Threat Levels

Beyond opinion, every country sizes up how dangerous every other country looks to it. Threat is a directional score from 0 to 100: how threatened country A feels by country B, which need not match how B feels about A. It is the main input to how the AI arms itself, where it stations its armies and whom it turns to for protection.

The country view shows both directions for the selected country: Their Threat Level (how threatening they are to you) and Our Threat Level (how threatening you appear to them), with a full breakdown of the score on hover.

What makes a country threatening

• Hostile relations. Poor opinion raises threat, and resentment counts both ways: how much you dislike them, and to a lesser degree how much they dislike you.
• Posture. Each posture a country holds toward you adds or removes a fixed amount: Conquer +30, Containment and Dominate +20, Regime Change +15, Damage +10, Deterrence +5 and Threatened +4; Alliance -25, Non-Aggression and Submissive -15, Détente -10 and Protect -5.
• The military balance. Its military power against yours, counting formal allies, subject states and any superpower that would defend either side.
• Troops on the border. Hostile Brigades stationed in provinces adjoining your country, so a much smaller neighbour with troops on your doorstep can feel more dangerous than a distant superpower.

What lowers it

• An overlord, its subjects and their sister subjects perceive no threat from one another at all.
• Countries in the same bloc subtract a flat 25 points, ignore each other's standing armies as an opposing force, and treat each other's border troops as posing little danger.
• Alliance and non-aggression postures reduce it, as above.

Colonies have no threat score of their own: they count as part of their ruler. A border with a colony is a border with its empire, and a threat to a colony is a threat to the empire.

Watching for change

Threat is recorded for every pair of countries at each month boundary. If a country's threat to you rises or falls by 10 points or more over a month, you receive an alert naming it, so a sudden buildup or a collapsing relationship does not slip past unnoticed. Scripted events and AI postures can compare threat with its value days or months earlier, for instance to adopt the Threatened posture when a neighbour's threat has climbed.

What threat does

Where armies stand

AI countries spread idle forces across threatened borders in proportion to each neighbour's threat multiplied by its military power. For border defence the opposing power is compressed and a bloc's combined strength is capped at the defender's own, so one huge alliance cannot drain every other frontier. Defensive and domineering postures add weight to a border. An overlord defends its homeland and its subjects as one territory, and always keeps capitals and the largest cities garrisoned. See Theaters and Brigades.

Readiness and rearmament

An AI country whose highest threat reaches 50 favours heightened alert over peacetime readiness. At 60 it leans toward hosting foreign bases or joining an integrated alliance command rather than strict non-alignment. Parties to a Critical flashpoint also go on alert, and countries caught up in a standoff favour partial mobilization before any war begins (see Stand-offs and Flashpoints).

Alignment and treaties

High threat pushes vulnerable states to seek guarantees, non-aggression pacts and membership of collective security International Organizations. Threat also enters how countries value treaty clauses (a threatened country values arms compensation more highly; see Treaties) and feeds flashpoint tension: high mutual threat between the two parties of a dispute steadily heats it.