Civil Disorder is when you don't make your moves and are kicked out of the game. Someone can take your place and you have to buy back in if you want to keep playing.

@ rratclif, I believe it is 3.

ahh

It is 2, unless the power in question has only 1 unit, in which case it is 1. However, phases where you have no move (no retreats, or no changed to # of SC) don't count, so it can take longer than it otherwise might. At least that's what someone told me, and that's how it worked my CD-ridden game MMIX.

Note this subtlety: Russia played in an Autumn retreat phase, where they had 2 units (one of which had to retreat). But they also lost a SC, so they had to disband a unit in the next phase, and they were NMR (no orders received) that phase. So the program disbanded one of them (the one that was more important to keep, as it happens, but the program was just following the rules). Suddenly Russia was down to only 1 unit, and having just had 1 phase NMR, they went CD.

@ Toby

I think abgemacht is right, I was just in a game where someone with 1 SC missed a turn and didn't go CD, and someone else missed 2 in a row without going CD.

It's the number of units, not the number of SCs, which confused me in my game for a bit. But I also saw a case in that game where someone seemed to miss 2 in a row yet did not go CD. At the time, I decided that they had visited and interacted with the game in some way, despite not changing the orders from the all-hold default, but I don't know … maybe it's 3 phases, unless you have fewer than 3 units, then the number of units? That would contradict what I was told when I asked here, but it wouldn't contradict what I've observed.

Toby was right.
Two phases or 1 if you only have 1 left.

(To be fair, I think figle is the one who told me, so you don't have 2 people telling you the same thing; you've simply upgraded from my inexperienced say-so to figle's experienced say-so.)

I was looking through rradclif's games to see if the theory matched the data, and I was confused by Super Fast-2 for a while, since the CDs seemed to come one phase too early there. But then I noticed that these were accounts banned (as mentioned in Exorcism performed. on this forum), so that's another way a country can go CD: if its account is banned.

@rratclif, I see you've won games with fewer than 18 SCs because your opponents are all CD. Cool, or annoying?

I've found it very annoying when that happens! In my case it was about my 3rd game, and it was back in December 2006 (dinosaur I know). This was well before draws or variable phases, so over Christmas we all went into CD. The bit that really annoyed me though was one of us went something like a day later than the rest, and so he won the game even though he would have gone CD soon anyway.

One was an accident, a face to face game that ran through the site. It was pretty clear england and I were the only ones who cared so we agreed to draw. England then forgot to log on to vote for the
draw and went cd. The other was abandoned by the time I joined I just happened to join before everyone cd'ed