World Alignment

World Alignment is the game's sphere-of-influence layer: every nation holds a share of itself toward each active bloc, and international organizations spend money to move those shares. Find it on the International Organizations page, Influence tab.

It only exists where the era has poles to fight over. A world with no alignment channels shows no Influence tab at all.

The board

Every nation has a set of shares, one per active bloc, plus a remainder for whatever no bloc has persuaded. They always sum to 100.

• 1945–1990 (Cold War): two poles, West and East. The remainder is Uncommitted.
• 1991 onward: three poles, Washington, Moscow, Beijing. The remainder is Non-Aligned, after the Non-Aligned Movement founds in 1961.

Crossing from one era into the other carries a nation's old shares forward pole-for-pole (West → Washington, East → Moscow) rather than resetting the board.

Shares are not spent from a national treasury. Every play is paid for out of the sponsoring organization's own pooled fund — players fund the org (e.g. NATO, the Warsaw Pact), and the org's treasury is what buys influence.

Reading a nation's status

Nations are labelled by their lead — the gap between the top bloc's share and the runner-up's, not the top share alone. A nation split 45/40 is closer to contested than its 45 alone suggests; a nation at 90/5 is not moving regardless of what the 90 looks like.

The join gate used for this ladder scales with how many poles exist — a four-way split can never produce the fifty-point lead a two-pole world can, so demanding a fixed lead would make "Eligible" unreachable once Beijing enters the board. Two poles need a 50-point lead, three need 40, four need 35.

Joining and leaving an organization

Membership in an alignment-governed org (NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the Non-Aligned Movement) is a separate, simpler test from the status ladder above: it looks at a nation's share in that org's own pole, not its lead over the field.

• 60 — a nation whose share in an org's pole reaches 60 may join it. At 60 out of 100 the nation already leads there, so no separate "does it lean our way" check is needed.
• 40 — a member whose share falls to 40 and stays there is on its way out.
• 41–59 is a deliberate deadband. Neither joining nor leaving happens in that range, so a nation sitting near the middle doesn't flap in and out of a bloc on a couple of points of weekly drift.
• A threshold has to hold for 24 turns (half a game year) before accession or defection actually fires — modeled on how slowly real Cold War realignments played out (Yugoslavia 1948, Albania 1961, Egypt 1972), not on the turn the number first crossed the line.

Not every org obeys this. The Commonwealth and the EU decide membership their own way — former-empire association, accession criteria — and still carry a channel that can move a nation's shares, but a Western nation doesn't get an automatic invite for being Western, and doesn't get expelled for ceasing to be.

The Non-Aligned Movement is not an exception to any of this: its "share" is simply the uncommitted remainder itself, so the same 60/40 gates apply to it exactly as they do to a bloc.

Drift: the tide

Every turn, alignment moves a little on its own — the background current a nation sits in regardless of anyone spending money.

• 5 points a turn is the normal ceiling on how far one nation's alignment can move, from every source combined. Swinging a nation from contested to committed takes the better part of ten turns of sustained effort even at full spend.
• Locked nations (lead ≥ 85) don't move at all under drift. Only a deliberate play can shift one, and it has to unseat the lock first.
• Non-aligned nations (lead ≤ 20) absorb movement at half rate. This is why a genuinely uncommitted country is hard to flip — its own inertia is working against you, not just the rival bloc.
• Opposing pulls cancel before the cap applies. Two blocs pushing equally hard on the same nation leave it exactly where it was — a real stalemate, not two separate pushes each burning through the 5-point ceiling. Pulls from allies on the same pole simply add.
• Membership itself pulls a little. Roughly one share point every 24 turns per organization a nation belongs to, scaled by that org's channel weight — call it a slow current keeping members in the fold. It tops out at 67, well clear of the 85 lock, so belonging alone can never seal a bloc shut. Only spending can push a member past that.

Influence plays: the rudder

A play is a deliberate, paid push against the tide, made from an organization's Influence tab.

• Cost is priced against the target's own economy: 1% of its annual GDP buys one share point. A rich nation and a poor one are not the same price — $100M goes a great deal further against a small economy than a large one.
• The price is linear, on purpose: past 5% of a target's GDP in one play, the spend is visibly wasted, because the 5-point turn cap means the extra money can't land anyway (unless a rival is actively contesting the same nation, which raises the effective ceiling by making your netted pull smaller).
• 10 points is the most a single play can be worth, before the turn cap trims what actually lands.
• A nation in the non-aligned band pays double — its own resistance halves what a play buys there too, same as it halves drift.
• A committed play doesn't move the meter immediately. It queues, and resolves in the same turn-phase pull vector as drift — obeying the same cap, the same non-aligned resistance, and the same locked-nation immunity as everything else.

Flashpoints

A flashpoint (labelled "Under flashpoint" in the nation filters) is a temporary crisis window on one nation. It doesn't move alignment by itself — it only raises that nation's turn movement cap from 5 to 7.5 points for the duration, so a flashpoint nobody spends on changes nothing at all.

• Windows last 12 turns (a quarter game-year), and at most 3 can be open across the world at once.
• A nation becomes a flashpoint one of three ways: an authored historical crisis tied to the live game year (Berlin, Cuba, and similar — if the intended target is already locked or otherwise unmovable, the crisis retargets to the most contested eligible nation instead); a member sliding toward defection for at least 12 turns; or a genuine tug-of-war, where a second-place bloc holds at least 25% share and the gap to the leader is inside the non-aligned threshold.
• A locked nation (lead ≥ 85) can never become a flashpoint target — there's nothing left to contest.

Rival activity

Each nation's dossier shows recent plays the opposing bloc has landed there — "no rival has moved here recently" when the field is quiet, or a note on how many points landed and how many turns ago otherwise. It's read-only intelligence: it doesn't change price or movement, but it tells you whether you're the only one spending on a given nation or walking into a bidding war.

Reading the dossier math

For any nation the panel shows exactly what a play there would cost: a cost-per-point figure (that 1%-of-GDP price), and a turn-cap cost — how much a play would need to spend to use the full 5 (or 7.5, under a flashpoint) points available this turn. Past that amount, more money buys nothing further this turn unless a rival is actively pushing back and eating into the netted pull.