States of Power Economy Guide: Building and Resources

Your economy is the part of States of Power that decides wars before they start, and it is compressed into a single bar across the top of the screen. This guide covers what that bar tracks, what you can build, and one balance change that invalidates advice written before 29 August 2026.

The 1.0.11 income change

Start here, because it affects everything else. On 29 August the developer shipped update 1.0.11 with a single balance line:

Base country money income increased from 1.5 to 2.0.

That is a 33% increase to baseline income for every country, three days after launch. Any economy guide, video or forum post written between the 26th and the 29th is describing a poorer game than the one you are playing. See the full patch log for both post-launch updates in full.

What you build

The developer’s own description of province development names four building types:

• Factories — production capacity
• Research labs — your research rate, the bracketed number on the flask meter
• Ports — naval access and, by implication, sea logistics
• Infrastructure — the connective layer

All four compete for the same construction capacity, which is the core tension of the early game. Every research lab is a factory you did not build, and vice versa.

What you balance

The store description names the four things you are juggling: construction, goods, military supplies, and manpower. The top bar shows all of them live, and the bracketed rate next to each is more important than the stockpile.

A worked example from the developer’s screenshots makes the point. A Polish campaign in September 1936 shows:

• Money 191.2 (+2.8) — positive, slowly
• Military supplies 887 (-17) — negative, draining fast
• Goods 674 (+5)
• Research 78/182 (+1.7)
• Manpower 4.71M

That supply line is the whole story of that game. A stockpile of 887 with a rate of −17 is roughly 52 ticks from zero, and everything else on the bar is irrelevant if your army runs dry. Watch the rates, not the totals.

For contrast, a German campaign in July 1936 shows money 473.6 (+8.2), supplies 7,095 (+16) and manpower 10.05M — a fundamentally different economic position from the same start year.

Loans and the world market

Two mechanics named by the developer that are easy to miss:

• Loans — you can take them, which means early aggression can be financed rather than saved for
• The world market — you can trade on it

Player reports suggest the market has rough edges. A community thread titled “Prices never normalise” is one of the more-discussed topics on the game’s Steam forum, so treat market arbitrage as unreliable rather than a strategy to build around.

Where the economy meets the war

Two things to keep in view:

Manpower does not come back. Multiple reviewers report there is no population regeneration. That makes manpower the one resource you should treat as a hard budget rather than a flow — an expensive victory can lose you the next war.

Embargoes are a real lever. The in-game news feed shows countries imposing embargoes on each other as a standard diplomatic action, and one popular forum thread is a player complaining that “a billion countries” embargoed them. Your economy is not insulated from your diplomacy.

What is not published

The developer has not released construction costs, building output values, or per-country starting economies. Any table of exact numbers you find elsewhere was not sourced from the game’s own data. What you can rely on is the structure above, the resource readouts in the official screenshots, and the one balance figure the patch notes actually state.