Devlog #4: Trade Routes, Spheres and the Price of Peace

Hello, world leaders.

The next update is one of the biggest changes to how the world of Global Protocol works since launch. It rebuilds three things at once: how the world trades, who leads it, and what it costs to end a war.

Trade gets a real network of ports, sea lanes and straits, so trade between countries now travels a route and pays freight on the way. That route can be closed by a crisis. Great powers can build spheres of influence, but only with the consent of the countries they lead. And peace is no longer a single button: you pick the provinces you want on the map, and the other side tells you whether it will sign.

One honest note before we start: this is a preview. Every screenshot below comes from the current development build, taken from games we played forward a few months as the United States, Germany, Australia and Turkey. Numbers and details can still change before the update ships.

236trade centres on real ports and cities

145trade lanes: 100 by sea, 45 over land

14chokepoints, from Suez to Malacca

2,600+new lines of text in each of 13 languages

Why we rebuilt trade

In the current version, trade works, but it floats above the map. You can sign trade agreements with other countries — tariffs, export terms and priority resources — but they run forever and can’t be negotiated. Spot purchases and your private sector’s everyday imports and exports all go through one abstract world market, with no partner country behind them. Nothing travels: there are no ports, no sea lanes and no freight, and the Economy map only draws lines from a capital to its trade partners’ capitals. And trade is spread across the Economy page, the Markets workspace, a trade ticket, a trade log and the diplomatic inbox.

So we rebuilt it around one idea: trade should happen between real places, along real routes.

Real partners. Your private sector’s imports and exports are now matched with actual partner countries first, and exported goods really leave the seller’s stockpile. Only what partners can’t supply or buy still goes to the world market, shown as “the rest of the world”.
Real routes. Trade between countries travels along lanes that follow real sea routes and land corridors, through real chokepoints, and pays freight by distance.
Real negotiation. Deals have a length, a fixed or market-linked price, counter-offers and renewals.
Real consequences. When a strait closes, a war starts or sanctions hit, the trade that depended on them has to find another way, or stop.

Trade hubs: where the world’s goods pass

The network is built on 236 trade centres in three tiers: 26 global hubs such as New York, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Istanbul, Port Said, Singapore and Shanghai; 30 regional centres; and a national centre for every playable country. Each sits on a real port or city province on the map, linked by 145 lanes.

Switch to the Economy map mode, or open the new Trade page, and the network appears on the map:

Bigger and brighter means busier. A centre’s size and glow come from the value of the trade that actually passes through it each month.
Your trade is drawn in gold, on top of everyone else’s, with animated chevrons running from seller to buyer.
Routes switch between sea and land where a land corridor is the better way, at a handling cost.

The Economy map mode over the North Atlantic: trade centres at New York, Houston, Miami, Panama, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Algeciras, dashed sea lanes between them, the United States' own routes drawn in gold, and a legend explaining trade centres, your trade, blockaded coasts and closed routes — The United States in June 2026, five months in. Gold lanes are its own trade: across the Atlantic to Europe, down to Panama and around the Gulf of Mexico.

Click any centre and its card opens on the Trade page: what kind of centre it is, how much value passes through it each month, who owns it and what it earned in handling fees.

Germany's Trade Overview: the foreign account with tariffs, handling fees and interest on foreign wealth, a Trade centres table ranking Hamburg, New York, Shanghai, London, Rotterdam, Mumbai, Algeciras and Port Said by monthly value, owner and fees, and the Hamburg card: global hub, $551.7B a month, $179.6M in fees, owned by Germany — Germany, 1 May 2026: Hamburg, a global hub, moves $551.7 billion of trade a month and earned Germany $179.6 million in handling fees.

Australia's Trade Overview with its trade centres: Sydney, a global hub moving $86.1B a month with $639.7M in fees, and Perth at $32.2B a month, both owned by Australia — Australia, July 2026: Sydney and Perth. "Yours: 2" — the table always shows the centres you own first.

Turkey's Trade Overview with the Istanbul card, a global hub moving $158.4B a month with $106.9M in fees, next to the Economy map of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus and the eastern Mediterranean with lanes to Novorossiysk, Piraeus and Port Said — Turkey, April 2026: Istanbul sits between the Black Sea, the Aegean and the land routes east.

Hubs pay their owners

A trade centre is now worth owning — and worth fighting over.

A commerce edge. Each centre you own adds to your economy’s commerce, more the busier it is: up to 4% per centre and 8% in total. An idle hub is worth little; a busy regional port is worth a lot.
Handling fees. 8% of the freight on every route is shared among the centres it passes through, bigger centres taking a bigger share. The fees come out of the freight the importer already pays, and each owner’s monthly take is capped relative to its economy.
Conquest moves them. Take the province, and its centre — with its bonus and its fees — changes hands.

The United States Economy Budget page: tax and spending sliders, then last month's cash flow with revenue rows for tax revenue, tariff revenue $10.5B, trade services $562.3M, handling fees $1.4B, partner sales and contract sales $3.9B, and expense rows including contract purchases and envoys and influence projects — The United States, June 2026. Trade now has its own rows in the budget: tariffs, trade services, handling fees, and what your contracts bought and sold.

A deal, from offer to delivery

The new Trade page has its own place in the sidebar, with five tabs: Overview, Buy/Sell, Offers, Auto Trade and Log. Here is one deal, start to finish.

1. The offer arrives. Other countries now send you supply contracts — at most one per country a month, and only when relations are good enough. Each one arrives as a toast and in your Diplomatic Inbox, and both take you straight to its card.

The Trade Offers tab for the United States in February 2026: incoming offers from India, Germany and Mexico as cards, each with what you get and what they get, the price, term, renewal, who pays freight, the negotiation round, an answer deadline and Accept, Counter and Reject buttons — The United States, 1 February 2026: five offers in the first month. Every card says what you get, what they get, who pays the freight and how long you have to answer.

2. You negotiate. Accept, reject — or counter. A counter can change the quantity, the price, the length of the deal (1 to 20 years), whether the price is fixed or follows the world market, and what happens when the term ends. You have up to four rounds, and a counter has to actually change something: at least 15% on quantity or price, or a different term.

The counter offer window to Germany, round 2 of 4: units a month, price per unit, a fixed price or indexed to market choice, duration buttons from 1 to 20 years with 3 years selected, what happens when the term ends, and the rule that a counter must change quantity or price by at least 15% or change the duration, price model or renewal — Countering Germany's one-year offer with a three-year term. An indexed price is re-set every month at the world price, inside a band of 60–150% of the agreed price.

3. The deal runs. Signed deals live under Active. Every month you see what was promised, what actually arrived, what you paid, and how reliably the partner has delivered over the last year — and when a delivery falls short, the card says why. Set a deal to Ask me first, and three months before it ends you’re asked whether to renew it.

Australia's active deals in August 2026: a supply contract selling gold to Japan with 8.3 of 10.3 tonnes delivered this month, 78% delivered over the last 12 months and the note that the seller must keep its own reserve, and a contract with New Zealand, each with renewal options and a Cancel deal button — Australia, August 2026: Japan's gold contract delivered 78% over the last year — Australia keeps a reserve it won't sell below.

4. Every delivery is logged. The Log lists every trade of the month — the state’s contracts and orders, and your private sector’s trade — with the partner, the amount and the money. Select a row to see what was asked for, what was matched, what was delivered, why, and when the goods can be used.

Australia's Trade Log for July 2026: rows for crude oil from Azerbaijan and the United States, iron ore to the United States and Japan, coal and gold to Japan and helium to New Zealand, with State and Private sector filters, and the trade details of a direct crude oil purchase from Azerbaijan — Australia, July 2026: iron ore and coal out, crude oil in. Each row names the partner country.

Two more ways to trade complete the page. Buy/Sell finds every country with spare stock of a resource and ranks them by delivered cost — the price plus the freight to your ports — before you place a one-off order or propose a monthly deal; or you can still buy and sell on the world market. Auto Trade sets the prices and amounts your country may buy and sell automatically, so reserves top themselves up within the limits you choose.

Your foreign account

Private trade has always kept its money off your treasury: export earnings went into your country’s foreign exchange reserves. But until now nothing used those reserves and no screen showed them, so a trade deficit cost you nothing you could see. In this update that account becomes real and visible: the foreign account, made of your foreign exchange reserves and foreign assets, and it now pays your private sector’s import bills.

Overview tells you where you stand: your reserves, how many months of imports they cover, and what came in and went out this month.
Running short has a cost. When the account can’t pay the whole import bill, imports shrink.
Low import cover becomes a warning in your attention list, before it becomes a crisis.
Your treasury still benefits. Tariffs, handling fees and interest on your foreign wealth flow into the budget, each as its own row.

Australia's Trade Overview: an economy-at-a-glance card with budget, GDP, inflation, top problem and foreign reserves of $63.1B covering 1.6 months of imports, and the foreign account with reserves, import cover, foreign assets, the month's change, and incoming rows for exports to partner countries, exports to the rest of the world and other export earnings — Australia, July 2026: $63.1 billion in reserves, 1.6 months of imports covered. This month's export earnings of $44.4 billion beat its $37.9 billion of import bills.

When trade gets blocked

This is where the network earns its keep. Fourteen chokepoints sit on the lanes, and four crises in the game can close one:

Crisis	Closes	For
Suez Canal blockage	the Suez Canal	2 months
South China Sea crisis	the Malacca and Taiwan straits	3 months
Strait of Hormuz crisis	the Strait of Hormuz, if that option is chosen	6 months
Taiwan Strait crisis	the Taiwan Strait, if it turns into a blockade	6 months

A closed route turns red on the map and carries nothing. Trade that used it looks for the next way round — longer, with more freight to pay — and the centres along the old route lose business.

Here is the Suez Canal closing, seen from Germany.

Germany's Trade Overview on 1 June 2026 with the Port Said card, a global hub owned by Egypt at $290.9B a month, next to the map of the Red Sea with the lane from Port Said to Djibouti drawn as a red closed route and other lanes running from Port Said to Jeddah, Dubai and the Gulf of Aden — Germany, 1 June 2026: the canal is closed and its lane runs red. Port Said's monthly trade fell from $308.7 billion in May to $290.9 billion — and $273.5 billion by July.

The Economy map of the South Atlantic and Africa: sea lanes from Santos and Lagos running around the Cape of Good Hope to Durban and Mombasa, with Germany's trade in gold running up the east African coast toward Mumbai — With Suez shut, Europe–Asia trade takes the long way round Africa.

The long way costs money. Refined petroleum from the Gulf, delivered to Germany, rose from $842 to $875 a tonne within a month, as the freight per tonne went from $161 to $210.

Germany's Buy/Sell for refined petroleum filtered to the Dubai hub: the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Iraq with available amounts and delivered prices around $875 to $889 a tonne, and a one-off order breakdown of goods, freight and total — Buy/Sell always quotes the delivered cost: the goods plus the freight to your own ports, along today's route.

On the other side of the world, the South China Sea crisis closed Malacca and the Taiwan Strait in our Australian game. The red dashed lanes are the closed ones; Australia’s own trade, in gold, goes round to the south.

The Economy map of Southeast Asia in July 2026: the lanes through the Strait of Malacca and from Hong Kong toward the Taiwan Strait drawn as red closed routes, open lanes between Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Hong Kong and Jakarta, and Australia's gold trade route running south of Indonesia — Australia, July 2026: Singapore's westbound lane through the Strait of Malacca is closed.

Crises aren’t the only thing that can block trade:

War stops trade. Countries at war don’t trade with each other, and sanctions cut a pair’s trade.
An embargo leaves only a trickle of private trade: 10% of what it was.
A blockaded coast — marked with a red ring on the map — loses half of its sea trade.
Poor access costs extra. Where access is poor, world-market prices carry a premium of up to 50%; below 5% access, the market won’t sell to you at all.

The AI reads all of this too: it picks its suppliers by delivered cost, so a closed strait reshapes the whole world’s trade, not just yours.

Spheres of influence

The second big part of this update is the sphere of influence — and it starts with the question of who leads.

We rebuilt spheres from scratch. Before, a sphere was something the AI managed for itself; it could pull a human player in without asking, and you couldn’t see how it worked. Now spheres are led by ranked powers, and no country joins a sphere unless it agrees to.

Who leads

The strongest countries hold a power tier, and yours is shown in the top bar next to your world rank.

Tier	Members	Influence projects
Superpower (at most two)	10	3
Great Power	6	2
Regional Power (up to two per region)	3	1

Superpowers and Great Powers can reach the whole world; Regional Powers reach their own region and its neighbours. A power that slips down a tier keeps its sphere for a 12-month grace period.

Choosing a charter

Founding a sphere means choosing what it is for — and every member sees that charter before it accepts.

The Found a sphere window for the United States as a Superpower with 10 slots: three charter cards — Economic, Security (selected) and Political — each listing what members get and what the leader gets, and the note that a charter can be changed once every 24 months — The United States, 1 January 2026, founding a Security sphere.

Economic: trade and growth for the whole sphere. Members get +10% exports and +0.3% growth a year; the leader gets +1% exports per member, up to +8%.
Security: mutual protection. The leader guarantees every member, and the sphere deters attackers.
Political: shared politics. Members’ ideology drifts toward the leader’s, their stability target rises by 4, and their aggressive expansion fades 50% faster.

Under every charter, other leaders can’t simply invite your members away — only a defection offer can take them. And you can change the charter once every two years, at an opinion cost with your members.

Influence: earning the right to ask

Before you can invite a country, you need influence over it: a score from 0 to 100, built from sixteen sources — geography and region, shared ethnicity, religion and ideology, relations, trade, embassies, debt, aid, guarantees, alliances, envoys and paid influence projects. Trade is one of them, so the deals you sign also pull countries toward you. Influence fades by 5% a month unless you keep it up.

The United States Sphere Candidates tab in June 2026: country cards sorted by influence — Mexico 57/100, Japan 52/100 with an influence project, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand already in the sphere, Australia marked Contested, the Philippines with an influence project and a Likely accepts chip — each with Invite and Project buttons and the project's monthly cost — The United States, June 2026. Candidates show your influence, who else is competing for them, and how likely they are to say yes.

Invitations open once you hold 35 influence over a country. The country decides.
A human player is never joined automatically. Invitations arrive in your inbox, a few at a time, and expire after 60 days if you don’t answer.
Small countries can ask to join. A country can petition a leader that holds at least 20 influence over it.
Leaving has a price. A member can leave, but it can’t rejoin for a year.

The United States My sphere tab in June 2026: Superpower, 4 of 10 slots, 3 of 3 influence projects, Security charter, and members Australia (contested, top rival United Kingdom 33/100), Canada, New Zealand and South Korea, each joined by invitation with the US influence over them and a Release button — Five months later, four countries have accepted. Each card shows the strongest rival for that member — the United Kingdom is courting Australia.

Germany's My sphere tab in August 2026: Great power, 1 of 6 slots, 1 of 2 influence projects, Economic charter, the Netherlands as a member with France as its top rival, an influence project on Switzerland at 49/100, and the Economic charter's effects for members and for the leader — Germany, August 2026: an Economic sphere with the Netherlands, and an influence project working on Switzerland.

Rivals and defection

Spheres don’t stay settled. A rival power that builds at least 45 influence over one of your members, and holds a lead of 15 points over you for six months, can make it a defection offer. The World tab shows every sphere on the planet, who leads it, how many members it has and how firmly it holds them.

The Sphere World tab seen from Australia in July 2026: Superpowers China (Economic, 5 of 10 slots) with Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Pakistan and Singapore, and the United States (Economic, 8 of 10 slots) with Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Ghana, Israel, New Zealand, the Philippines and South Korea, then Great Powers France, Germany, India and Japan — Seen from Australia, July 2026: in a game left to the AI, the powers have founded their spheres within months.

Built to grow

Spheres are the first layer of something bigger: a world where it matters who answers to whom. They give the game ranked powers, influence that can be measured, and membership based on consent. That is the groundwork we want to build overlords and vassals and proxy relationships on, in later updates.

The price of peace

Ending a war used to be a single list of demands. Now it happens on the map.

Open the Peace view from the war dock and click the occupied provinces you want. Every demand — a province, war reparations, humiliation, a change of regime — has a cost, paid from a peace budget that grows with your war score. And the other side answers live: Will accept or Will refuse, with the reason.

The Peace view for Turkey's war against Malta on 1 February 2026: war score +6, peace budget 23.3 of 11.6, the answer Will refuse — your demands outweigh the pressure on them, terms for status quo, war reparations, humiliation and regime change with their costs, and Valletta selected on the map as a land demand — Turkey against Malta, one month in: Valletta costs 23.3 of an 11.6 budget, and Malta refuses.

The same Peace view on 1 April 2026: war score +28, the war marked Winning, the peace budget 23.3 of 28.4 and the answer Will accept, with the Send offer button enabled — Two months later, at +28, the same demand fits the budget — and Malta will accept.

The AI decides for itself. Before, a peace offer from a human player was judged only by the sender’s own estimate, which never refused a white peace. Now the AI weighs every offer in the simulation, so a losing player can no longer walk away with a white peace on demand.
Regime change has teeth. With an ideological casus belli, a regime change installs a government aligned with the winner: the loser takes a 10-point stability hit, and its new government starts with a strong opinion of the winner (+25) that fades over two years.
Picking provinces on the map was one of the requests from our Discord. Thank you for it.

Corruption you can fight

Corruption used to stay frozen at its starting value — one of your reports. Now it moves: every month, corruption drifts toward a target set by your laws, doctrines, stability, inflation and war exhaustion. A free press lowers that target by 4; a state-controlled press raises it by 4.

Corruption also costs you more now. Above 55, it drags your stability target down (by up to 20 points), and above 20 it leaks tax revenue (up to a quarter of it).

To fight back, Politics › Decisions gets an anti-corruption campaign: it cuts your corruption target by 8 for two years — a quarter of that for good — for 0.1% of your GDP and 3 points of stability. You can launch it once every three years, and the AI uses it too.

Turkey's Politics Decisions page in April 2026 with corruption at 60.8% and the confirmation Launch an anti-corruption campaign? — $1.4B, corruption target −8 (−2 for good), −3.0 stability, this can't be undone — Turkey at 60.8% corruption: $1.4 billion and 3 stability for a lower corruption target.

The stability and corruption indicators now name what drags them down most, and take you to the control that fixes it. And national goals that depend on stability or corruption, such as the Anti-Corruption Drive, can now be completed.

Missiles: aim once, fire a salvo

You no longer launch missiles one click at a time. Pick a target and choose the salvo size — one, a few, or everything you can launch.

To show it, we put the United States at war with Russia in a test game and aimed a salvo at the Northern Fleet’s base at Murmansk.

The map of the North Atlantic on 2 February 2026: twelve red missile trails arcing from the eastern United States over the Atlantic and Scandinavia to Murmansk, DEFCON 1 in the top bar, and a Missile launched notification: nuclear salvo of 12 missiles ordered on target — One target, one click: a salvo of 12 ICBMs on its way to Murmansk.

Two days later on the same map: the twelve US trails toward Murmansk and a dense fan of red trails from Moscow back to the eastern United States, with a Nuclear retaliation notification: Russia has launched 24 retaliatory warheads against the United States — 4 February: Russia answers on warning with 24 warheads, aimed at the launch site the salvo came from.

Conventional and nuclear salvo sizes are kept apart, so a conventional barrage never carries over into a nuclear strike.
A nuclear salvo from “any silo” fires only from silos that can reach the target, each with its own flight time — and you’re told when only part of the salvo can make it. The AI follows the same rules.
Satellite launch facilities now support three satellites each, instead of one.
Every war keeps a record of its losses for each side — including ships and aircraft — and every end screen shows your campaign record.

Multiplayer

Everything above works in multiplayer, exactly as in single player. Alongside it, multiplayer got another hardening pass:

A resync now reaches every player at once, and the host waits until everyone has applied it before the game goes on.
A player who rejoins stays in step with the host from the first day back.
We found and fixed around 30 places where two computers could have resolved the same moment in a different order — battle fronts, naval and bombing losses, AI fleets and armies, coalition ties and more.
The lobby no longer blocks a game when a mod’s translations differ between players; it just tells you.

For modders

The Mod Builder got its biggest update yet. The screenshots below show our own test mod.

Edit your mod while you play it. When you play single player with a mod of your own, the Mod Builder opens from the pause menu. Apply to running game reloads your events, texts, scripts and many game settings without restarting, and Fire now triggers any event on the spot.
A new, grouped menu — Mod, World, Rules & content, Research, Politics & goals, Events, Interface, Text, Publish — with tooltips that explain where each setting is used.

Scenarios can start mid-story: with alliances, organisations, treaties and wars already running on day one, and with their own leaders.

The Mod Builder's Diplomacy page for a scenario: a collective-defence organisation founded by France with three members, a military alliance between the United States and Canada, and a truce treaty, each with Add and Remove — Day-one diplomacy for a scenario: organisations, alliances, treaties and running wars.

New editors: interface themes and layout, unit map markers, endings, a data painter for province data, a goal graph with prerequisites and mutually exclusive goals, research tracks, laws and interest groups, and event pictures.

The Mod Builder's Goals page in Graph view: four national goals as nodes, arrows for prerequisites and a dashed red line between two goals that exclude each other, with zoom, Fit and Auto layout controls — National goals as a graph: drag from one goal to another to make it a prerequisite; a dashed red line marks goals that exclude each other.

The Mod Builder's Endings page: an ending with its title key, result Victory, who can win, the earliest year, conditions such as a flag being set and a lifetime counter of ships lost above a value, Add condition, and end-screen rows — Endings: your own ways to win, with the conditions checked once a month and the rows your end screen shows.

Events can do much more: declare war, sign peace and truces, form alliances, target every country, keep variables, run covert operations, change militaries and create units. Every reactive trigger now fires.
Scripts can read the world, set and clear flags and show translated pop-ups, and mods are checked when they load.

And many more changes

Budget, GDP and inflation tooltips are now built from the same ledger as the simulation, so the numbers add up.
Event pop-ups no longer cover your panels, and long options wrap.
Global events no longer repeat events meant to fire once.
A recruit order that fails no longer takes your money, manpower or resources.
Missiles in flight survive a save and load — even when their silo was captured mid-flight.
The map no longer starts black outside your own country on day one.
Unit markers no longer leak memory month after month.
A hover tooltip could crash the game while loading a save or returning to the menu. Fixed.
Every new line of text — over 2,600 of them — is in all 13 languages.
Your saves carry over: games from the current version load in the update.

What’s next

We’re still in Early Access, and your feedback decides what comes next — much of this update started with it. Our development roadmap is public: see what we’re working on at our roadmap page.

Thank you

Thank you for every review, bug report, screenshot and long message. If you’re enjoying the game, a Steam review helps a small team like ours more than you know.

See you on the world stage.

— Ozan Kanık, founder, Dorlion Interactive