Laws
Cause-and-Effect rules designed by citizens and enforced automatically in order to achieve societal goals.
Laws are the means by which the government makes changes in the world, to achieve the goals of the populace.
Laws are created by placing a SmallCourtItem or a LargeCourtItem, and depending on the available Civic Articles, may require an election to pass. Each law is created with a list of causes and effects, and when the cause happens, the effect will be activated. This allows a lot of flexibility in how the laws work, and they can cover many areas, from taxation to regulation to paid out funds incentivizing activities.
Many ‘Cause’ choices will provide context about the citizen who triggered it, where it was triggered, etc. These ‘context’ properties can be seen in the Cause tooltip, and are available for specifying data in the ‘Effects’. For example, an effect may tax the specific player who chopped down a tree.
Injunctions
Injunctions, which can be created on a LargeCourtItem, have the ability to block laws on a lesser court. Each injunction states a list of triggers and legal actions that will be blocked in a defined set of child settlements (or all, if left blank). This can be used by countries to block laws that a town have passed, for example.
The ability to create injunctions is a powerful feature that should be considered when forming a country or federation, as it can have a big influence on the government of children settlements. Powers can be defined in the constitution of the settlement to lay out who can make injunction additions and changes, if any. The role of injunctions should be carefully discussed among town leaders when joining together to form a country.