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Each round lasts one month. At the start of every month, you review last month’s status: tax income, military expenditure, regional disasters, officials’ assignments and the actual execution of imperial decrees.
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You are the Chongzhen Emperor.
You know Beijing will fall seventeen years from now, and the tree atop Coal Hill is waiting for you. You also understand the Ming Empire will not collapse because of one single enemy. Its fatal woes lie in empty national coffers, endless fiscal bleeding from the Liaodong frontier, widespread refugee rebellions, vicious partisan struggles inside the court, lazy and perfunctory bureaucrats, unpaid garrison troops, and your helplessness after countless routine replies of "Noted".
But in this restarted timeline, you are allowed to summon any official face to face whenever you want.
The game runs on a monthly turn system, with one turn representing one month. At the start of each month, you read official memorandums, hold audiences with ministers and issue imperial edicts; all nationwide developments get calculated and settled at month’s end.
You may summon grand secretaries, Six Ministries civil servants, palace eunuchs, frontier generals, local provincial administrators and imperial spies. Every character holds personal biases and factional interests. You can question them, test their true intentions, or order them to draft imperial decrees.
The edict-making process works in three steps: draft text formed during conversations, followed by optional editing, deletion or final approval, before the edict is officially released and tied into monthly settlement.
Imperial orders rarely get enforced exactly as written. Shortage of state funds, declining imperial prestige or factional sabotage will twist implementation results away from your original intention.
A Ming-style official court bulletin is automatically generated every month after settlement, recording current national conditions and real consequences brought by your previously issued decrees.
All reforms and ongoing crises become traceable agenda items that naturally shift monthly based on historical inertia. Your imperial decisions can speed up progress, reverse negative trends or adjust the overall difficulty of each issue.
An event memory system creates categorized memory entries covering individual figures, regions, court politics and foreign forces after each monthly wrap-up. These past records automatically pop up in later minister audiences to keep conversations logically consistent. Memories fade over time according to importance tiers: levels one through four come with limited valid duration, while tier-five key information gets permanently stored without decay.
Before monthly outcome calculation, dedicated AI units pull key terms from all decrees passed that month, match relevant historical background via preset tags, and feed these details into monthly situation simulation and scoring. This keeps the monthly bulletin’s storyline consistent and makes imperial archive filing more accurate.
Officials can look up past events by specific year and month, bypassing regular memory decay rules. Duplicated historical information gets merged and cleaned up, providing reliable evidence whenever you ask ministers about old affairs.
You can appoint historically proven civil servants who are not listed on the pre-set staffing roster by issuing direct imperial commands; the Minister of Personnel reviews candidates’ official seniority and immediately fills vacant court positions when approved.
Every official has a clear personal status: in office, dismissed from duty, imprisoned, exiled, retired or deceased. Famous historic officials join or leave the court automatically according to their real-life timelines.
If you ask any minister about another official’s current post and status, they must check the official court register to answer truthfully instead of relying on vague memory. The official roster is sorted strictly by bureaucratic rank.
You can issue an imperial edict to launch imperial maiden selection. The Directorate of Ceremonial picks out a shortlist of candidates with distinct personalities and talents for your inspection; those you favor receive formal decrees to be conferred noble titles and enter the palace.
During private audiences, you can command your consorts to learn new skills or modify their dispositions. All character changes are saved into permanent memory, and their personalities will reflect these adjustments in future meetings.
A web-based harem panel lets you view all registered palace ladies, browse pending candidate rosters, confirm new palace enrollments, or reset an entire playthrough with a single click.
You may upload local image files to create exclusive custom portraits for each concubine card; these portraits save at archive level and reload automatically when you restart your game.
Provincial finance is calculated separately across four core tax sources every month: land tax, Liaodong wartime surtax, salt tax and commercial tax. Corruption and local uprisings reduce the actual tax silver delivered to the central government; low imperial prestige further allows provincial authorities to embezzle reserved Liaodong military levies.
After all provincial tax revenue is compiled into the central treasury each month, government spending gets allocated following fixed priority ranking: nine frontier garrison supplies, official salaries, large-scale public projects, disaster relief, and troop stipends. You can temporarily divert money from the emperor’s private inner treasury to cover urgent fiscal emergencies.
Detailed revenue and expenditure logs are filed by fiscal category every month. A full end-of-month audit tallies exact incoming funds, total spent silver and outstanding unpaid balances for every single item.
The game’s map covers the two imperial capitals and thirteen Ming provinces, tracking real-time shifts in population, public morale, civil unrest, natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, cultivated land, untaxed hidden farmland, tax revenue, grain reserves, gentry resistance and regional military pressure.
The military module records troop numbers, monthly upkeep costs, supply levels, soldier morale, training quality, equipment condition, unpaid payroll, troop mobility, personal loyalty and overall combat status.
Construction projects including imperial kilns, frontier forts, public granaries, craft workshops and river regulation works have graded development levels. Their maintenance fees and resource outputs are logged monthly, and any new construction needs formal imperial approval to start construction progress.
Outside forces — Later Jin/Qing, the Eight Banners, Mongolian tribes and Joseon Korea, alongside domestic peasant rebel armies — shift their strength and territory month by month.
Key fixed historical turning points such as Huang Taiji’s ascension as khan, the 1629 Jisi Invasion and the Qing imperial coronation are locked into the timeline. Your rulings can alter how these landmark events unfold.
All campaign progress saves locally inside the database file named data/ming_sim.db, enabling multiple independent new playthroughs.
