Bloc Alignment and Spheres of Influence

Overview#

Alignment tracks how drawn each nation is toward each Cold War pole (0-100 shares that sum with an "uncommitted" remainder). Spheres of influence are the downstream effect: which patron a nation actually belongs to right now. Alignment is the cause, sphere membership is the effect, sphereProjection.ts is the seam between the two systems.

Location: src/lib/alignment/

Key files:

• blocStress.ts - Bloc-level strain gauge and its damping effect on bloc plays
• sphereProjection.ts - Projects pole shares onto sphere membership
• crossing.ts - Re-projects a nation's shares when the game crosses into a new alignment era
• drift.ts - Bounded passive per-turn movement
• membershipEligibility.ts - Join/leave thresholds for alignment-governed organizations
• crisisCatalog.ts, crisisTurn.ts - Flashpoint crises (see crisis-system.md)
• normalize.ts, project.ts - Share normalization and lead/status derivation

Bloc Stress#

A bloc's own cohesion is modeled, not just its members' individual shares, an alliance that grabs half the map should not defend all of it as easily as a compact one. Stress is a 0-1 gauge (computeBlocStress()) built from three weighted components of the bloc's own membership:

Raw member count is deliberately not an input, a large bloc of settled, uncontested members should not be penalized for size alone.

blocPlayEffectiveness(stress) returns a multiplier on the bloc's own plays: 1 - STRESS_MAX_DAMPING * stress, where STRESS_MAX_DAMPING = 0.4. A fully-stressed bloc is impaired (60% effectiveness), never inert. blocStressLabel() buckets the gauge into Settled (<0.25), Strained (<0.6), or Overextended (>=0.6) for player-facing display.

Sphere Projection#

projectSphereAlignment() converts a nation's pole shares (0-100) into the sphere system's per-sponsor alignment scale (0-1), one entry per sponsored pole in the current era (including zero-share sponsors, so a lapsed patron shows as lapsed rather than disappearing).

primarySphereFor() determines which patron a nation is actually committed to: it takes the nation's top pole and requires lead >= joinGateForPoleCount(poleCount) (the same gate the alignment Ledger's bands use) before returning a sponsor. Below that gate, nobody has committed the nation and there is no primary sphere.

applyAlignmentToMembership() writes projected alignment through onto an existing SphereMembership document:

• Only relationships that already exist are updated, alignment does not create a new patron relationship (that is the court intent's job).
• integration (economic entanglement) is never touched by this, it is sphere-owned and lags political sympathy on purpose.
• The primary sponsor is only cleared when the membership shape allows it (no primary with 0-1 relationships); with 2+ relationships and no committed sponsor, it falls back to whichever surviving relationship has the highest alignment, so the record stays valid.

Era Crossing#

applyEraCrossing() re-projects a nation's pole shares onto the poles of a new alignment era, run exactly once per crossing (guarded by a stored era key so a long game converts cleanly instead of drifting between vocabularies or re-converting every turn).

• Every surviving pole is seeded at zero first, so a pole nobody inherits into (e.g. Beijing splitting off in a later era) reads as a real zero.
• A pole that survives the era transition keeps its own share.
• A pole that is superseded hands its share to its declared successor (era.inherit[from]).
• A pole with neither is dropped; normalizeShares returns that share to the uncommitted pool.

Drift (Passive Movement)#

Drift is bounded background movement, small enough that a deliberate influence play always outweighs it (computeDrift(), src/lib/alignment/drift.ts10d ago).

• A nation at or above ALIGNMENT_GATES.locked (85 lead) is immovable by drift; only a deliberate play can shift it.
• A nation in the non-aligned band (lead <= ALIGNMENT_GATES.nonAligned, 20) absorbs drift at half rate (NON_ALIGNED_RESISTANCE = 0.5), genuinely uncommitted countries are hard to move.
• Opposing pulls on different poles cancel before the per-turn cap applies, so only the net margin survives; allied pulls on the same pole simply add.
• The scaled result is capped by PER_NATION_TURN_CAP = 5 share points per turn, or CRISIS_TURN_CAP = 7.5 for a nation with an open crisis (see crisis chains).

Membership Pull#

Belonging to an alignment-channel organization exerts its own small passive pull toward that org's pole (membershipPullForTurn()):

• MEMBERSHIP_PULL_PER_TURN = 0.04 share points per turn per unit of channel weight (roughly 1 point every 24 turns, half a game year, before weighting).
• Capped at MEMBERSHIP_PULL_CEILING = 67 share points, membership alone can carry a nation to 67, never higher. Getting a nation past 67 (and up toward the 85 locked gate) requires deliberate plays, not just standing membership.
• The ceiling clamps only the passive component; a nation already carried past 67 by deliberate plays keeps every point, drift simply stops adding on top.

Membership Eligibility#

standingFor() (membershipEligibility.ts) answers whether a nation can join, or should leave, an alignment-governed organization, measured on the nation's share in that org's pole, not its overall lead.

• JOIN_SHARE = 60, share at or above which a nation may join.
• LEAVE_SHARE = 40, share at or below which a member is on its way out (wantsOut).
• Between 41 and 59 is a deliberate deadband: neither joining nor leaving, so a member doesn't flap in and out of its bloc on a few points of drift.
• SUSTAIN_TURNS = 24 (half a game year), how long a nation must hold a threshold before the turn phase acts on it. This is also what feeds wantsOutSinceTurn into bloc stress and the defection-crisis trigger.
• The Non-Aligned Movement has no pole of its own; its "share" is the nonAligned remainder, evaluated against the same 60/40 thresholds.
• governsMembership is fail-closed: an org whose channel hasn't opted into alignmentAccession carries alignment influence but is not actually joined or left on alignment (e.g. the Commonwealth's former-empire association, the EU's own accession criteria).

Related Systems#

• crisis-system.md - Flashpoint crises that raise a nation's movement ceiling while open
• International organizations and their alignment channels: src/lib/constants/alignmentEras.ts10d ago