You now know how to read a country from the outside, like a visitor peering in. This lesson is about the country you belong to from the inside - your citizenship. It is honestly one of the most consequential settings in the entire game, because so much of your day-to-day life quietly hangs off it without you even noticing. Get comfortable with what it controls, and you will make far better decisions about where to call home. Do not let the importance scare you, though; the idea itself is simple, and we will take it one piece at a time.
Let us define it as plainly as possible: your citizenship is simply the country you belong to. You have exactly one at a time - never two, never none. When you signed up, you automatically became a citizen of the country you joined in - you did not have to choose anything, it was handed to you the moment you arrived. You are free to move later on, but moving has rules and a cost, and that is the whole of the next lesson, so we will save the details. For now, just let it sink in what that single quiet setting decides on your behalf, because it is more than most newcomers realise.
Four things your country decides for you
Your citizenship is not just a little flag printed next to your name. It quietly determines four big parts of your game, and it is genuinely worth seeing them laid out together so that the real weight of the choice can sink in properly. Take a moment with each one.
- Your market. You trade on your country's local market, and the prices there are in that country's currency. Move countries and you change the marketplace - and the very money - that you buy and sell in.
- Your vote. You only get to vote on the laws of the country you belong to. Your citizenship is your ballot; it decides whose rules you help shape and whose you do not.
- Your budget and bonuses. The shared treasury you draw from, and the citizen bonuses that pay out to you, are your country's. A generous country pays you more; a thrifty one pays you less.
- Your taxes. The taxes you pay are set by your country. Live somewhere with low salary tax and you keep more of your pay; live somewhere with high tax and the treasury keeps more of it.
Read that list one more time and you will quickly see why people do not pick a country at random or on a whim. Market, vote, bonuses and taxes are four of the levers your whole economic life runs on, and your citizenship pulls all four of them at once, together. This is simply not a setting to flip casually - which, very conveniently for a new player, is something the game itself makes sure of, as you will discover in the next lesson. The friction is on your side.
Where you ARE versus where you BELONG
Now for the one idea that trips up almost every single newcomer, so please read this part twice and let it stick. There are two completely separate things here, and they are genuinely easy to confuse when you are starting out. Where you ARE is your location - the country you are physically standing in, which you change by travelling. Where you BELONG is your citizenship - the country you are an actual member of. These are NOT the same thing, and the game treats them as two different facts about you. You can be standing in one country while still belonging to another, and that is perfectly normal.
A simple, everyday way to picture it: imagine you are on holiday abroad somewhere lovely. You might be sitting on a sunny beach in another country - that is where you are right now - but your passport still says you are a citizen of home, and that is where you belong. Visiting a place, however long you stay, does not quietly make you a member of it. Exactly the same is true here in the game. Travelling somewhere changes only your location; it leaves your citizenship completely untouched until you deliberately decide otherwise.
Travel first, belong second
As a firm rule, you have to travel to a country before you can ever become its citizen. You cannot become a member of a place you have never gone to. So location always comes first and citizenship second - never the other way around. Keep that order in mind and the next lesson will feel completely natural to you.
You might fairly ask why the game bothers keeping these two ideas apart at all - it would be simpler to mash them together, surely? The reason is that it makes moving a deliberate, two-part act instead of an instant teleport across the map. You go somewhere, you settle in, and only then do you switch your membership over to it. That little bit of friction is entirely on purpose, and it works in everyone's favour - it gently stops people flitting between countries every five minutes and keeps each country's population stable enough to actually mean something over time.
It is worth pausing here to reassure you about a worry that crosses many new players' minds. You might fear that simply travelling somewhere to look around will accidentally sign you up as a citizen there, or that a careless click could move you out of the home you started in. It will not. Because location and citizenship are kept so firmly separate, you are completely free to wander, visit, and explore the world without ever risking your membership. Your citizenship only ever changes when you deliberately and consciously choose to change it, with the steps we will cover next. Until you make that choice for yourself, on purpose, you stay exactly the citizen you already are, no matter how far you roam.
So, to gather it all up: your citizenship is the country you belong to; it quietly decides your market, your vote, your bonuses and your taxes, all at once; and it is a completely different thing from wherever you happen to be standing at any moment. In the very next lesson we will walk through the actual move together, slowly and calmly - travel there first, then change citizenship second - step by careful step, so that when you do it for real, there is nothing left to surprise you.