Diplomacy

How it works

Prestige is earned, not collected

Prestige doesn't trickle in on its own — you earn it for landmark achievements: sweeping reforms, leading an alliance, military expansion, nuclear and space milestones. It never goes negative, and it's what actually ranks the Great Powers against each other. From 1951 on, the US and USSR are compared on economic growth every New Year — outgrowing your rival is worth real prestige, and falling behind costs you just as much.

How it works

You only get so many moves a month

Every country gets one diplomatic action a month, plus an extra one for every category — prestige, economy, military — where it ranks in the global top two. Every outward move spends one of these slots; once they're gone, you wait for next month. That means climbing into the top tier of any category doesn't just look good — it directly buys you more room to act.

How it works

Standing offers, not one-off buttons

Diplomacy isn't a single aid button — it's a real menu of ongoing initiatives, like food-aid programs, scholarship exchanges, or military advisor missions, each taking real time to land and costing political capital both to start and to keep running every month. A few resolve once and are done; others keep renewing automatically until you cancel them or can no longer afford them — and the AI reconsiders whether it can still afford its own every month too.

Elite Scholarships

A slow-building goodwill program — completes a year at a time, building trust that fades if you ever stop funding it.

Guarantee independence

Doesn't buy goodwill by itself — it only pays off if the country you're protecting actually comes under threat from a much stronger neighbor.

Promote Ideology

A slow, ongoing push that builds support for parties who share your ideology abroad — takes years to build, and fades again if you stop.

Insult

A real, lasting hit to relations that fades over about a decade — and repeated insults are each remembered and decay on their own.

Design choices

You always know why a country feels the way it does

Every country's opinion of every other is tracked separately and starts at zero — there's no hidden baseline working against you. What you see is a running total of specific, named reasons, each fading on its own schedule, so you can always tell exactly why a relationship is where it is. Even the starting state in 1949 follows the same rule — each Eastern European country falling to communism adds its own separate, decaying black mark to how the US sees the USSR, without ever touching how the USSR sees the US in return.

How it works

Alliances and being dragged into a war

Every country leans toward one side, the other, or neither, on a spectrum from firmly aligned to genuinely neutral — and that alignment is set by history and circumstance, not by what kind of government a country happens to have. A communist France can still lean toward the West; a democratic Poland can find itself with nowhere else to turn. If a firmly aligned country gets attacked, its patron is offered the choice to step in and defend it — the same choice a player gets that an AI ally would also be offered, never something that happens to you silently.

How it works

Satellites, colonies, and old claims

Countries can be fully independent, a self-governing satellite of a stronger power, or a directly administered colony flying its overlord's colors. A colony regains its own identity the moment it becomes independent. Every province also quietly remembers every country that's ever claimed it — the historical basis for a border dispute that could resurface generations later, long after the original owner is gone.

Threat & AI

How threatened a country feels

Beyond simple opinion, every country sizes up how dangerous every other country looks to it — driven by hostile relations, an aggressive posture, the real military balance including allies on both sides, and enemy troops massed on the border. Countries that share a bloc barely register each other as a threat at all, even with large armies facing off — while a much smaller neighbor with troops on your doorstep can read as more dangerous than a distant superpower.

How the militaries compare

Raw strength and equipment, measured against your own.

How close they are

A land neighbor's army matters far more than a distant great power's.

How opposed your systems are

Rival ideologies read each other as more dangerous by default.

Active disputes

Border claims and open hostility push the number higher.

Threat & AI

Watching for sudden shifts

If how threatening a country looks to you jumps by a wide enough margin in a single month, you're alerted by name — so a sudden buildup or a collapsing relationship doesn't slip past you unnoticed.

Threat & AI

Where countries actually stand

Beyond simple alignment, a country holds an actual strategic posture toward specific others — one side might see an alliance where the other sees deterrence, since these aren't always mutual. AI countries reassess their postures every month based on ideology, the military balance, and existing relationships, but won't flip away from a working posture on a whim — a challenger has to clearly outscore what's already in place.

Cooperative

Alliance, non-aggression, or a genuine thaw in relations.

Defensive

Feeling threatened, submitting to pressure, or actively deterring a stronger neighbor.

Aggressive

Anything from open conquest to quiet regime change to plain harassment.

Great-power management

Containing a rival, protecting a client, or dominating a weaker neighbor outright.

Threat & AI

Where the AI puts its troops

AI countries spread their idle forces across their most threatened borders in rough proportion to how dangerous — and how strong — each neighbor looks. An empire with satellite states defends the whole thing as one territory, not just its home provinces, and always keeps its capital and biggest cities under a standing guard. If an ally scales back its commitment to a shared war, a defending patron pulls its own overseas forces back to match, rather than leaving them stranded and outnumbered.