"Peace In Our Time" is the last installment of a multiplayer megacampaign that started in CK2 in 1066, and has passed through EU3, Victoria 2, and will now convert to HoI3. The 1936 setup, then, is somewhat unusual:
- Islamic Spain is at war with the Christian nations of Europe, and losing badly. Late 1935 saw the collapse of the defensive line in Africa, and even the Pyrenees, drenched in blood through these ten years of futile assaults, do not look like they can hold much longer.
- The foremost among the Great Powers are in Asia: Malaya, India, China. The latter two are nominal belligerents on Spain's side, but a ceasefire has been in effect on their fronts since 1930; they are perhaps content, as is neutral Malaya, to see Europe tear itself apart.
- South America is drenched in darkness: The bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs joined to the efficient bureaucracy of the unconquered Inca makes a state only marginally more terrible at war than in times of peace.
- The European peninsula, although currently united (for the first time ever, and even so Greece must be excepted) against their Islamic enemy, remain a fractious and squabbling lot. Poor Greece, last remnant of the Roman Empire, sided with Spain (a traditional expedient of Christian states whose diplomacy has been going badly) and was rather promptly crushed when the soldiers of Islam failed to break out of the Pyrenees; Greece is currently completely occupied by the victorious Northern Alliance. Germany (comprising, roughly, OTL Switzerland, Bavaria, Prussia, and various connecting bits) initially did the same but was bought off by some long-coveted Scandinavian territory; Scandinavia is not pleased but will ignore the issue while the Great War is still on. Russia, greatest of the Christian land powers, similarly had to buy off Mongolia, and tends to look a bit nervously at its Asian and Caucasian borders while its armies are busy in France and Africa. England and Scandinavia have seen their traditional naval dominance in the Atlantic challenged by the Inca; a decisive battle has not yet been fought - and both sides look over their shoulders at "neutral" Malaya, who with the world's largest navy and air force certainly holds the balance of naval power. Finally, Italy has embraced the opportunity to rush to the aid of the victors, and in the process exhausted most of its armies; its allies are quite grateful for the sacrifice of millions of peasants that broke the defense of Africa, but the gratitude of nations is worth its weight in gold.
- The endgame approaches. Will the Asian powers manage to overcome their mutual suspicions and invade Russia to break Europe once and for all? Will the Europeans maintain their brief unity in the face of the Yellow Menace, or will the lure of territorial ambitions unsatisfied for centuries, (or perhaps revenge for one of the five Baltic Wars) prove too much for some revanchist? Will the peace of the Americas continue to hold when the Great War peters to its end, and a new source of victims is necessary to power the fires of the Sun? Will Malaya spread its revolution by the bayonet? Can the leadership of a quantum-mechanically reincarnated medieval dynast overcome the well-known tendency of Germany to lose all its armies in the first year of a war? Will Scandinavia finally achieve its ambition of making the Baltic a Norse lake, and does that even matter in HoI3's economic model? Stay tuned. The one thing that's certain is that there will be little peace in our time.