It seemed to be just ignoring the third one whichever I made the third. When I've assigned the same set of names to two factions I haven't taken any notice of which order they were in. It shouldn't go on alphabetical listing anyway, only thing it could want to follow is the sm_factions order, but I've been re-arranging that anyway to get faction icons in right place in menus.

btw that reminds me - changing order of factions in descr_sm_factions and not deleting map.rwm causes 'random' CTD in campaign about half dozen turns in