Dictators: No Peace - The Full Countryballs Strategy Guide

By Nham Vu · Updated July 2026

Dictators: No Peace is a war simulation and strategy game from RPN Indie Developer, built in Unity and released back in April 2019. It puts you in charge of a country rendered as a stubby little countryball, and your job is simple to explain but genuinely tough to master: trade, build up your economy, and eventually roll tanks over your neighbors.

I have put a fair number of hours into the countryballs version on Steam and the mobile builds on Android, and what keeps pulling me back is how much depth hides under that goofy art style. This guide walks through what the game actually is, how the trading economy works, and the questions I see new players ask most often.

Is Dictators: No Peace a good game?

Dictators: No Peace earns its keep as a low-stakes strategy game that rewards patience over twitch reflexes. It is not going to replace a deep 4X title, but for a mobile-first or casual PC session it delivers a surprisingly sticky trading loop.

The countryball art style throws people off at first. It looks like a joke game, and there is plenty of humor in how the nations are drawn, but the underlying systems (trade routes, resource scarcity, military buildup) are treated with a straight face. In practice, the fun comes from figuring out the economy before you ever fire a shot.

How many countries are in Dictators: No Peace?

Dictators: No Peace maps nearly every recognizable country in the world onto its playable board, each represented as its own countryball with a starting set of goods and a starting relationship with its neighbors.

That scale is part of the appeal. You are not picking from a shortlist of five factions, you are picking a corner of the actual globe and figuring out how its economy fits into the wider trade network. Some regions start richer in raw materials, others start stronger militarily, and that asymmetry is what makes replaying with a different starting nation feel fresh.

How to play the dictator game?

Playing Dictators: No Peace starts with picking your country, checking what goods it produces, and figuring out where those goods sell for the best price before you touch the military side at all.

The best players I have seen treat the early game almost like a spreadsheet exercise. You are watching prices, moving goods between ports, and only once your treasury is healthy do you start funding an army. Rushing combat before your economy can sustain it is the single most common way new players stall out.

• Pick a starting country and review its default tradable goods
• Scout nearby countries to see what they buy at a premium
• Route your surplus goods to those buyers before reinvesting profit
• Use early profit to expand infrastructure, not just troops
• Only escalate to war once your economy can absorb losses

Which country buys timber in Dictators: No Peace?

Timber demand shifts depending on which nations are industrializing or rebuilding in your particular game session, so there is no single fixed answer that holds across every playthrough.

What experienced players do instead is check the in-game trade screen for each neighboring country rather than memorizing a list, since prices and buyers reset with updates and can vary from one save to the next. As a general habit, countries with fewer forested tiles on the map tend to be reliable timber buyers because they cannot produce it themselves.

What country buys paper in Dictators: No Peace?

Paper, like most manufactured goods in Dictators: No Peace, sells best to countries that lack the raw industrial base to produce it themselves, and that buyer pool can change as the map's economy evolves during play.

The trick that trips up new players is assuming trade partners are static. They are not. Checking the current buy prices in the trade menu before you commit a shipment saves you from hauling paper across the map only to find the price has dropped.

How to get Dictators: No Peace on PC?

Dictators: No Peace runs on PC primarily through the Countryballs edition available on Steam, alongside builds for Linux, in addition to its original mobile releases on Android and iOS.

If you started on mobile and want to move to a bigger screen, the Steam version keeps the same core trading and combat loop but benefits from mouse-driven map navigation, which makes managing multiple trade routes noticeably less fiddly than tapping through menus on a phone.

• Steam (Windows, Linux) as Dictators: No Peace Countryballs
• Android via Google Play
• iOS via the App Store

What are the best tips for Dictators: No Peace trade routes?

The most reliable trade tip in Dictators: No Peace is that every country has at least a couple of goods it will consistently buy at a solid markup, so scouting those constants early sets the tone for your whole game.

I always tell newer players to keep a mental note (or a physical one) of which neighbors pay well for what you produce, then build shipping routes around those anchors instead of chasing whichever price happens to spike that day. Consistency beats chasing the highest single sale.