Badges

Badges are earned marks of distinction. They are permanent, they accumulate, and together they place you on a ladder that pays real damage and production.

The four badges

Badge	How you earn it
Pressman	Wrote the best-rated article of the day.
Warlord	Dealt the most damage in a war, on either side.
Industrialist	Produced more than anyone else in a day.
Statesman	Held a head-of-state office: one per election won.

Each is scarce in its own way. Exactly one Pressman and one Industrialist badge exists per day, and one Warlord per war. Statesman is won per election rather than per day, so it arrives once a term: a president re-elected next cycle earns another.

Note

The Warlord badge is awarded on damage dealt, not on winning. A defender who carried a losing fight still earns it.

Caution

The ladder bonus does not apply to military production. Guns, tanks, missiles and jets are produced at a flat rate set by the factory, independent of who works the line: exactly as luck, loyalty and region productivity are ignored there.

The ladder

Every active player is ranked into 6 groups by how many badges they own: the same six rungs an equipment box rolls. Crucially, the ladder is badge-blind: a hundred Warlord badges rank exactly the same as a hundred Pressman badges. Only the total counts.

Rung	Damage & production
1	+0%
2	+2%
3	+4%
4	+6%
5	+8%
6	+10%

Every player on zero badges ties on rung 1 and earns nothing: that is the floor, not a penalty. Ranking uses percentiles, so your rung depends on how you compare to everyone else, not on hitting a fixed number.

The champion

The single highest badge count in the game earns a further +5% (up to +15% in total) and wears an animated frame that cycles every colour. There is only ever one champion. A tie at the top leaves the throne empty: if two players share the highest count, nobody is champion until one pulls ahead.

Frames

Your rung is drawn as a coloured ring around your portrait, everywhere you appear: chat, rankings, war logs, congress. The colours match the equipment rarity ladder, so a purple ring means the same thing a purple helmet does.

Worked example

For this example, suppose your 9 badges put you on rung 5. Your actual rung depends on the badge counts of other active players.

• Rung 5 → +8% damage and production.
• You are not the champion (someone else holds 14), so no extra 5%.

An attack that would otherwise deal 1,000 damage now deals 1000 × 1.08 = 1,080. A shift producing 250 iron now yields 250 × 1.08 = 270.

If you later overtake the leader and reach the highest count in the game, you’d gain the champion’s +5% on top: 1000 × 1.15 = 1,150 damage.

Tip

Because the ladder only counts how many badges you hold, the cheapest way to climb is whichever badge you can win most often: for most players that is Pressman or Industrialist, which are contested fresh every single day.

Try it yourself on the badge ladder calculator.