National Agendas

A national agenda is one goal a country is trying to reach: keeping Western Europe out of the Soviet camp, seeing Poland communist, paying down the war debt, or reaching the world's top three in education. Agendas are what your nation expects of its government. Nobody picks them, the player included. The situation decides which goals matter most, and your record against them is judged at the end of the campaign.

The outliner shows the agendas your country is pursuing, with progress bars, the next one in line, and the most recently decided.

Pursued and proposed

Each month, every country pursues its most important proposed agendas, in a limited number of slots: three for most countries, one more for a great power or superpower. Only pursued agendas are judged and scored. The rest are proposed and wait for a slot.

Importance isn't fixed. It's recalculated every month from the situation, so goals rise and fall as the world changes. Moscow cares more about Poland while Washington contests it. A socialist government cares three times as much about education rankings as other governments do.

When a proposed agenda becomes clearly more important than the least important one being pursued (by a margin of a quarter), the weaker one starts to expire. It keeps its slot for a final twelve months, a last chance to finish it. If it's still undecided by then, it's set aside, and the newcomer takes its place. A set-aside agenda keeps its progress and its clock, which keeps running, and it can come back later. Agendas whose purpose no longer applies are withdrawn without effect.

Kinds of goal

• Achieve agendas complete the first time their goal is met, and fail if time runs out first. Example: bringing debt below 70% of GDP by 1956.
• Hold agendas fail the first time their goal stops holding, and complete when time runs out. Example: keeping France, Italy and West Germany out of the Soviet sphere until the end of

Some agendas form trees: one appears only after an earlier one has been completed. When it completes, the outliner replaces it with the agenda it led to.

Authored agendas

The major powers have hand-written agendas. The 1946 scenario includes them for the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, the Republic of China, the Chinese Communists and Sweden. The two superpowers' agendas face each other. Washington aims to hold Western Europe, keep China out of the Soviet camp and keep its nuclear lead. Moscow aims to secure a communist Poland and an eastern buffer, win China, and break the atomic monopoly on the way to nuclear parity. Both contest Turkey, Greece, Italy and India.

Generated agendas

Everyone else gets agendas generated from the state of the world:

• Rankings. World ladders for education, GDP, GDP per capita, military power and completed research, climbed one rung at a time (top ten, top three, first).
• Reclaims. "Reclaim our land in…" for every country holding provinces you claim. Progress is the share of those provinces you control. These matter most to reactionary and fascist governments, and more again when you hold a casus belli.
• Influence. "Win…" or "Keep…" for each contested country where a power holds bloc influence. Two powers chasing the same country are racing: only one can lead it, so one completes and the other fails.

Domestic stakes

Every agenda has an owner: the faction behind it, usually the most influential faction of the matching ideology. A powerful owner pulls its goals up the agenda, because the owner's influence raises the agenda's importance.

• On completion, the owner gains influence, and the government gains 2% Legitimacy.
• On failure, the owner becomes more agitated. If the owner is the ruling party, legitimacy falls by 2%.

The government's net record (importance completed minus importance failed) feeds into the next election campaign as support for the ruling party, then resets. Many agendas also grant or cost prestige, and the most important ones trigger a full event. When Poland slips away, for example, the Soviet Union can accept Warsaw's course or denounce it, and only denouncing grants a regime-change casus belli.

How the AI follows its agendas

The player and the AI share one agenda system, but only the AI's choices bend toward it. Countries that an AI's agendas target become its diplomatic interests, so its Treaties, diplomatic actions and Diplomatic Missions focus there. Research that serves a pursued goal, such as education, the economy, the military or the nuclear program, is favoured in its research.

The scorecard

When the campaign ends, the scorecard rates your country from 0 to 100 against its rival in seven categories: survival, bloc strength, influence, wars and crises, economy, nuclear position, and agendas. Agendas carry the heaviest weight of the seven. Each decided agenda counts by its importance on the day it was decided. A failed one still earns half credit for the progress made.

The weighted total gives a verdict: Dominant, Ahead, Stalemate, Behind or Collapsed. A country with no land has collapsed, whatever its score. After a nuclear exchange, there is no scorecard: everyone has lost.