States of Power Ideologies and Civil War Guide

Ideology is one of the few systems in States of Power the developer describes in explicit detail, and it is load-bearing: it drives civil wars, it affects who will deal with you diplomatically, and it is one of the few things you can change about your own country mid-campaign.

The four ideologies

From the official store description:

Choose your nation’s ideology — Democratic, Authoritarian, Communist, or Fascist and reshape your country through reform or civil war.

That sentence contains the whole system in outline. Four options, two routes between them.

Reform or civil war

Reform is the peaceful route — a gradual change of your country’s ideology.

Civil war is the violent one, and the patch notes confirm it is fully modelled rather than an abstraction. A launch-week fix addressed “civil wars in countries with 0 cores” as a crash case, which tells you civil war interacts with the core-territory system directly. Another fix stopped carrier fighters splitting off from their carriers when a civil war starts — so your fleet is divided between the two sides when one breaks out.

The Spanish Civil War is present at the 1936 campaign start as a worked example: Nationalist Spain and Republican Spain exist as separate entities on the map, and the in-game news feed reports Nationalist Spain declaring war on Republican Spain on 17 July 1936.

What changes when your ideology changes

Two effects are confirmed in the patch notes, both of them added or fixed after launch:

• Unit flags update. A launch-week fix made units change their flags after an ideology change — before that they kept the old country’s colours.
• The diplomatic country list updates immediately. The same patch made the multiplayer country list refresh right after an ideology change rather than lagging behind.

Both of these are small on their own, but together they confirm that ideology is a live property other players and the AI can see and react to, not a hidden stat.

Cores

Cores are referenced repeatedly in the patch notes without being defined in public material, so here is what can be stated safely: countries have core territory, a country can have zero cores (a state specific enough that it produced a crash bug), and the map UI tracks a home control percentage separately from world control. Hovering a country in one official screenshot shows “SOVIET UNION 0.0%” against a home icon.

The practical read: holding your own cores is tracked as a distinct thing from conquering other people’s territory, and civil wars are fought over them.

Puppets

Countries can be released as puppets. The 1.0.11 notes fixed “released puppet countries clashing with the nation they were formed from” — which confirms both that puppet release exists and that the puppet retains a relationship with its parent nation that the game has to reason about.

Playing with it

There is no official guidance on when reform is preferable to civil war, and no published numbers for stability, support, or how long either takes. What the systems tell you is that ideology change is disruptive by design: it splits your navy if it goes violent, repaints your army, and visibly changes your position on the diplomatic board — see the diplomacy guide.

If you want to build an alternate-history scenario where the ideological map is different from the start, that is what the scenario editor is for.