Provinces and delegation
A colony outgrows one pair of hands. Provinces and standing orders let you rule more by deciding less.
Provinces
As settlements multiply, ground is organized into administrative provinces. A province gets a governing head — a real character with real skills, not a slider — and how well that person governs is a function of who they are and what their standing supports.
Governing an area is a senior seat: the game expects someone far enough up the rank ladder, and seating anyone junior to that is allowed — marked, and paid for in how well the province runs. From there the two axes split. Leadership — the learnable craft of coordination — decides how much ground one person keeps in hand, counted in member regions. Standing decides how well that ground is actually run.
The seat also stands in the chain of command: the mayors of every settlement inside a governed province answer to its governor, and the governor answers to the head of the colony. An area handed to someone is an area actually under them.
Push a province past what its governor holds and the arrangement inverts: instead of lifting its regions, the administrative layer drags on them — work slows, incidents come more often, and hauls inside the province lose more than they would have unorganized. The answer is a stronger leader in the seat, a smaller province, or a working office in the province's capital; the game states the load against the capacity before you commit to any of them.
Delegation is the point, and delegation has texture: a capable governor quietly handles what would otherwise land on your desk; a poor one generates the problems you were trying to avoid.
The office behind the title
A capital is more than a mark on the map: naming a settlement the colony capital or a province capital opens an office there for the function that city hosts. The office is an ordinary set of habitat work positions — a chief and, on grown habitats, aides — and it is staffed the way any position is staffed. Its seats ask for leadership rather than a trade: an office does not run a kind of work, it runs the function.
What an office buys is reach, never a ceiling. Behind the head of the colony it carries their presence further down the chain of command, so decisions still land with people who never meet them. Behind a governor it widens the ground the province administers before overload sets in. Grow the habitat and the office grows with it — more aides, a larger staff, and a more senior chair.
An empty seat of government is worse than none at all: a capital whose office nobody runs carries its holder less far than a settlement without the title, and a province that never named a capital leaves its governor without a seat to work from. Move the title elsewhere and the office moves with it — the old staff is released, the new city opens an empty office waiting to be filled.
Standing orders
Routine field work can be entrusted to a team commander as a standing mandate. Every mandate goes out as an expedition — a named mission the colony records from departure to close. The mandate never invents competence: a routine is only as good as the people assigned to it, and orders beyond a team's ability go undone or go wrong.
The craft is deciding what deserves your attention. Everything can be done by hand; nothing forces you to.