So far you have voted only in your imagination - "the country votes," we kept saying - without ever once seeing where a proposal actually comes from. This lesson fixes exactly that: it is all about being the person who proposes a law. Proposing is how you, as a citizen, get to suggest a change and put it to the whole country for a decision. It is a real responsibility and a real privilege, both at once, and there are a few requirements to meet first, so let us go through them gently and without any pressure. There is nothing here you cannot handle.
What a law actually is
Remember the golden rule all the way from lesson one: a law is a single proposed change to ONE number. Not two numbers, not a tidy bundle of reforms stacked together - just one number. That number is either a tax rate or a bonus amount, and nothing else at all. When you propose, you do two simple things. You state what you want the number changed TO - for example, "set the salary tax to 8%" - and you write an explanation of why you honestly think that is a good idea for the country. That is the whole shape of a proposal, start to finish: a target value, plus your reasoning behind it. Nothing more complicated than that.
Your explanation has real room to breathe, which is generous of the game - it can run all the way up to 2500 characters. That is plenty of space to properly make your case, lay out your reasoning step by step, and gently persuade your fellow citizens to come around to your way of thinking. You do not have to fill all of it, of course, and a short clear note is fine, but the option is there waiting if your idea genuinely needs a proper argument behind it. A thoughtful, honest explanation is really how you win votes in practice, so it is well worth taking the time to use that space.
What you need before you can propose
Not everyone can propose a law at any random moment - there are three gates to clear first. None of them is hard to understand or remember, but the important thing is that all of them must be true at the very same time before the game will let you proceed. Let us look at each gate in turn.
- You must be a citizen of the country. You can only propose changes to the rules of the country you actually belong to - not somewhere you are merely visiting as a traveller.
- You must have premium membership. Only premium citizens can propose laws. A non-premium citizen can still do absolutely everything else in the game, but proposing is specifically a premium ability.
- You must wait your turn: one proposal per player per 24 hours. After you propose something, you have to wait a full day before you are allowed to propose again.
There is also a sensible no-duplicates rule that keeps things orderly. You cannot propose a change that exactly matches a proposal already open for voting. If someone has already put "set salary tax to 8%" on the table and it is still being voted on right now, you simply cannot put the very same thing up a second time alongside it - the game will not let two identical proposals run at once. This keeps the Laws page tidy and readable, and it stops the exact same idea being voted on twice in parallel, which would only confuse everyone and split the vote pointlessly.
One proposal a day, so make it count
Because you only get one proposal every 24 hours, it genuinely pays to choose carefully and to write a clear explanation - and remember you have up to 2500 characters to work with. You are not firing off ideas in bulk here; you are putting forward one considered, well-argued change and asking the country to back it.
The only two things a law can target
Let us be crystal clear once more about what your one number can actually be, because it neatly bounds absolutely everything you are allowed to propose. A law can target a tax rate - and from lesson seven you already know that means a whole number from 0% to 25%, set per tax. Or a law can instead target a bonus amount - which can be set anywhere from zero up to that particular bonus's ceiling, and you will meet all the bonuses themselves in the final lesson. Those are the only two kinds of target there are, ever. Everything else about a country is fixed by the game and is simply not up for a vote. You cannot propose to rename it, merge it with another, or do anything at all outside those two dials.
So picture the whole act of proposing like this: you walk up to one of just two control dials - either the tax dials or the bonus dials - you turn it carefully to the setting you genuinely believe in, and you write a little note beside it that says "here is where I think this number should be, and here is exactly why." Then you hand the whole thing over to the country to decide its fate. You have set the proposal in motion, yes, but you have not actually changed anything yet, not one bit; that only happens later, and only if the vote passes. Until then it is just a suggestion on the table.
If you are not yet premium, or your town is still small, please do not feel left out by any of this. Proposing is just one part of politics, and plenty of players spend their early days happily voting on the proposals that others put forward rather than writing their own. There is no rush to become a proposer, and nothing is lost by waiting until you feel ready. The point of this lesson is simply that, when the day comes that you do want to suggest a change, you will already know exactly what it takes and what a clean, well-argued proposal looks like.
To gather it all up: a law is one change to one number, either a tax rate or a bonus amount; to propose it you must be a citizen, you must hold premium, and you must not have proposed anything in the last 24 hours; you cannot duplicate a proposal that is already live; and you get a generous up to 2500 characters to argue your case as well as you can. With your considered proposal now sitting on the table for everyone to see, the next lesson covers the other half of democracy here in CoinRepublik - how the whole country actually votes on it.