A House Divided is on the App Store, and 1.19 is out

Get it on the App Store

A House Divided for iPhone is free on the App Store: apps.apple.com/app/a-house-divided. It plays the same live world as the browser and the desktop client, so your character, party and companies are already there when you sign in.

• Sign in with Apple, or with your existing account.
• Home screen widgets for keeping an eye on the world.
• Ask Keir built in, for questions about how the game works.
• Report and block tools for player messages and content.

Thank you to everyone who tested the TestFlight builds and reported what broke. Most of the fixes in the review build came from you.

Where it is available

The app is live in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and most other App Store countries. It is not yet available in the 27 countries of the European Union.

If you are in the EU, nothing about the game changes. The browser game at ahousedividedgame.com is the full game, and the desktop client and Android tester program work as before.

Why not the EU yet

The EU's Digital Services Act requires every app seller on the EU App Store to declare whether they are a "trader", meaning a business. Traders must give Apple a postal address, a phone number and an email address, and Apple shows all three publicly on the app's EU store page. Apple checks the address and phone number before it accepts them, and an app from a seller who has not completed this is not offered in the EU.

We are a registered company, so we are a trader under the rules, and we will not claim otherwise. The problem is what we would have to publish. Lakeside Games is a small studio, and the address and phone number tied to it today are personal ones. Completing the EU step right now would put the home address and private phone number of a real person on a public page that anyone in the world can read. For a game about politics, where feelings sometimes run high, we are not willing to do that.

The fix is a business address and a business phone line that Apple will verify. That is not free. A P.O. box does not qualify, so it means paying every month for a staffed business address with mail handling, plus a dedicated phone number, and then updating our company records so everything matches what Apple checks. None of this improves the game, so we want to set it up once and properly rather than rush it.

We plan to bring the app to the EU once that is in place. We will post here and in the Discord when it happens. EU players who want to help it happen sooner can support the game on Patreon.

1.19: Every sale has a buyer

1.19 went live on November 3. The headline is the economy: the turn now runs on a market where households, governments and companies pay real money for every unit they buy, and prices follow real shortages. A market like that is far less forgiving than the old one, and most of the release fixes the places where the old rules still assumed free money.

• Plants keep working. A company short of cash runs the plants it can staff and supply, instead of freezing. Plants pay wages and site costs only for what they actually produce.
• Banks and bonds. Central bank injections no longer charge interest, banks closed by that interest are open again, and the bond market no longer creates money.
• Campaign Manager. Every race below the presidency on one page, with maps down to counties and every campaign action in reach.
• Ask Keir for everyone. Open to every signed-in player, full screen on phones, with roughly four times the old allowance.
• A rewritten wiki. Every system page rebuilt around the decisions you make, with diagrams, live charts and real screenshots.
• Faster pages. The code a page loads before it works is about two thirds smaller, with the biggest gain on phones.
• Singleplayer. Save slots, autosaves, and playing 3, 5 or 10 turns in a row.

The full notes are in the 1.19 changelog.

The economy work is not finished

1.19 put the new market in place. The work since then is making it behave the way a good player would expect, and it has not slowed down. In the two days after 1.19 we merged more than 30 economy fixes. The main threads:

• Prices that respond to shortages. When a good is short, automatic asks can rise to meet it, with a soft ceiling so prices do not run away.
• Plants that plan ahead. Plants plan their runs from last turn, buy inputs at market prices, keep a cash reserve when building, and restart idle plants when demand comes back.
• Wages tied to work. Wages follow the labour a plant actually uses and its share of the value it adds, and national minimum wage laws set the floor.
• Household and government spending. Households split one budget across what they need, and governments spend carried budget over several turns instead of all at once.
• Sovereign debt. Maturing government bonds are refinanced cleanly, and missed coupon payments are tracked properly.
• Telling you why. Your sector page now says why a plant ran low, why output went unsold, and what would let it run more.

Much of this ships switched off and is turned on one step at a time, with a check on the live world after each step. That lets us move fast without betting the whole economy on a single update. If your company does something that makes no sense, open a ticket in the Discord. Those reports are what tell us which piece to fix next.