States of Power Getting Started Guide

States of Power is deliberately built so you do not need a guide to start. The developer’s pitch is explicit: no hours of tutorials, no reading a wiki before your first game. So this page is short on hand-holding and long on the things that are genuinely non-obvious in the first hour.

The campaign starts in 1936

Every official screenshot of a fresh game shows an in-game date in 1936 — July and September appear in different captures. The Spanish Civil War is already running at that start: Nationalist Spain and Republican Spain exist as separate entities and the in-game news feed reports war between them on 17 July 1936.

That matters for your first pick. The world is not frozen waiting for you.

Reading the top bar

The bar across the top of the screen is your entire economy in one line. Reading it correctly is the single highest-value thing to learn early, because nothing else on screen tells you whether you are actually growing.

From the developer’s own screenshots, it tracks:

• Money — with a per-tick rate in brackets, e.g. 473.6 (+8.2)
• Military supplies — the stockpile your army draws on; it can and does go negative, one screenshot shows 887 (-17)
• Goods — general production output
• Research — completed out of total, plus your rate: 20/195 (+3.3)
• Manpower — raw population, in millions
• A paired production figure — shown as two numbers, e.g. 57 | 32
• World control % — how much of the world is under your side’s control
• Home control % — how much of your own core territory you actually hold

A ninth meter appears once nuclear weapons are in play. If you see it, someone has the bomb.

Speed is a weapon

There is a pause button and five speed settings. This is not a turn-based game, and new players coming from turn-based strategy consistently under-use the pause. Pausing to issue orders costs nothing.

On official multiplayer servers the speed is not entirely yours: those servers run faster while nothing important is happening and automatically slow down when real players go to war, announcing each change in chat.

Your first session, in order

1. Pick a country you already have intuitions about. There is no official difficulty rating, and anyone telling you a country is “S-tier” is guessing — see the nations page for what is actually established.
2. Build before you mobilise. Factories, research labs, ports and infrastructure all come out of the same construction capacity. The economy guide covers the trade-off.
3. Set a research direction. The tree runs from early-war infantry weapons to the atomic bomb; see the tech tree.
4. Do your diplomacy before you need it. Guarantees, alliances and non-aggression pacts are cheap in peacetime. See diplomacy.
5. Build a mixed army. Every unit type has a counter — the units page explains the system.

What new players complain about

Worth knowing up front, because these are design decisions and not bugs you can wait out. Drawn from launch-week Steam reviews:

• You generally have to fully occupy a country to take it. Several players report there is no peace-conference system for negotiating a partial settlement.
• Population does not regenerate. One detailed negative review calls this the single biggest problem — losses are permanent, so attrition strategies are expensive in a way you may not expect.
• Beaten units retreat rather than die. A defeated stack withdraws deeper into its own territory and can loop back around behind you.
• Alerts interrupt. Pop-ups arrive at inconvenient moments, including mid-battle.

None of these stop the game being enjoyable — 89.8% of Steam reviews are positive — but knowing them in advance stops you assuming you missed a mechanic.

If you came from Hearts of Iron 4

You almost certainly did; it is the comparison nearly every reviewer reaches for. Read the comparison guide before you go looking for division templates and support companies. They are not in this game’s vocabulary, and hunting for them will only frustrate you.