Your first season, in numbers

Every other page tells you how the machine works. This one follows one player with 5 SOL all the way to day 21, and shows the arithmetic at each step.

This is arithmetic, not a projection. The formulas and parameters are the real ones; the volumes are an assumption, stated below, chosen to be plausible. Change the volume and every number changes. Nobody can tell you what a nation will raise — that’s the game.

Losses are shown as prominently as gains, because both are on the table.

Assumptions: you buy the launch-window maximum (5 SOL) into a fresh nation and are its first buyer. Over the season that nation’s curve ends up holding about 40 SOL of buy-ins. You hold — no trading in between. Defaults from the glossary.

Step 1 — you buy in

You send 5 SOL. A 1% fee comes off the top, so 4.95 SOL enters the curve. The fee doesn’t vanish — it splits four ways, and half of it arms the nation you just backed:

You receive ≈189 million tokens at an average price of 2.61e-8 SOL each. The curve’s reserve is now 4.95 SOL and the price of the next token has risen to 2.73e-8.

You now own 100% of a nation nobody else has bought yet. That is the early-buyer position — and it is the entire reason to be early.

Step 2 — the nation fills up

Others buy in behind you, adding 35 SOL. You did nothing.

Your 189M tokens are now worth 6.13 SOL at backing. If you sold into the curve you’d net 7.23 SOL after fees — +44.6% on your 5 SOL.

Be clear about where that gain came from: later buyers paid a higher price than you did. Being early is a real edge, and it is paid for by the people who arrive after you. The same mechanism will work against you if you arrive last.

Step 3 — day 21, and it survived

Trading freezes and the waterfall runs. Your nation ends with a treasury of about 8.2 SOL — its 8 SOL founding seed plus its share of trading fees. The seed is a senior claim and is repaid first, leaving 0.2 SOL to distribute, split 50/50 between stakers and holders.

Read that carefully. Almost all of it is your own backing, not winnings. On a quiet nation the treasury barely clears its seed. The treasury only becomes real money if your nation wins wars — in a real engine run the season’s conqueror finished with a 45.75 SOL treasury while a beaten rival held 1.49 SOL. That spread is the game.

Step 3, alternative — it was conquered

Your nation’s capital falls. Its mint freezes mid-tick and its reserve is swept:

• 50% into the redemption pool for holders like you
• 30% to the victor’s treasury · 10% to the victor’s stakers · 10% burned out of the season

You have 72 hours to redeem. You get 0.5 · R_L / s_L per token:

And it is paid in the victor’s tokens, bought live on their curve — so you exit as a citizen of the nation that beat you, and your redemption is buy pressure that pumps them.

This is the real downside, stated plainly: conquest costs you about half your backing. Your alternatives are to take a resistance position instead, or to leave early.

Leaving early — emigration

You can burn your tokens at backing and move to another nation, minus a haircut. Half the haircut refills the treasury you’re abandoning; half is burned.

Note the ordering: leaving during a war (3.68) is worse than peacetime (4.90) but still better than being conquered (3.06). The exit tax is designed to make you choose before the shooting starts, not during.

The whole picture

Starting from 5 SOL, holding to the end:

A winning nation’s treasury adds to the survive case; the conquest case is the floor. Your outcome is a judgment about which flag survives — see risks & trade-offs for the decisions that move these numbers, and the honest rake for what the protocol takes (~1% of deposits).