Revisiting your nation’s past

The one-minute explanation

From the moment a save begins, the game writes one snapshot per game month: the nation’s totals, every settlement’s figures, the traffic each link carried, the month’s accounts, and the state of the network.

Map Tools → History turns those into a viewer. Pick a month, load it, and the map becomes that month—old borders, old network, old numbers.

Using the viewer

The panel holds a month slider and a Load historical snapshot button. Moving the slider only changes the label—nothing loads until you press the button. That is deliberate: reading an old month gets slower as a save grows older, so the game does not attempt to scrub through history live. While a snapshot loads, the map is masked and the controls lock; if you change your mind mid-load, the stale result is discarded rather than displayed.

A save with no recorded months yet simply says so.

What is different in the past

The historical map is not a replay of live simulation—it is stored data, and a few things behave accordingly:

• Editing is off. Build tools, the game menu, saving and the time controls are all disabled, and a marker in the corner reminds you which month you are viewing.
• Congestion comes from the record. Saturation is drawn from the traffic actually measured that month. A link with no recorded metric simply shows nothing rather than borrowing today’s traffic.
• Metro footprints are unavailable. They are not stored historically, and the game would rather show nothing than imply a shape it cannot verify.
• Settlements open a historical card instead of the live panel: population, GDP, development and service score, each with its change from the previous recorded month, plus that month’s resources, development fields and policies. The City Map cannot be entered from the past.
• Rates and prices are blanked where a stored total cannot honestly reconstruct them—tolls, frequencies and load factors among them.

Only the Help panel and Screenshot & Export stay available; opening anything else returns you to the present first.

Exporting the past

Because export works inside history, you can render a map of any recorded month, and the file name carries that year and month. A series of exports from the same view is the simplest way to show how a nation grew—see Names, layers and exporting maps.

How it is stored

History lives beside your save rather than inside it, organized by game year. Each month is verified when written and again when read: totals must agree with the accounts, and the network must agree with what the ledger says exists. A snapshot that fails those checks is refused rather than shown, and the viewer tells you the month could not be verified.

Nothing is pruned—every recorded month stays available for the life of the save. The cost is that loading a month reads everything up to that year, which is why older saves take longer to load a snapshot and why the explicit Load button exists.

Branching a save

Saving an existing game into a new slot copies its history into an independent line. From then on the two saves record separate futures, and the new one publishes to this website as its own nation rather than updating the original—see Publishing your nation to ntgg.me.

Note that this branches from now, not from a month you were viewing. The history view is for reading the past, not resuming from it.

What it is good for

1. Diagnosing a decline. Load the month before a downturn and compare settlement cards: the per-month deltas show what turned first.
2. Checking a project’s effect. View the month before a corridor opened, then a year after, on the same overlay.
3. Recovering context. Returning to a save after months away, stepping through a few snapshots is faster than reading the trend charts.
4. Telling the story. Exports from successive months make the record a narrative rather than a table.

Common misconceptions

“Loading history will overwrite my game”

It cannot. The past is loaded into a separate view, saving is blocked while you are there, and closing the panel restores the present untouched.

“Historical congestion is recalculated”

It is the traffic that was actually measured that month. Where nothing was recorded, nothing is drawn.

“I can continue playing from a past month”

Not in this version. History is a viewer; branching a save starts from the present.

Related reading

• Names, layers and exporting maps — exporting historical maps.
• Publishing your nation to ntgg.me — the published archive by game month.
• Reading the economy dashboard — the trend charts, for questions history is too heavy to answer.