Eleven numbers live on your game's top bar, and almost no new player can explain what each one actually means beyond "higher is better." This file walks through them in the same order they appear on screen, left to right, with real figures for each one — nuclear arsenal included, even though that specific icon only shows up once you've researched it.
Political power: where it goes and what it costs
Accumulates between −500 and 2,000, at a base rate of +2/day on Regular difficulty (+50% on Civilian, +25% on Recruit, −10% on Veteran, −15% on Elite). And here's the connection almost nobody notices: your own stability modifies that gain directly — −20% gain at 0% stability, +10% at 100%. An unstable country doesn't just produce worse, it also generates worse political power to fix the problem.
The most common expenses, with exact costs:
- Adding or removing an idea (law, minister, company): 150 PP.
- Hiring a commander: 5 PP per commander you already have (scales upward).
- Justifying a conquest casus belli: 50 PP base, +10 per additional state, +5 if the target has the Neutral Foreign Policy spirit.
- Justifying to retake a core: 25 PP.
- Guaranteeing independence: 15 PP the first time, +15 PP for each additional guarantee you already have active.
- Improving relations: 10 PP to start, +0.2 PP/day for the same ideology, +0.4 PP/day for a different one.
The textbook mistake is letting political power pile up "just in case" — it does nothing sitting idle. The right question isn't how to get more, it's what order to spend it in.
Stability: the exact numbers
Moves between 0% and 100%, with its effects scaling linearly from 50% (where it does nothing) toward the extremes. Instead of memorizing "high stability is good," here are the real numbers:
- At 100%: +10% political power gain, +20% factory output, +20% dockyard output, −20% consumer goods factories needed.
- At 0%: −20% political power gain, −50% factory output, −50% dockyard output, and up to +20% resistance target in occupied territory.
What raises or lowers it also has concrete figures: being at war subtracts a flat −20%; low war support subtracts up to another −30% (0% penalty at 100% war support, −30% at 0%); your ruling party's popularity adds up to +15% (at 100% popularity); and the "Popular Figurehead" trait or political advisor adds another +15%, stackable. Japan additionally has a unique +60% modifier tied to its own leader.
War support: the exact numbers
Also runs 0% to 100%, with the neutral point also at 50%. At maximum: +30% mobilization speed, +10% attack and +10% defense on core territory, and +50% command power gain. At minimum: −50% mobilization speed, −95% command power gain, −30% to the surrender limit, and risk of an internal crisis if you're at war.
It moves with the war itself: −20% for fighting an offensive war, +20% for fighting a defensive one, +10% for having an active attaché in another country, and +5% for having a "pride of the fleet." This is why aggressor nations struggle to keep war support up the longer an offensive drags on, while defending your own territory sustains it on its own.
Manpower and conscription laws
The population available to form divisions, and it refills slowly. A full-strength infantry battalion needs 1,000 manpower, an engineer company needs 300 — and non-core states only contribute 2% of their normal recruitable population (a −98% penalty, reduced to −96% with the "Prince of Terror" political advisor). You can only have in training, at most, 75% of the manpower you already have deployed at the front, or 100,000, whichever is higher.
The conscription law is the real lever, and it has a very concrete safety threshold:
Volunteer Only (default for most nations) — 1.5% recruitable population, no economic penalty.
Limited Conscription — 2.5%, no penalty.
Extensive Conscription — 5.0%, no economic penalty, only +10% training time.
Service by Requirement — 10.0%, but this is where the cuts start: −10% factory output and dockyard output, −10% construction speed.
All Adults Serve — 20.0%, with −30% across those same three categories.
Scraping the Barrel — 25.0%, with −40% across those same three categories.
The recommendation is simple once you see the table: raising it up to Extensive Conscription is essentially free, so do it early. From Service by Requirement onward, you're actively trading factories for soldiers, not before — only worth it once war is already at your doorstep and you need the numbers.
Number of Factories
This is the sum of your civilian and military factories, the number that decides how much you can build and produce in parallel. It doesn't rise on its own — you gain it by constructing, by conquering industrialized territory, or, more slowly, by buying production licenses from other countries. The real numbers behind each factory type and its output are in the production guide, which is where this number actually deserves the deep dive.
Fuel: reserves, consumption, and what happens when it runs out
Your base storage capacity is 50,000 units, +1,500 per level of state infrastructure, and +100,000 per level of fuel silo — and you start the game with only 25% of that capacity already filled. Real consumption isn't the figure you see on the unit's own stats: your active divisions burn 12 times that number per day (0 while idle, ×2 while fighting or moving), your fleet consumes 2.4 times its own figure (0 in port, ×2 in combat), and your air wings burn 8.4 times theirs (only ×0.2 on interception missions, ×0.6 while training).
Hitting zero isn't just "less efficient" — it's a collapse: your divisions drop to 0.4× speed and 0.1× on the stats that depend on fuel; your fleet loses up to −75% speed, −50% attack, and −80% torpedo attack on submarines; your air force falls to −25% mission efficiency. The navy is, by far, the one that suffers most without fuel.
Logistics Coverage
Sums up at a glance whether your rail network and supply hubs are keeping up with the front. Each rail level has a fixed throughput (15/20/25/30/35 from level 1 to 5), and below 35% coverage you enter attrition: you start actually losing equipment, not just performance, with up to −50% defense and −20% attack along the way. The logistics guide develops these numbers in more depth, including the weakest-link-in-the-chain rule.
Convoys
The real rule is simple: 1 weight point of a division equals 1 convoy to ship it overseas, always rounding up (a division with 4.5 weight needs 5 convoys, not 4.5). Convoys also carry your resource trade, so the same number covers both troops and goods. Unescorted, they're defenseless against enemy warships, but they have one lesser-known advantage: a convoy damaged in battle (not sunk) is restored to perfect condition automatically once the battle ends, with no need to return to port.
Army, 
Navy and 
Air Experience
Each branch is earned separately, mostly through combat and training units, and it also arrives via military attachés, volunteers sent to fight other countries' wars, and lend-lease equipment received. It's spent modifying division templates, designing equipment variants, and unlocking special forces doctrines (mountaineers, marines, paratroopers). The usual mistake is hoarding it out of fear of "wasting" it on a bad design — unlike political power, this is one resource where taking an early risk pays off: training during peacetime is the cheapest way to bank it before you actually need it.
Nuclear Arsenal
This icon doesn't even appear until you complete the nuclear fission special project — that's why it's missing from the screenshot above, taken with France in 1936. From there it counts your already-built arsenal, which grows very slowly: a standard nuclear reactor (30,000 construction cost) produces one bomb every 852 days, nearly two and a half years per unit. The special projects guide covers the real cost of the program and what a bomb actually does when it drops.
World Tension
It's not just a thermometer — it directly gates what you can do. At 50% world tension, any non-aligned country can already justify a war and declare it; a democracy, by contrast, needs to reach 100% to declare war on its own, though it can guarantee other countries' independence starting at 25%. Calling other countries into an ongoing civil war also requires a minimum of 50%. Plenty of democracy playthroughs stall right here: you've got the army, but not the legal path to use it, while world tension stays low.
The loop: how they drag each other down
None of these numbers live in isolation. Low stability cuts your political power gain by up to −20%, which leaves you without the PP to activate the very laws or focuses that would fix that stability. Low war support costs you up to −50% mobilization speed right when you need to react fastest. Without fuel, your fleet and air force can't protect the very convoys bringing in more fuel. And war itself subtracts a flat −20% from stability, which stacks with any other penalty if you're losing on top of it. That's why it pays to enter any conflict with these numbers already in good shape, rather than counting on fixing them mid-war.
Where value gets lost
The first is jumping straight to All Adults Serve the moment the game starts, without actually needing that manpower yet, and eating a −30% production hit for nothing — raise conscription up to Extensive Conscription without hesitation, and no further until the war actually justifies it. The second is letting political power accumulate without spending it. The third is not watching your fuel reserves until the fleet is already running on fumes mid-campaign, when it's too late to have invested in refineries or trade.