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So we are posting sign-ups now?
1.) Glorious Kingdom of Thatcher (UK)
2.) Soviet Union
3.) Italy
Minors:
1.) Norway
2.) Portugal
3.) Greece
1.) Glorious Kingdom of Thatcher (UK)
2.) Soviet Union
3.) Italy
Minors:
1.) Norway
2.) Portugal
3.) Greece
I change my sign-up to,
1.) United States of America
2.) United Kingdoms
3.) Japan
1.) United States of America
2.) United Kingdoms
3.) Japan
oh for pete's sake
still no sign ups, guys. i know you're excited but there's no point in signing up before I have stats finalized, which I don't (and I want to finish at least UK, Manchuria and France first. Nobody's really expressed that much interest in Brazil and so I think we can get started without it. It's all integralist and stuff and is the axis enforcer in South America with a small sphere of influence.)
Anyway, UK incoming for reals this time, though i'd forgive you if you were skeptical
still no sign ups, guys. i know you're excited but there's no point in signing up before I have stats finalized, which I don't (and I want to finish at least UK, Manchuria and France first. Nobody's really expressed that much interest in Brazil and so I think we can get started without it. It's all integralist and stuff and is the axis enforcer in South America with a small sphere of influence.)
Anyway, UK incoming for reals this time, though i'd forgive you if you were skeptical
oh for pete's sake
still no sign ups, guys. i know you're excited but there's no point in signing up before I have stats finalized, which I don't (and I want to finish at least UK, Manchuria and France first. Nobody's really expressed that much interest in Brazil and so I think we can get started without it. It's all integralist and stuff and is the axis enforcer in South America with a small sphere of influence.)
Anyway, UK incoming for reals this time, though i'd forgive you if you were skeptical
OSS WORLD FACTBOOK
COUNTRY PROFILE: UNITED KINGDOM
Official Name: United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and BelizeCOUNTRY PROFILE: UNITED KINGDOM
Short Name: United Kingdom, Great Britain, UK
Capital: London
Prime Minister: Margaret Thatcher (Conservative Party)
Government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy
History:
Along with the USSR, Britain bore the brunt of much of the initial German blitz through Europe. The national government, helmed by the indomitable Winston Churchill, suffered greatly during what was known as “the Blitz.” German V1 rockets leveled large parts of London, while German rocket bombers that were able to outrun RAF interceptors made the damage even worse. A particularly ambitious project to create an amphibious destroyer resulted in an attempted German invasion of the British Isles in early 1942. However, the plan was ill-conceived, and British coastal defenses that utilized both Tesla coils and domestically developed jetpack-wielding infantrymen, the “Rocketeer Corps,” managed to send German “assault destroyers” and troop transports into the sea before they could even set foot on English soil. This rousing defense, immortalized as the Battle of Brighton, rallied the previously demoralized British and prompted increased American attention to the Atlantic front.
Britain would fight hard in the many battles to come. The African campaign to push the Italians out of Libya was primarily conducted by British forces, and His Majesty’s forces performed admirably in the Battle of Sicily and in the defense of Singapore from the Japanese. Even so, however, the British public began to demand decisive action in the war. The moderate gains of 1942 and stalemate of 1943 did little to stop the despised rationing of civilian goods and so the public would push hard for an end to the war. They got it, as is well known, at the end of 1944 after British Rex-class mecha helped break through the Nazi defences during the Normandy landings. The anger accumulating at Churchill during 1943 dissipated instantly, and in the next election he and the Conservative Party were returned with a commanding majority.
In the immediate postwar, Churchill had favored continued austerity for a limited time to help cushion the transition out of a war economy. The American Marshall Plan, granted to the countries of Free Europe and the USSR, helped avoid a nasty postwar crash, and Churchill managed to maintain much of his popularity throughout his administration, which lasted until 1951. Churchill, being the staunch Empire loyalist that he was and watching with alarm the French decolonization process, set a policy of “not one step back” for what remained of the British Empire. Ultimately, granting self-government to most of Britain’s African and Asian possessions would be inevitable, but Churchill decided to focus on keeping a few key territories. He first managed to defeat a 1949 Newfoundland referendum on joining Canada, angering the Canadians a great deal, and then began a process to increase the integration of British Honduras into the rest of the Empire that would continue for some time. This period would also see the emergence of increased tension in Northern Ireland, which would remain a minor factor for the time being but would later greatly increase in importance.
Churchill resigned in 1950 due to his age, and is to this day revered as Britain’s greatest Prime Minister. After after a brief caretaker Tory government, Labour under Herbert Morrison won the 1951 election. Seeking to reverse the Tories’ hard line against decolonization, Morrison would find his plans stymied when the British-aligned Sultan of Egypt was overthrown in a military coup in June 1951 and quickly moved to annul the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 granting Britain usage of the canal. Morrison, despite his pacifist tendencies, would not surrender the canal to Egyptian forces. A standoff ensued for much of 1952, but by the end of the year Morrison’s counterparts in Cairo met Egypt’s Generalissimo and hashed out a deal. Britain would grant independence to the Sudan by 1956 and withdraw in stages over a period of 20 months in exchange for a further extension on the canal lease and continued rights to maintain British bases there. The canal was now set to be handed over in 1968.
Morrison walked away satisfied, piloting a successful government to victory again in 1955 in coalition with the Liberal Party, but the Egyptian President had many domestic critics of his actions. Fed up with his apparent acquiescence to British demands, hardline elements of the military ended his short-lived Republic of Egypt and replaced it with the Egyptian State, an Egyptian nationalist-fascist state explicitly committed to destroying the British Empire and the influence of all Western powers. Fascist Egypt would conduct border raids into British Sudan during most of 1955, further damaging relations between the two governments. Egypt would strike its decisive blow on July 26th, 1956, when it unilaterally nationalized the canal and attacked the British garrison there. Acting quickly, the British, French and Israelis decided to work together to take the canal back. Israel would invade the Sinai, and the British and French would then pressure both sides to withdraw from the canal, giving the Israelis the Sinai and leaving the canal to the British and French. While the Israelis made quick progress into Egypt, Germany had been building ties with the new Egyptian regime, and the threat of German intervention made the United States try and pull back its allies. While the British and French did manage to seize the canal, fears of the war widening caused the French to unilaterally withdraw in late November, forcing the British to withdraw as well soon after. Britain was humiliated and the Liberals left the coalition, leaving the very unpopular PM to soldier on for three more years. Morrison did manage to lay the groundwork for the National Health Service, but it would be signed into law by the Eden administration, who claimed all the credit. All Morrison could do was watch as his popularity fell. Even an Argentine incursion by the fascist-leaning Peronist regime onto the Falkland Islands, which prompted him to intervene in Argentina, could not save his popularity.
Anthony Eden, Britain’s next prime minister, would face the escalation of the Falklands conflict into the 60s. However, as the war dragged on, Eden presided over a gradual transition of responsibility in the conflict to the Americans, as he wanted to avoid an increasingly unpopular land war. He would be unseated by hardline conservative Enoch Powell in a 1966 early election, who saw the growth of an anti-war and isolationist movement. Powell’s anti-immigration, anti-UN stances would leave a lasting impact on British politics, even if he ultimately would be blamed by both the left for failing to fight fascism and the right for sending good British men to die in a pointless war. The Powell government tried to withdraw from the UN in 1970, which failed and prompted him to lose his seat in the next election. Labor would take power under Harold Wilson, the last Labor Prime Minister to date, and tried to reconcile with the UN. Wilson even supervised Britain’s entry into the European Cooperation Organization, a French-led organization of the (few) non-fascist European countries. Unluckily for him, he was in power during the Axis oil embargo, and economic stagnation from 1974 onward both ended his political career and shattered the Labor Party into virtual irrelevance, the Liberals taking up the mantle of the left.
The United Kingdom is still in the UN, but is the most conservative society amongst the major powers of the free world. Despite possessing the world’s third-largest navy after the US and Germany, and having naval bases on every continent, Britain is strongly isolationist, and determined to keep the Empire together at virtually any cost. Newfoundland and Belize were, in a project of the Powell Administration, created as full countries in the United Kingdom, and are securely in the UK (though the Belize Independence Party regularly takes close to 40% of Belize’s seats in Westminster.) Malta and the Bahamas have their own devolved parliamentary assemblies, and are mostly autonomous, but are still not de jure independent. Though the Tories and Liberals do trade power in government, with the Labor-derived Social Democratic Party being the occasional kingmaker, Britain still has a strong case of imperial nostalgia and has tried desperately (with little success) to keep the Commonwealth strong. This has created occasional issues with the rest of the UN, including in Britain’s strong support of the worryingly nationalist Australian government. But modern Britain’s biggest problem by far is Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland exploded into violence in the mid-70s and never truly stopped. Republican and loyalist terrorist groups, after their preferred governments began to seek peace, continued violence against the wishes of the governments they designed to stay with. In contrast to the liberal democratic rest of the UK, Northern Ireland is a de facto police state, with permanent martial law designed to keep the peace at any cost. Even this is not enough, however, and car bombings and mass shootings are still a daily occurrence. In truth, most of Ulster outside of Belfast is an utterly anarchic war zone that would put war-torn Sierra Leone to shame. Much of the populace is resigned to this state of affairs, and the terrorist groups are so fractured and independent that peace is seemingly out of the hands of either Britain or Ireland. Will an end to the Troubles ever come, and what course will Britain chart on the world stage?
((Big thanks to gorganslayer for the outline of the Suez scenario. I know I left what the Falklands War was a bit unclear, so you can ask me on IRC / PM. Or in here - lore questions are reopened.
Anyway, this one was even worse than the US, but I did it! Next is Manchuria, then France, then Brazil, then go time! I'll be working on stats as we go, so by the time Brazil is posted, signups will be ready.))
Hmmm, given Churchill being Churchill, I don't see the UK agreeing to a negotiated peace that gives up on British India, void bombs and mecha or not. He'd have to have been ousted at the end of the war, though he might have clawed his way back.
India wasn't included in the peace deal, and the British kept fighting them until 1946 or '47, when they got kicked out. Churchill being Churchill, he still didn't officially make peace with them and kept the naval war going a while longer from Sri Lanka before they officially had to recognize reality and pull out. Britain and the UN generally didn't recognize the Boseist government as legitimate until 1971, backing instead a government-in-exile from Sri Lanka helmed by quasi-loyalists representing the "Dominion of India." Gandhi wasn't perfectly happy with either but generally supported the Dominion government, as it had representative goals and was nonviolent.
Sounds more like it.
Also, I don't think it was ever answered: does anyone other than the Nazis have a space program?
Also, I don't think it was ever answered: does anyone other than the Nazis have a space program?
While I'm working on Manchuria, have a basic outline of the stat spread:
Population: Your country's population. Pretty self-explanatory, really.
Population Growth: Your country's rate of population growth. If you send me orders trying to raise this, you probably also get slapped frequently by people at clubs for trying bad pickup lines.
GDP: Your country's gross domestic product, which I kind of hope I don't have to define for you.
Tax / Tariff Net Rate: An (admittedly abstracted) percentage of your GDP that you're taking in. It doesn't quite work that way in real economics, but let's pretend it does here. You can't adjust this directly with your orders per se, but an order to "raise taxes" will likely increase it. How much depends on both the severity of your order, the luck of the draw and so on. More isn't always better, either; the higher this number is, the more likely you are to take stability hits.
Revenue: How much money you're actually making. You can calculate this by multiplying your GDP by your Tax/Tariff Rate. If you send me orders that say "increase my income" I will laugh. Think of how you would go about doing that.
Military Expenses: How much you pay for military upkeep and supplies. This is determined in direct relation to your supply usage, and two countries using the exact same supply usage will have the exact same military expenses, even if their unit composition is drastically different. No bulk discount on rifles and booze, I'm afraid. You can't change this with orders; if you want to do that, build or scrap some units. (I know in real life this *does* vary a bit, but for the sake of my sanity we are abstracting differences in supply doctrine and potential arbitrage in ammunition sales.)
Civilian Expenses: Everything else your government spends money on, from healthcare to schools to roads. You can try and lower this with orders. Going for increased efficiency is less likely to anger your citizens, but has pretty low marginal returns, whereas as cutting spending is more effective at cutting costs but also more likely to backfire.
Net Income: What you're walking away with at the end of the day.
Balance: How much money you owe / have stored up. Running a deficit is fine - in fact, most countries do and will run deficits - but very high levels of debt will start to cause economic issues, and if you default, things will be very bad.
When you are in danger of default depends on the country, but generally speaking, a debt between 150 and 200% of GDP is in the danger zone. Bigger economies have a lot more leeway. For consequences, defaulting results in a really big stability hit. If you've anything less than perfect it will almost certainly trigger a Bad Thing.
Trade Balance: I made this stat to make the ubiquitous "derp let's sign a trade deal" orders we so often see a little more interesting. A score of +5 to -5 representing your ability to dominate markets, roughly speaking. When two countries strike a trade deal, the country with the higher trade balance score tends to benefit more and get a higher GDP increase. Countries with an extreme imbalance in trade balances who trade may experience a wide variety of effects. A country that has a very low score may not want to trade with a country with a very high score, as the cheap products may do damage to its homegrown industries (i.e. its IC). But on the other hand, wide-ranging trade liberalization can have a lot of benefits and greatly increase cash flow.
To sum up, you’ll need to think about the actual economic situation when you strike a trade deal, and if you want to be safe, trade with countries that have similar market power to you. An example of a +5 country might be OTL South Korea (or TTL Korea, for that matter): a big exporter with a very developed domestic market that is fairly safe from undercutting. A +/-0 country might be Brazil, which has more than infant industries but also doesn’t have a very export-oriented economy. Countries with -5 might be somewhere like Nigeria, which (while relatively rich) has little domestic industry and is in danger of foreign corporate dominance. Trade balance is often correlated with GDP, but isn’t always; the US might have a score of something like +2 or 3 despite being a very powerful economy because it is so developed that less developed countries can undercut it. This is why you don’t see American politicians scrambling to sign a free trade deal with the Chinese. (There’s some of that in this world too, but most of the China hysteria faded in the 90s TTL when their bubble collapsed.)
Trade balance isn't really directly changeable with orders, but for you developing countries out there, building IC and cuttig good economic deals is a good place to start.
TL;DR: Trade is complicated. This number tells you how good at trade you are. High is good!
Supply Limit: Abstraction of how much materiel you have available to keep your units around. Based off of industrial power. All units cost varying amounts of supply, and you pay your maintenance cost based on how much supply you’re using. If you’re using more supply than you have, your units suffer a penalty in combat, with this penalty being greater the more undersupplied you are. Let this go on long enough and you may even lose some units as they become inoperable.
Supply Usage: How much of your supply limit you're currently using. This accounts for part of your expenses.
Industrial Capacity: How much industry your country has. This has a few effects, most of them good. The more IC you have, the more units you can produce at a single time (you can only order a given batch of units with an IC cost equal to or less than your current IC score x your current economic mobilization percentage in a single turn.) also increases your GDP growth rate (duh), but GDP growth isn’t only tied to IC - trade and services are also parts of your economy. High IC also will increase your stability over time (bread and circuses) and increase your supply limit.
Economic Mobilization: Scale of 0 (complete peacetime economy) to 100 (total war economy.) The higher this percentage is, the more of your IC is devoted to producing military instead of civilian goods (and vice versa.) EM of 100, for example, means your economy produces no consumer goods and is increasing your supply limit by 100% over its natural limit. EM of 0%, converesly, means you have no active defense industry and your supply limit stays close to its “base” (inevitably too low to support all but the tiniest of armies.), but is instead giving you 100% protection against random stability drops. The average peacetime country has an EM of about 20 to 30 percent, depending on where exactly you are. You can set this at any time with an order by up to 25% in any direction.
High economic mobilization means that you can build military units cheaper (you get a discount at high EM levels due to economies of scale), faster (your order limit will rise with higher EM), and maintain more of them (your supply limit is higher.) On the other hand, you are more likely to receive stability drops for failed rolls, and at very high levels you will suffer automatic stability drops over time. Combined with war exhaustion, this can undermine a struggling power very quickly. Conversely, low EM countries are more protected against stability fails, gradually improve their trade balance (and GDP, though note a war footing doesn’t shrink your GDP and may also increase it; generally, war provides a short-term economic boost, but a prolonged war is bad for your economy) and may get free stability points. However, they pay more for new units, they can’t build them as fast, and have a lower supply limit.
You’re perfectly capable of fighting a war with low EM (see: modern OTL US) and of staying in peacetime with high EM (see: North Korea). What you use your economy for is up to you.
TL,DR: Peace sells, but if you want peace, prepare for war. Or something.
Standard Tech Level: Tech level works a little differently than in MGaSO or similar games. There are five categories: State of the Art, Developed, Emerging, Developing, and Backwards. Each stage down from State of the Art represents a five-to-ten year gap in adoption of modern technology. A higher tech level increases things like GDP, supply limit multiplier, and so on. It doesn't affect your ability to build exotic weaponry, though; that depends on...
Special Tech Level: This is a little more like tech level in MGaSO. There are six levels, and the higher your level is, the more superweapons you have the capacity to build. For example, a Level 1 country can't build any advanced weaponry at all - their armies are strictly what we'd call "conventional". Level 2 will grant you light mecha and assault destroyers, for example, and so on.
Any country reaching Level 4 will have access to a unique unit that only they can build. These are expensive, but can turn the tide of the war in ways that your enemies can't expect. They will be PM'd to you, and while you can keep them secret, maybe you want to auction your secrets to the highest bidder? All Great Powers start at this level, and no minor powers do - though some like Japan, Israel, South Africa or Hungary could get there fairly quickly if they so wanted.
Level five and above is where the science starts getting weird, and this is where the Antarctic Reich starts. While potentially powerful, there is a lot of insanely dangerous stuff being cooked up at this level, and upgrading from here is where you have a much increased chance of triggering a Bad Thing. In fact, if you screw up enough, it could be a Bad Thing for not just you but for your neighbors or even the world. Have fun with that!
Stability: A very important stat. Stability is both a measure of the security of your rule and the contentedness of your populace. It ranges from 0 to 10, with 10 being "super happy nirvana land" and 0 being "the cities are burning and the people are at the barricades." Stability has a chance of falling every time you fail a roll for an order, but this chance is smaller at lower EM percentages - a populace with lots of civilian goods to buy is less likely to be pissed at an incompetent government enough to take to the streets. Stability can also fall at high EM percentages, by losing a lot of battles in a war, for doing things your party or the populace are strongly against (read: being off policy or stupid; this is at my discretion, deal with it), the interference of other players, consequences of other world events, or sometimes just plain bad luck. You can raise stability by using orders, having a high GDP, lowering your EM percentage, winning battles (up to a point; eventually, endless little victories but no final victory tires people out) and signing a favorable peace deal.
If your stability hits 5 or below, you'll get an event where you can choose how to approach the problems. The lower your stability goes, the more critical this crisis will be. An event you get at 5 stability isn't very serious and may even be beneficial in the long run; events at 3 or lower stability tend to be Bad Things, which if bungled will probably lead to further problems. If your stability hits 0, your country will plunge into civil war, with a specific event for it. This is Very Bad, and will have negative effects on pretty much everything. You can still get couped or forced out before 0 stability by popular or military (read: GM-controlled) elements, but I won't drop it on you without giving you time to do something about it.
For comparison, 10 is a sleepy country where nothing bad ever happens (Luxembourg). 9-7 is a very stable country where there still problems being discussed (Japan). 6-4 is a functioning, peaceful country that is facing deep political or social issues that are causing tension (Belgium). 3-2 is a country with lots of trouble spots but short of civil war or collapse (Mexico). 1-0 is a country in the midst of civil violence (Syria, TTL Northern Ireland were it independent).
That's about it for civilian stats. Combat will be discussed in a separate post. How does all this sound? Am I missing something obvious?
Population: Your country's population. Pretty self-explanatory, really.
Population Growth: Your country's rate of population growth. If you send me orders trying to raise this, you probably also get slapped frequently by people at clubs for trying bad pickup lines.
GDP: Your country's gross domestic product, which I kind of hope I don't have to define for you.
Tax / Tariff Net Rate: An (admittedly abstracted) percentage of your GDP that you're taking in. It doesn't quite work that way in real economics, but let's pretend it does here. You can't adjust this directly with your orders per se, but an order to "raise taxes" will likely increase it. How much depends on both the severity of your order, the luck of the draw and so on. More isn't always better, either; the higher this number is, the more likely you are to take stability hits.
Revenue: How much money you're actually making. You can calculate this by multiplying your GDP by your Tax/Tariff Rate. If you send me orders that say "increase my income" I will laugh. Think of how you would go about doing that.
Military Expenses: How much you pay for military upkeep and supplies. This is determined in direct relation to your supply usage, and two countries using the exact same supply usage will have the exact same military expenses, even if their unit composition is drastically different. No bulk discount on rifles and booze, I'm afraid. You can't change this with orders; if you want to do that, build or scrap some units. (I know in real life this *does* vary a bit, but for the sake of my sanity we are abstracting differences in supply doctrine and potential arbitrage in ammunition sales.)
Civilian Expenses: Everything else your government spends money on, from healthcare to schools to roads. You can try and lower this with orders. Going for increased efficiency is less likely to anger your citizens, but has pretty low marginal returns, whereas as cutting spending is more effective at cutting costs but also more likely to backfire.
Net Income: What you're walking away with at the end of the day.
Balance: How much money you owe / have stored up. Running a deficit is fine - in fact, most countries do and will run deficits - but very high levels of debt will start to cause economic issues, and if you default, things will be very bad.
When you are in danger of default depends on the country, but generally speaking, a debt between 150 and 200% of GDP is in the danger zone. Bigger economies have a lot more leeway. For consequences, defaulting results in a really big stability hit. If you've anything less than perfect it will almost certainly trigger a Bad Thing.
Trade Balance: I made this stat to make the ubiquitous "derp let's sign a trade deal" orders we so often see a little more interesting. A score of +5 to -5 representing your ability to dominate markets, roughly speaking. When two countries strike a trade deal, the country with the higher trade balance score tends to benefit more and get a higher GDP increase. Countries with an extreme imbalance in trade balances who trade may experience a wide variety of effects. A country that has a very low score may not want to trade with a country with a very high score, as the cheap products may do damage to its homegrown industries (i.e. its IC). But on the other hand, wide-ranging trade liberalization can have a lot of benefits and greatly increase cash flow.
To sum up, you’ll need to think about the actual economic situation when you strike a trade deal, and if you want to be safe, trade with countries that have similar market power to you. An example of a +5 country might be OTL South Korea (or TTL Korea, for that matter): a big exporter with a very developed domestic market that is fairly safe from undercutting. A +/-0 country might be Brazil, which has more than infant industries but also doesn’t have a very export-oriented economy. Countries with -5 might be somewhere like Nigeria, which (while relatively rich) has little domestic industry and is in danger of foreign corporate dominance. Trade balance is often correlated with GDP, but isn’t always; the US might have a score of something like +2 or 3 despite being a very powerful economy because it is so developed that less developed countries can undercut it. This is why you don’t see American politicians scrambling to sign a free trade deal with the Chinese. (There’s some of that in this world too, but most of the China hysteria faded in the 90s TTL when their bubble collapsed.)
Trade balance isn't really directly changeable with orders, but for you developing countries out there, building IC and cuttig good economic deals is a good place to start.
TL;DR: Trade is complicated. This number tells you how good at trade you are. High is good!
Supply Limit: Abstraction of how much materiel you have available to keep your units around. Based off of industrial power. All units cost varying amounts of supply, and you pay your maintenance cost based on how much supply you’re using. If you’re using more supply than you have, your units suffer a penalty in combat, with this penalty being greater the more undersupplied you are. Let this go on long enough and you may even lose some units as they become inoperable.
Supply Usage: How much of your supply limit you're currently using. This accounts for part of your expenses.
Industrial Capacity: How much industry your country has. This has a few effects, most of them good. The more IC you have, the more units you can produce at a single time (you can only order a given batch of units with an IC cost equal to or less than your current IC score x your current economic mobilization percentage in a single turn.) also increases your GDP growth rate (duh), but GDP growth isn’t only tied to IC - trade and services are also parts of your economy. High IC also will increase your stability over time (bread and circuses) and increase your supply limit.
Economic Mobilization: Scale of 0 (complete peacetime economy) to 100 (total war economy.) The higher this percentage is, the more of your IC is devoted to producing military instead of civilian goods (and vice versa.) EM of 100, for example, means your economy produces no consumer goods and is increasing your supply limit by 100% over its natural limit. EM of 0%, converesly, means you have no active defense industry and your supply limit stays close to its “base” (inevitably too low to support all but the tiniest of armies.), but is instead giving you 100% protection against random stability drops. The average peacetime country has an EM of about 20 to 30 percent, depending on where exactly you are. You can set this at any time with an order by up to 25% in any direction.
High economic mobilization means that you can build military units cheaper (you get a discount at high EM levels due to economies of scale), faster (your order limit will rise with higher EM), and maintain more of them (your supply limit is higher.) On the other hand, you are more likely to receive stability drops for failed rolls, and at very high levels you will suffer automatic stability drops over time. Combined with war exhaustion, this can undermine a struggling power very quickly. Conversely, low EM countries are more protected against stability fails, gradually improve their trade balance (and GDP, though note a war footing doesn’t shrink your GDP and may also increase it; generally, war provides a short-term economic boost, but a prolonged war is bad for your economy) and may get free stability points. However, they pay more for new units, they can’t build them as fast, and have a lower supply limit.
You’re perfectly capable of fighting a war with low EM (see: modern OTL US) and of staying in peacetime with high EM (see: North Korea). What you use your economy for is up to you.
TL,DR: Peace sells, but if you want peace, prepare for war. Or something.
Standard Tech Level: Tech level works a little differently than in MGaSO or similar games. There are five categories: State of the Art, Developed, Emerging, Developing, and Backwards. Each stage down from State of the Art represents a five-to-ten year gap in adoption of modern technology. A higher tech level increases things like GDP, supply limit multiplier, and so on. It doesn't affect your ability to build exotic weaponry, though; that depends on...
Special Tech Level: This is a little more like tech level in MGaSO. There are six levels, and the higher your level is, the more superweapons you have the capacity to build. For example, a Level 1 country can't build any advanced weaponry at all - their armies are strictly what we'd call "conventional". Level 2 will grant you light mecha and assault destroyers, for example, and so on.
Any country reaching Level 4 will have access to a unique unit that only they can build. These are expensive, but can turn the tide of the war in ways that your enemies can't expect. They will be PM'd to you, and while you can keep them secret, maybe you want to auction your secrets to the highest bidder? All Great Powers start at this level, and no minor powers do - though some like Japan, Israel, South Africa or Hungary could get there fairly quickly if they so wanted.
Level five and above is where the science starts getting weird, and this is where the Antarctic Reich starts. While potentially powerful, there is a lot of insanely dangerous stuff being cooked up at this level, and upgrading from here is where you have a much increased chance of triggering a Bad Thing. In fact, if you screw up enough, it could be a Bad Thing for not just you but for your neighbors or even the world. Have fun with that!
Stability: A very important stat. Stability is both a measure of the security of your rule and the contentedness of your populace. It ranges from 0 to 10, with 10 being "super happy nirvana land" and 0 being "the cities are burning and the people are at the barricades." Stability has a chance of falling every time you fail a roll for an order, but this chance is smaller at lower EM percentages - a populace with lots of civilian goods to buy is less likely to be pissed at an incompetent government enough to take to the streets. Stability can also fall at high EM percentages, by losing a lot of battles in a war, for doing things your party or the populace are strongly against (read: being off policy or stupid; this is at my discretion, deal with it), the interference of other players, consequences of other world events, or sometimes just plain bad luck. You can raise stability by using orders, having a high GDP, lowering your EM percentage, winning battles (up to a point; eventually, endless little victories but no final victory tires people out) and signing a favorable peace deal.
If your stability hits 5 or below, you'll get an event where you can choose how to approach the problems. The lower your stability goes, the more critical this crisis will be. An event you get at 5 stability isn't very serious and may even be beneficial in the long run; events at 3 or lower stability tend to be Bad Things, which if bungled will probably lead to further problems. If your stability hits 0, your country will plunge into civil war, with a specific event for it. This is Very Bad, and will have negative effects on pretty much everything. You can still get couped or forced out before 0 stability by popular or military (read: GM-controlled) elements, but I won't drop it on you without giving you time to do something about it.
For comparison, 10 is a sleepy country where nothing bad ever happens (Luxembourg). 9-7 is a very stable country where there still problems being discussed (Japan). 6-4 is a functioning, peaceful country that is facing deep political or social issues that are causing tension (Belgium). 3-2 is a country with lots of trouble spots but short of civil war or collapse (Mexico). 1-0 is a country in the midst of civil violence (Syria, TTL Northern Ireland were it independent).
That's about it for civilian stats. Combat will be discussed in a separate post. How does all this sound? Am I missing something obvious?