Working

Working is the simplest, most reliable income in Imperix. You take a job at a company, spend Stamina, and earn a wage.

The cost of a shift

What	Value
Stamina per shift	10
Cooldown between shifts	3 hours
Realistic shifts per day	about 8
Experience per shift	+1

Work is gated by a personal 3-hour cooldown. After you work, you wait for the timer before working again. It’s the same for everyone: one timer per player that covers every employer, not something a company can shorten. Because Stamina regenerates fast (+1 every 6 minutes) and a shift only costs 10, the cooldown is what actually paces your income, not the Stamina bar.

A shift that fails (for example because your employer can’t pay you or is out of materials) costs you nothing: no Stamina is spent and the cooldown doesn’t start.

Your wage, and what comes out of it

The employer sets the wage. A hiring offer must pay at least the minimum wage of the country that holds the company’s region, which that country sets by law between 10 and 40, and you are paid in that country’s local currency. What lands in your wallet is the wage minus a few deductions:

Deduction	Rate	Goes to
Income tax	1% to 40% (set by law)	Your home country
Work tax	1% to 40% (set by law)	The country that holds the region you work in
Unit cut	5%	Your military unit treasury (only if you’re in one)

Income tax and work tax are set by each country’s lawmakers, so the exact percentages change with politics and with where you work. If a court has fined you, an extra 25% of each wage goes to your home country for 7 days. A unit that has advanced far enough on the Economy doctrine makes 10, and later 20, of your shifts each week free of income tax and work tax; see Units and doctrine.

Employers and workers

• Companies compete for labour by offering wages; you choose where to work. You can hold one job at a time, and an embargo between your country and the company’s host country bars you from being hired there.
• Your shift is a production input, so employers and workers need each other. Each shift turns the employer’s materials into goods, and every different worker who has already worked there that day adds +10% to the output of later shifts. A company can take at most 10 different paid workers a day.
• Your employer can raise your wage at any time but can’t cut it before your first shift. If the host country raises its minimum wage, any wage below it is raised automatically.
• If an employer can’t cover a wage or runs out of materials, the game withdraws the hiring offers they can’t honour, so nobody new is hired into a job that can’t pay. Workers already hired keep their jobs.
• Running your own company is a separate path from working for one. Both earn you income; both can level you up.

Working your own company

You work the companies you own yourself, unpaid: the goods are your reward. Each company you own can be worked once per day (the day resets at 00:00 UTC), and these shifts neither need nor restart your 3-hour job cooldown. Each one still costs 10 Stamina and gives +1 experience, plus an Operating Licence. A raw material company (Grain Farm, Iron Mine, Silicon Quarry) pays 30 of the local currency of the country that holds the region: 10 goes to that country and the other 20 leaves the game. Any other company pays 0.5 gold to that country. With several companies, Stamina rather than the cooldown is what limits you.

Where the money goes

Wages fund the rest of your play: equipment for war, food to keep fighting, or capital to build a company of your own. See Companies and production for how that labour becomes goods, and Regions and resources for how location changes what a company is worth.

Tip

Set a reminder for your 3-hour work cooldown. Over a day those eight shifts are a dependable income floor that combat and market swings sit on top of.