The map
Powerbloc is played on a real-world globe: 24 territories, fixed borders, fixed sea lanes. Six of those territories are capitals, twelve are home provinces, and six are neutral ground that belongs to nobody until someone’s army takes it.
The six nations
Each of the six countries starts with a capital plus two home provinces — 18 national territories in total. Geography is destiny, exactly as on Earth:
- United States — sea-locked. Every external edge off American soil is a sea lane, which costs more to cross (combat effectiveness at a discount, heavier supply burn) but also means nobody reaches the US cheaply either. Hardest nation to kill, and it pays a toll for every inch of reach abroad.
- Germany — the land power of the Western half of the board, sitting directly across the neutral Eastern-Europe zone from Russia. Whoever holds that zone decides who is exposed.
- India — reach runs through the sea and through the Gulf; a hybrid constitution running a nation with real, if indirect, access to two of the six contested zones.
- Saudi Arabia — sits closest of anyone to the Gulf zone itself: cheap to defend it, cheap for others to want it from you.
- China — a land power with a long, cheap border into the contested east, and a direct line to the South China Sea zone. Expansion is easy; exposure is the price.
- Russia — the most edges on the board, and the most exposure. Russia touches nearly every other nation’s sphere in some way, which makes it the cheapest nation to expand from and the most dangerous nation to be.
Land powers expand cheap and live exposed; sea-locked powers expand expensive and live safe. Nobody gets both.
The six zones — the war magnets
Between the capitals lie six neutral Strategic zones, named for the real-world chokepoints they stand in for:
| Zone | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Panama | the western hemisphere’s toll gate — the one objective the US can reach cheaply abroad |
| North Atlantic | the sea lane between the US and Europe’s democracies |
| Eastern Europe | sits between Germany and Russia by design — the board’s most contested line |
| The Gulf | the most fought-over crossroads on the map — three powers (India, Saudi Arabia, Russia) border it |
| South China Sea | China’s cheap, direct extension eastward |
| Arctic | the northern route everyone can eventually reach, nobody can cheaply hold |
These six zones have no home nation — they belong to whoever claims them first during the five-epoch peace phase (the land rush), or whoever wins the fight for them afterward. They yield more Supply than a home province, which is exactly why every war on this board ends up being fought over one of them.
The discovery
The board isn’t static. Around epoch 24, roughly the season’s midpoint, a new Strategic zone spawns — a route that wasn’t reachable, or a find that wasn’t there, opening up out of nowhere on a board that had otherwise settled into six armed camps. It re-runs the land rush in miniature, for whoever still has an army to spend on it, and resets the calculus for nations that thought the map was already decided. Exactly what it is and exactly where — that’s part of what Season 0 finds out live.
How territory actually changes hands
Full invasions are the loud way. Most of the map moves quietly:
- Claims. Neutral zones are taken by claiming them — a 0.5 SOL cost from the treasury, paid into the prize pool. Contested claims are resolved by force of arms. The land rush in the peace phase is mostly claims.
- Skirmishes. Short, single-exchange clashes on a contested border. They bleed casualties and set up position without the escrow and commitment of a declared war.
- Fortify. A government can dig in on a territory for 2 epochs, taking a 1.3× defensive multiplier — stacked on top of the defender’s standing θ = 1.3 edge. Fortifying is how a weak nation makes itself not worth attacking. The cooldown is at least as long as the duration, so it can’t be held permanently.
- The discovery (epoch 24) reopens the land rush mid-season — see above.
Anti-harassment rules. You cannot grind a neighbour down with repeated cheap attacks: there’s a 6-epoch cooldown per pair after a war, and an escrow floor of 0.5 SOL so that even attacking a tiny army costs something real.
Supply: the number that caps armies
Territory isn’t just points on a map — it’s food. Every territory yields Supply each epoch:
| Territory type | Supply / epoch |
|---|---|
| Home province | 2 |
| Capital | 4 |
| Strategic zone | 7 |
Each unit eats 0.4 Supply per epoch, so M_max = income ÷ 0.4. That turns the table
above into a hard army ceiling:
| Territory held | Supply / epoch | Army you can feed |
|---|---|---|
| Home only (capital + 2 provinces) | 8 | 20 units |
| + 1 Strategic zone | 15 | 37.5 units |
| + 2 Strategic zones | 22 | 55 units |
For scale: a treasury of 8 SOL can buy roughly 140 units — seven times what home territory can feed. Past the ceiling units go UNSUPPLIED (fighting at 70%), then start dying at 15% per epoch. This is the single most important trade-off in the game, and it is why the zones are worth more than the money: you cannot buy what you have not conquered the fields to feed.
A nation’s army can only grow as large as its Supply income can feed — treasury SOL buys units, but Supply is the hard ceiling on how many of them your country can keep standing. Squeeze a rich nation onto too little land and its army starves in public, no matter how deep its treasury runs. This is why the map, not the leaderboard, is the real balance dial — see why the biggest doesn’t just win and Supply and campaign wars for how that plays out in combat.