At the request of
leazriz, I've checked French neutrality in my
CCGG game and it is indeed 0 as of September 1939. In that game, I have the option to declare war on Spain for Conquest, Democracy, or Puppet goals. (This would be foolish of me, since I don't have anywhere near the necessary forces to hold the western front while attacking Spain. As detailed in my AAR, I believe a Spanish attack over the Pyrenees could crush me and am relying on diplomatic influence to keep them out of the Axis.) Highest threat is Germany, and it's enormous, but then again, we're already at war. My spies have been raising national unity this entire time, so there's no way they could have been lowering neutrality.
In the stock Blitzkrieg scenario itself (also September 1939), French neutrality is 19. Highest threat is Japan, at 0.25, and no other nation has a nonzero threat score... not even Germany. It's very peculiar. Allowing time to advance from that starting point, the usual suspects go up in threat and French neutrality goes sharply down. By mid-November, French neutrality is 0 and France can declare war on Nationalist Spain, just as above. French domestic spies were on counterespionage duty the entire time and could not have lowered neutrality. Unfortunately, there is no mouseover breakdown of effects on neutrality.
There are two other issues that immediately sprang to mind when considering an aggressive, tank-oriented France: manpower and fuel. I checked some manpower numbers and was a bit surprised to find the 1939 scenario and my own 1939 game not ruling out the possibilities in this AAR. Italy really does have around 200 brigades at the time, and France can probably put together 400 with more focus on it. (I didn't research Agriculture etc. as much as I could have, I spent a lot of IC on static defenses, and I left a considerable amount of manpower in the pool for reinforcements. All of these differences reflect a more defensive strategy, of course.) As for fuel, it's much harder to say, since overrunning enemy depots can make all the difference.
I have obtained these results in Steam HoI3 3.05 UBYY/WBYY (checksum varies; reason unknown) with SF and FtM. No mods, no console commands. (I have Dies Irae: Gotterdammerung, but it's not activated. Last I heard, it didn't work with FtM.) I used to have a custom trident flag for Germany when I was doing
Dönitz, but I don't think this is the same install I was using then. Can't see how that would change what I got anyway, but you never know.
I was surprised to be asked about this. I'm not an authority on anything involved, and the numbers are there for anyone who cares to look, although I suppose I can demonstrate that an AAR played from 1936 to 1939 exhibits effects similar to those seen when starting from 1939. Glad to be of service if indeed I have been, but this sounds like one for the devs, not a player.
This would have been posted a bit more than 5 hours ago, but the forum ate the version I wrote at lunch, and I didn't have time to recreate it until now. Never trust that "auto-saving" indicator, no matter how many times it appears.
