Cohesion is the most important stat for your country. It ranges from 0 (Fragmented) to 10 (Monolithic), and it’s a quick way to see what you need to focus on. The magic number is 5 and that middle range is what you want to aim for in order to get the most benefits out of your country.


In the early game, you'll often find countries with low cohesion. These fragmented nations usually also suffer from high levels of unrest and inequality. Basically, the country’s in a bad state, and fixing cohesion should be your top priority before addressing anything else. You can see an example of such a country below.



So, how do you boost cohesion? Here’s a straightforward approach:

1. **Invest about 30% of your Investment Points (IP) into Unity.**
This will automatically help improve cohesion.

2. **Allocate the remaining 70% of IP into Welfare.**
With inequality at 5.1, that has a major impact on keeping cohesion low. We need to bring that down to at least 2 before we can focus on anything else. I would put the the majority if IP into Welfare in order to bring Inequality down quickly, even as high as 80% in some cases.

3. **Use Councilors to lower unrest.**
High unrest, in this case 7 (Guerrilla War) drains your IP and makes it harder to change your ♥♥♥♥♥♥. While you can invest in the Military to reduce unrest, it’s very inefficient. Instead, assign Councilors with strong Command stats to Lower Unrest repeatedly until your Unrest goes below 2.

Note: One "hack" for increasing Cohesion quickly is to rival other countries that are on a similar GDP level to yours or starting wars with other countries. This will have an immediate positive effect on the Cohesion resting value.

Alright so you've done the above until your country looks like this.


Ignore the fact that Colombia turned into Hungary!

With Cohesion close to 5, Inequality and Unrest under control, NOW is the time to start developing your country. Here you have 3 options :

1. Invest in the Economy
- Put 70% in Economy to grow the economy
- Put 20% in Welfare to keep Inequality in check as you grow GDP
- Put 10% in Unity mostly to keep Public Opinion of your Faction high so other factions can't snipe your Control Points easily

2. Invest in Knowledge
- Put 80% in Knowledge
- Put 10% in Economy to keep the GDP growing a tiny bit
- Put 10% in Unity for the reason described above

3. Invest in Other Priorities (Mission Control, Boost, Military etc.)
- Put 100% into whatever priority you're looking to develop until things get out of whack and cohesion goes down or up, bring it to the middle and repeat.

So below you have an example of cohesion being too high.


Typically you'll see this in Totalitarian countries like China, where the Government Score is very low. In this example Government Score is 3.1 (Authoritarian). Normally this wouldn't be a problem. You can still grow the Economy or invest in Military or other priorities without many issues. Totalitarian Governments can also be advantageous in keeping Unrest low.

Low Government Score and High Cohesion become a problem when you're trying to develop Research Points in that particular nation. In countries with big populations like India or China you DO want to develop Research Points so let's talk about how to bring Cohesion down.

Basically you want to do what I explained in the first part, but in reverse.
- Put about 40% into Economy to increase GDP and inequality a bit
- Put the rest 60% into Knowledge to make Cohesion trend towards 5

You want to keep an eye on this because you don't want to take inequality too high unless Cohesion is like 10 and it's not budging. Ideally you want to invest more into Education as you go along because that will also increase your Government Score. Remember that the ideal conditions for maximum Research Output are Cohesion (5) and Full Democracy (10). The latter is very very slow to change so it will be a long process.