NationForge is a nation-scale city builder centered on deliberate planning, population growth, and production chains. You play as the head of a private enterprise entrusted with building and governing a new nation. Your objective is clear: reach a population target within a fixed time period while avoiding bankruptcy.

Cities serve two core purposes: supporting population growth and producing the resources that population requires. Strategic placement is critical—terrain, location, access to resources, and connectivity determine what a city can efficiently become.

Each city is shaped through policy systems with synergistic, stacking effects, pushing it toward distinct economic roles such as food production, resource extraction, industry, logistics, or dense urban population centers.

Production chains span multiple cities rather than a single location. Transportation and logistics bind the entire system together, enabling the movement of goods across your nation while remaining a supporting layer rather than the core focus.

Trade functions as a strategic tool rather than a primary mechanic—used to generate wealth, cover shortfalls in production chains, or accelerate growth when internal capacity falls short. Territory acquisition gives economic decisions weight, forcing you to balance expansion costs against imports, infrastructure investment, and long-term population capacity.

WHAT YOU DO

You plan and expand a nation by making long-term strategic decisions rather than managing a single city.

• Expand territory through land acquisition to unlock space for new cities

• Strategically place cities and define their roles through synergistic policies and inter-city planning

• Develop cities with housing, services, and utilities to support population growth and generate taxes

• Design multi-city production chains to supply resources required by your population and industries

• Create transportation routes and storage networks to meet population and production demands

• Use trade to generate wealth, cover resource shortages, or accelerate growth using existing infrastructure

• Reinvest surplus into further expansion, completing a continuous cycle of growth while avoiding bankruptcy

KEY SYSTEMS

• Nation-scale multi-city management with a hard city cap (up to 250 cities)

• Policy-driven specialization using stacking synergies instead of fixed city classes

• Deterministic, multi-city production chains planned at national scale

• Transportation and trade as support layers, not standalone gameplay loops

• Contiguous territorial expansion with politically driven land pricing

• Strict failure conditions — bankruptcy ends the game, no bailouts

EARLY ACCESS FEATURES

• Procedural overland map and city maps

• Territory expansion through land acquisition

• Multi-city building and management

• City planning and policy systems

• Resource production chains

• Transportation and trade

• Worker and Specialist population tiers

PLANNED FEATURES 

The following features represent the current development direction and may change based on development progress and player feedback.

• Public transportation systems

• Expanded map generation: rivers, lakes, islands, hills, continents, and varied terrain

• Administrators and Diplomats

• Diplomacy mechanics

• Utilities and utility grid systems

THE SETTING

Advances in technology dramatically extended human life expectancy, pushing the world into a population crisis. With no unclaimed land remaining, nations agreed on a radical solution: a disputed territory would become a sovereign state with open borders—governed not by a government, but by a private enterprise.

You lead that enterprise. Your mandate is to transform empty land into a self-sustaining nation capable of supporting a growing population—without outside aid and without failure.