Feed people. Pay workers. Give them a reason to become something else.
The market from the last diary does not end when a purchase settles. It lands in a province, in the hands of people with jobs, savings, needs, culture, literacy, political views, and a place in the social order. Every pop is a group of people represented inside that world. They consume goods, earn wages, form opinions, and change as the economy around them changes.
That is where the map stops being scenery. A province is not just iron, grain, or a factory slot. It is the people who can work there, buy there, become dissatisfied there, and build a different future there.
Meet needs first
Buy what a pop can afford. Each pop carries life, everyday, and luxury needs, then keeps the goods it successfully bought. At the end of the day, the game measures how much of each category was met.
Meet life needs and population growth improves. Meet everyday needs and radicalism can fall. Meet luxury needs and pops gain political consciousness as well as another measure of comfort. Fail to meet life needs and radicalism rises. A high price is therefore not only an economic number. It can become an anxious household, a more volatile province, and a political problem waiting for an answer.
Keep money with the people who earned it. A pop has a wallet, spends from it on market requests, and receives wages for work. There is no invisible national purse that makes every shortage painless. If food, clothes, or other necessities become scarce, the pressure arrives where it should: with the people trying to live on what they have.
Build a labour pool
Post a job before someone can fill it. Mines, farms, artisan workshops, state foci, state buildings, and factories all report the occupations they want to hire into their state's labour pool.
Compare demand with the people already there. The pool tracks each occupation's local labour tightness, then moves wages toward a target instead of making them jump from one extreme to another. A scarce occupation can command up to two and a half times the base wage. A glut can fall as low as one quarter of it. Employers read those pool wages when they pay their workers, so labour scarcity reaches their books as a real cost.
This gives every new operation a wider effect. Open a factory and it does more than add an output icon. It asks for workers. It raises the value of scarce skills. It changes which jobs make sense for people in that state. The market for goods and the market for labour become two views of the same pressure.
Change occupation where demand exists
Turn pressure into conversion. The labour pool builds promotion and demotion factors for every occupation from the jobs actually being requested. An occupation with no hiring demand has no pull. Pops do not drift into a profession merely because it exists in a table.
Accrue the change person by person. Each pop gathers fractional progress toward the occupations available to it. When that progress becomes a whole person, the game records a conversion in the state's population ledger. At the safe, serial end of the daily economy tick, the ledger applies those changes. People leave the source pop, enter or join a pop of the new occupation in the same province, keep their culture, and take their proportional savings with them.
The delayed application is about correctness, not theatre. Market requests and employer rosters can finish their work without a population list changing beneath them. Then the new worker exists for the next day's economy. The result is stable enough for a large simulation and concrete enough to follow from a decision to the people affected by it.
Say what moves today
Change is active now. Occupations respond to local demand, wages respond to scarcity, needs affect growth and radicalism, and those changes feed back into production, spending, and politics.
Physical migration is not yet part of that active loop. The population ledger already has paths for internal and external migration, but the game does not currently emit migration decisions into them. We will not pretend that an unbuilt system is already reshaping the map.
That distinction matters. A factory can currently draw a province toward an industrial workforce by making its jobs valuable and available. It does not yet cause people to relocate from another province. When movement between places joins the same system, it should follow the same standard: a real source, a real destination, people carrying their money and culture with them, and consequences visible at both ends.
Let people answer the economy
Build jobs and ask who can fill them. Let prosperity reach households through wages and affordable goods. Watch shortages turn from empty shelves into radicalism. Watch a state's labour pool pull people toward work that the economy genuinely needs.
That is the scale we want: not a map painted with bonuses, but an economy that reaches the people inside it. Every mine, field, workshop, tariff, and factory changes a chain of needs, wages, occupations, and politics. The forum is open for questions and discussion.