Eclesiar: an MMO where you run for president and vote on tax rates

You start as an ordinary citizen. You can end up president.

Not president of a scripted faction. President of a country, elected by other players, with the power to set tax rates, pass legislation and manage public finances.

Eclesiar is out today, it is free, and the proposition is worth a close look, because this genre has all but disappeared.

What it is

A persistent strategy MMO where politics, economics and warfare sit in the same world, and where that world is shaped by real players.

The three pillars are clearly stated.

The economy. You start companies, hire employees, manufacture goods, trade with other players. The studio talks about a fully player-driven economy, where every resource produced and every trade influences a supply and demand in constant motion.

Politics. You found a party, you run, you climb to the presidency. Then you set tax policy, pass laws, manage the national budget alongside other players. The studio writes that politics is not scripted, it is shaped by the players.

War. You train every day, sharpen your combat skills, equip yourself, and take part in territorial wars against rival nations. Victory depends on strategy and above all on coordination.

There are no predefined classes and no single path to success. And the world keeps evolving whether you are online or not, with seasons that regularly recreate openings for new leaders.

The family it belongs to

If all of that rings a bell, it should. This is the grammar of browser nation simulations, of which eRepublik remains the best-known example: daily training, goods production, real elections between players, and wars won through mobilisation rather than skill.

That genre was enormous around 2010 and then ran out of breath, largely because it rested on a daily routine and on a population big enough for elections to mean anything.

Seeing it come back on Steam, in 2026, with a polished presentation, is more interesting news than it looks.

The three questions that decide everything

Let me be direct, because this genre lives or dies on very specific things.

Population. It is the only one that truly counts. An election between forty people is not an election, it is a residents' meeting. A player economy without players is an empty shop. Everything this game promises assumes several thousand active people over time, spread across several nations. The game promises a world shared by thousands of players, and that is the promise to verify in three weeks, not today.

The business model. The game is free. In a genre where military power is built through daily training and equipment, the question is whether you can buy time or strength. That is the point this genre's predecessors took the most criticism for, and it is the first thing I will be looking at.

Abuse handling. A world where players vote on laws and control a country's budget is a world where people will organise takeovers, puppet parties and multiple accounts. That is not a flaw, it is the salt of the genre. But it needs tools, otherwise three organised people confiscate an entire nation in a week and the other four hundred leave.

Why I want this to work

Because it is one of the few genres where the content is not written by a studio.

In most MMOs, the story is in the game. Here, the story is the person who built a party from nothing, campaigned on a tax cut, won, emptied the treasury and was impeached three days later. No writer scripts that. All it needs is a system solid enough for it to be possible.

It is free, it is out today, and the entry ticket is therefore your time rather than your money. If the genre speaks to you, now is the moment to go in: in these games, arriving at a world's founding is worth infinitely more than arriving three months later, when the nations are already held.

We will come back with a score once we know who governs what.

Lived through a season of one of these nation games? Tell us about the coup on the InsertCoins Discord, we love those stories.