WarEra+ v1.1 — tomorrow's world, two days early

Still me, https://app.warera.io/user/69d2ed249f38d300d59a2af1. Busy week, this one: in case you missed it, I'm running for the Italian presidency ( https://app.warera.io/article/6a9013111375cafe49ad3761 ) — what I'd do with it belongs in the campaign, not in this post.

The only campaign-related thing that belongs here is that it didn't stop the tool: it's been a handful of days since v1 shipped and we're already at v1.1.

And thank you again — I read every comment. A good chunk of what you're about to see came straight out of them: this isn't a launch, it's what happened afterwards.

There's a thread running through almost everything in this round, and I only noticed it at the end: it's all stuff that's already in the game, that the game just doesn't show you. A bonus it never tells you the value of. A party whose ideology quietly changes how much your country produces. A penalty that's about to land and nobody has looked at yet. Things that were sitting right there in the data, waiting for someone to put them on a screen. A market that tells you the price of everything and never what it pays you to make it.

Same map as always. One more question it answers.

A ninth view: Production bonus

The Views menu had eight entries. Now it has nine.

Almost everything in WarEra is earned with people: population, damage, wealth, development. The production bonus isn't — that one is earned with territory. Two countries with the exact same population produce differently if one of them is sitting on coal and the other isn't. That felt like precisely the kind of thing that deserves a map of its own: where the world's mineral wealth actually is.

The world repaints on the bonus, with the percentage written right on top of every nation. But "+25%" on its own doesn't say much, because it hides two completely different situations: five different resources, or one single resource across five regions. You lose the second one all at once if that area falls. So underneath each nation, in the summary, you get icons for which resources they actually are — coal, uranium, diamonds, rare earths, gold, lithium — and the legend also tells you how many regions in the world carry each of the six, so you can tell at a glance which one is rare and which isn't.

And there are the timed deposits: the other production bonus, and the only one that expires. Each with a bar showing how much life it has left, so you can see immediately which ones are about to run out.

Not just how much. Also what it's made of, and how long it lasts.

The ruling party changes how much your country produces

This is my favourite of the round, and it has been written in the game all along — just on the wrong side.

Every party in WarEra has four ethics axes — militarism, isolationism, imperialism, industrialism — each at −2, 0 or +2, and what they do is written on the party page: known stuff, anyone who plays knows it. The catch is that it's written on the party side, while the question you ask looking at the map is on the nation side: who governs your country, and does that country therefore have that +30% or not? To answer it you had to know who's in power, open that party's page and read its ethics. For a hundred and eighty nations.

So I crossed them myself, and checked it against the companies' real bonuses: the +30% on the nation's specialized item only lands where the ruling party has industrialism at +2. Ukraine, Iraq, Indonesia, Venezuela: they have it, and they get the 30. Serbia has a specialized item too — but industrialism 0, so it gets nothing. And digging further, across 70 sampled nations: all nine of the ones at industrialism −2 don't have a specialized item at all, and all seven of the ones at +2 do.

So the nation panel now tells you, without making you tour a hundred and eighty party pages: who governs, which ethics they bring with them, and what that's worth in production. Honesty as always — the link between the ethics value and the real bonus is something I worked out by sampling the numbers, not an official table: if the game ever added in-between values it would need re-measuring, and that's exactly why the tool labels that bonus as an estimate whenever it isn't read straight off a company's bonus.

Whoever governs doesn't just change the laws. They change the factories.

And now: what to produce, and where

This is the big one this round, and it came out of a chat conversation. The Industrial Optimizer fixes the companies you already have: skills, relocations, workers. But if you still have to open a company — or you're thinking about reconfiguring one — that view is no help: it tells you how to play the hand you're holding, not which hand is worth holding. "I can't see the info if I need to open a new one and decide what to produce", word for word. Fair point.

So here's Production yields, a new entry under Insights. It opens and shows, with no username to type in: this isn't about your companies, it's about the market.

One row for each of the twenty producible resources, ranked by the only question that really matters: what does a production point pay. The row carries the sell price, the input cost, the production points, the best region in the world for that resource with its bonus, that country's tax, and the resulting yield.

yield per point = (sell price − input cost) ÷ production points × (1 + bonus)

The first thing it told me, I wasn't expecting: the market is arbitraged tight. Between the best-paying resource and the worst there's barely 15%. There is no golden resource — there's the right combination of resource, regional bonus and taxation. And taxes run from 2% to 45%: they swing the outcome more than switching resource does. Which is exactly the column nobody looks at, because nobody ever puts it in front of them.

Two switches change what the numbers mean, so they sit in plain sight in the toolbar instead of hiding in a menu: reference price (the market average) or executable price — I sell into the best buy order and buy from the best sell order, which is harsher and truer — and net of market tax. On executable prices a small △ shows up on the rows where the best price only covers a handful of units: a price that holds for twelve units isn't a price.

Click a row and you get the five best regions for that resource, each with the bonus broken down — deposit, ethics, strategic resources, specialization — and, above all, when the deposit expires, which is the number that actually decides whether moving is worth it.

Twenty resources, one question: what does a production point pay.

And the wage: the exact point where an employee stops paying off

The same table carries the break-even wage: the wage above which every point your employee produces costs you more than it makes. Below it you earn, above it you lose, and it's written out resource by resource instead of left to your gut.

Type in the wage you have in mind and the table tells you what's left for you and what actually reaches the worker's pocket each day — that one net of their country's income tax. And there's the loyalty bonus slider: every day spent with the same employer is worth one more percentage point of production, up to ten. Drag it and watch the yield climb day by day, plus the total earned across those days — which isn't one day's earnings times ten, because on day one you're still at zero loyalty.

One detail the game states in a single line and that's worth a lot: loyalty never enters the salary. It raises your yield, not their pay. You can see it in the table — move the slider and your columns climb while the worker's column stays put.

Ten days of loyalty is +10% production. They don't pay for it — you collect it.

The alliance bonus is about to become a penalty

From 1 September 2026 the alliance damage bonus curve changes. For some alliances the number goes negative: not "less bonus" — an actual penalty.

WarEra+ shows you the new numbers starting today. Not in two days, not when it happens: from now on, everywhere in the app, every alliance bonus is computed with the curve that goes live on 1 September. The tool says so out loud too — the curve tooltip spells out that those numbers only reach the game on the 1st, so if you compare with the alliance screen you know why they differ. And where the number goes negative, you can see it: explicit sign and red, in the panel and in the tables. A −12% painted green reads like a gain, and that was exactly the risk.

I did it on purpose, and on purpose now: if the bonuses change for everyone on 1 September, the useful moment to look at them is before. Alliance leaders can use the Alliance Builder from today to test tomorrow's world: merge, split, move nations around, and the builder recalculates all of it with the new curve. You've got two days to act on what you find, instead of discovering after the fact that your bloc landed in penalty territory.

Better to find out now than on 1 September.

The Alliance Builder grew a lot

In Part 2 you could drag a nation from one alliance to another, merge two blocs and build one from scratch. After that I got an avalanche of "what if I could also…", and most of them were fair asks:

• Pin the alliances you care about, so they stay at the top instead of making you hunt for them every time.

• Delete an alliance: its members drop back into the Unaligned pile on their own, which is the whole point of deleting it.

• Unmerge a merge you made by mistake, without rebuilding everything.

• Remove a nation with an ✕, instead of dragging it all the way down the page.

• Multi-select, to move half a bloc in one go.

• And a table, for people who prefer rows to cards — same numbers, same actions.

• Sort it your way: name, number of nations, share of world core development, bonus, weekly damage, total damage, population, wealth, wars.

That last one sounds trivial and was the most irritating thing in there: everything used to be ordered by damage, which moves at every battle tick — so the alliance you were working on slid away on its own while you were still dropping nations into it. Now you choose, and if you choose the name nothing moves at all. The sort drives the cards and the table, and while I was in there the table gained the two columns it was missing, total damage and wealth: sorting by a number you can't see is a joke.

It all still saves itself, so a refresh won't wipe out an hour of dragging flags around.

Pin, delete, unmerge, select in groups. And none of it touches the real game.

Not how many players, but how far along they are

A nation's page already told you how many of its players are on war and how many on economy — the donut at the top. What it didn't tell you is where in their growth they are. And a nation with 200 economists all under level 10 and one with 200 economists past level 40 have exactly the same donut, and are not remotely the same country.

Now the two cross: one column per level band, and inside each column the split between war, economy, hybrids and people who haven't spent their points yet. You can drop down to individual levels, switch to percentages, and turn groups off by clicking the legend — turning off "no points spent" is almost always the first thing you want to do, because at low levels they're the majority and they flatten everything else. And you can throw other nations into the same chart to compare.

Same round, one small thing that was missing: anyone who has prestiged now has a star next to their name. It genuinely mattered, because prestige resets your level — without that star, a player who started over just looks small.

And now prestige has a sortable column of its own: prestiged players first, highest level down, then everyone else counting down from 50. It's the fastest way I know to see who in a nation has already been round once. In the same pass I dropped the Attack column, which nobody was reading and which was stealing room from the rest.

Same donut, two completely different countries.

Spheres of influence now draw themselves

Small confession about Part 1: the Sphere of influence view was, in large part, a list I maintained by hand, built by asking around in game. Reliable, but incomplete by construction and perfectly capable of ageing without anyone noticing.

Now, next to those rows, there are computed ones, each with its own confidence percentage — and a hand-written row the data contradicts carries a mark, instead of sitting there forever because nobody looked at it again.

The good part of the problem is that a proxy erases the very field that would identify it: whoever moves to Slovenia is Slovenian as far as the API is concerned. So you don't observe control, you observe residues — where the citizens' units are registered, which unit the government is enlisted in, what language it speaks, who funds the treasury. None of them proves anything alone: they only count combined, and the panel shows you the evidence behind the number, not just the number.

Only what clears 75% makes it onto the map, and I measured that threshold against a source the model never sees — migration clusters derived from citizenship history by an outside analysis: above 75%, agreement on the patron is 10 out of 10. So the limit isn't accuracy, it's coverage: of the 24 documented pairs it finds ten, and the missing ones are the consolidated proxies, where the people who migrated have built local military units by now.

a special thanks to @jonny for this one, he helped me a lot with the data!

Elections: the whole history, not the last five

In the Politics section, a nation's election history stopped at ten entries: five presidential and five congress. That wasn't a design choice — it's simply how many the game handed over, and I never noticed because at a glance it looked like plenty.

Now it's all of them, from day one. That's 33 elections for Italy, 42 for the United States, going back to May 2025. The presidential turnout chart covers the nation's entire history instead of five points. The congress seats chart starts in March 2026, which is when parties were born: before that everyone was an independent, and a chart that draws one line per party would have had nothing to draw.

A big thank you to https://app.warera.io/user/697b55e4bcecf3b37667e0d1 for helping me figure it out!

From five elections to a nation's whole history.

And a couple of things that were simply broken

I always promise honesty, so:

• The light theme in the Politics section never existed. The button was there, you clicked it, and nothing happened: about a hundred style rules were pointing at the wrong place, from day one. It works now — and there's only one switch, the app's own in the top right. Politics had a second one fighting with it, and I removed it.

• The ticker dates. "22 ago 14:31" with the interface in English reads as "22 ago" — a player pointed it out, and they were completely right. It's now "22/08 14:31", which isn't ambiguous in any of the nine languages.

• The nation panel sometimes opened before the app had finished mounting and left a piece half-done. You almost never saw it, but it happened on every single startup.

Thanks, now go try it

wareraplus.vercel.app — free, no login, works on your phone. If you haven't opened it yet, Part 1 is the map and Part 2 is everything you can dig into: this update mostly makes sense after those two.

Thanks to @reporter1 and @reporter2, who wrote to me instead of shrugging and closing the tab: half of this post exists because of them. Bugs, ideas, complaints — always welcome, find me in game: https://app.warera.io/user/69d2ed249f38d300d59a2af1