaign - past that, you are saturating the same targets.
• AA REDUCTIONmin(0.8, AA_rating / 200). Strong air defense cuts up to 80% of the damage. There is always a 20% floor.
• DIMINISHINGIf pop is below 50% of pre-war, casualties scale by (pop / preWar). The fewer people left, the slower the collapse - but the collapse is permanent.

A 500-bomber Tier 3 campaign against a major city with weak air defense kills tens of thousands per turn. The same campaign against a hardened modern target with full AA is closer to a few thousand. The cost-benefit is real and reads in the report.

Demographic crisis, not a binary

Population responds to losses with non-linear behavior. The game models the long demographic shadow that real wars cast.

A nation that loses 35% of its population grows back faster than usual - the post-war boom is real. A nation that loses 75% does not recover for generations: growth stalls to 10% of normal. There is no respawn.

Carrying capacity adds a ceiling: basePop × (1 + agricultureRatio). A nation that bombed its own farms during the war or imported its food from a now-blockaded ally cannot grow back to its old size. Demographic recovery has prerequisites.

Refugees as a weapon

War displaces 5–15% of the affected population per turn. Forced transfers carry a −20 stability hit, take 24 months to decay, and run a 15% partisan-formation risk in the receiving territory.

In the offensive form - refugee flooding - a nation deliberately drives population across a target's border to destabilize it. It costs 0.5% GDP per month and pushes refugees at 5× the natural rate. Below 0.2% stability the target's institutions start to crack.

Receiving refugees is not free. Doing it well is not cheap. Doing it badly is how stability dies and partisans appear.

Escalation taxes growth

Beyond casualties, escalation itself drags annual growth:

• TIER 1−0.0% growth (diplomatic friction)
• TIER 2−0.1% (limited war)
• TIER 3−0.3% (major war)
• TIER 4−0.5% (total war)
• TIER 5−1.0% (nuclear)

A long total war doesn't just bleed casualties. It shaves a percent of compounding economic growth - and that compounds against you for the rest of the game, even after peace.