u/Loud-Profession2322

TL/DR: Since the GRACE monarchies don’t have a real world equivalent to the “Three-world model” of the real life Cold War, I’m partial to the idea of labeling them as the “Old World” as a nod to their unique position in global politics.

If you compare the Cold War in the Suzerainverse to the Cold War in the OTL, this is around the time when the labels of First World, Second World, and Third World were created to describe the way the world was divided between eastern and western blocs, with the term Fourth World eventually being created to describe indigenous and stateless peoples across the world, albeit not as commonly as the other three. While these terms have not yet been used in the text of the game as far as I’m aware (please correct me if I’m wrong) you can see them used occasionally in online discussions of the game, particularly the term Third World.

This leaves me with a question as to what would the GRACE member countries be called considering that they are a totally unique occurrence to the Suzerainverse. Calling them Third World countries feels wrong because although they are officially neutral when it comes to the conflict between East and West, they are not a nonaligned movement as they are clearly all working towards the cooperation and preservation of the remaining monarchies and support each other on the international stage even though GRACE doesn’t have an official military component like the CSP and ATO. This makes me feel like they deserve to be called something, but what? To complicate the situation, GRACE is actually the oldest of the three organizations, with GRACE being founded 114 years before ATO. While this could technically qualify GRACE to be the “First World”, this feels wrong as so much of the language in the game relates back to our own Cold War with the West being capitalist democracies and the East being the communist side, the NATO analog being ATO and the CSP having the word “pact” in the title make it feel weird to disrupt that by making GRACE the First World imo. After thinking about it for a bit I landed on the idea that GRACE could be the “Old World”. Since Suzerain seems to lack an Age of Discovery analog that would create the distinction between the Old World and the New World like in our world, I felt that using the term Old World was a fun way to incorporate GRACE and the monarchies in the different worlds vernacular of the Cold War era while acknowledging their unique position in the global power struggle.

Sorry if this is only interesting to me btw but I had the thought and wanted to get it out there. Let me know if you have any ideas about what exactly the GRACE countries should be referred to as colloquially.

Do you think we’ll have some control over what goes in the Galmish Manifesto or will it be a set thing we’ll play around? I ask because Brighde Halvorsdatir is going to be an elected protagonist like Anton and in the base game prologue we get to decide what promises were made that got us elected and I presume that Galmland will be democratic based on what we know.

I’ve also noticed that similarly to Rizia, the details about the plot are vague but we’re shown one of the possible outcomes when it comes to Galmsland’s foreign policy like how in Sordland, Romus picks arbitration and remains within GRACE. I’m presuming this to mean that while Galmsland has a “default” path (Gathering the support of other CSP nations, more self-sufficient economy, CSP leadership conference to work out differences) this could just be one of several ways to resolve the disputes and move forward.

It also helps that the actual contents of the manifesto are vague enough that it could be expanded upon in the prologue. I can understand that more self sufficiency might just be a locked in part of the manifesto as we’re playing a former colony but I do think that being one of the potential policy goals you can choose to work towards like in Sordland and Rizia is not impossible.

Does anyone else think that the new lore updates are intended to help make reconciliation more appealing than it has been? While reconciliation has always had its defenders, its obvious that it is the least popular of the good outcomes. However, I've realized recently that all of the good outcomes are written so that there is no clear "correct" choice, with each one containing a potential crises that could hurt Sordland as much as the potential advantages could help it. Still, reconciliation has been interpreted as the worst of the good outcomes by a large portion of the player base (for good reason imo). Players have compared it to appeasement and argued that your just giving Rumburg money and gas that they'll use to conquer Sordland in a few years, which is not an unreasonable assumption considering how aggressive Rumburg is throughout the game.

All this being said, I think the new lore about Rumburg is intended to make the idea that reconciliation is more in line with the rest of the paths, potentially fruitful and dangerous in equal measure. Instead of being a land-hungry giant, Rumburg is far more interested in trade and transit rights. They also seem to have made Beatrice someone who is willing to negotiate (when she was still a teenager admittedly) in the lore for the War of Broken Wills. idk if it will work but this is the impression I'm getting from these new entries. Personally I'm neutral towards all of the outcomes as I can see that they all have positives and negatives but with these new revelations I don't see reconciliation as being noticeably worse than war and sanctions like I have in the past.