Well damn, I ran into another vanilla bug; one which I've already made several bug reports about. First off, in case you guys don't know, when you place an HQ under AI control and place all your objectives on territory you own or are covered by one of your theaters, the AI will "sleep" and refuse to do anything. The AI only "wakes up" when you place an objective in enemy territory that isn't covered by one of your theaters. Sounds logical, right?
Well, the game breaks once you have an alliance with a neighboring country. Now, this problem doesn't happen for faction-mates, just members of the same alliance that border each other. What happens, is the game figures out who the "alliance leader" is for every in-game alliance network. In my situation, the only alliance network is the Chinese one, which was created by two events: the 2nd Sino-Japanese War and the United Front Against Soviet Aggression, triggered back when Romania asked the RoC for help. Now, here's the source of the problem. Since in this situation the "alliance leader" is adjacent to all of its allies, the leader's theaters now cover allied territory. If you start the game, either with or without the HPP mod, you'll see that the RoC's main theater covers Xibei San Ma as well as nationalist territory if you hover your mouse over XSM provinces in the theater map mode. This is fine when the allies are fighting together against a common foe, but the real issue is that the theater isn't changed once the alliance breaks.
So, I'm left with a stupid situation - I made an event that cancels the RoC alliances with the remaining warlords, then has the RoC declare war on them. All seems fine, until 3 months pass and *nothing* has been done by the AI. Guangxi troops are trapped in the Chinese interior, surrounded by KMT troops, but no one is attacking. RoC troops are literally outside of Shanxi's capital, but neither side is moving. Troops are all along the borders, but no one is moving. Since the AI can't initiate hostile actions inside of its theater borders, the Chinese Unification war is dead. The only action that's going on is along the Tibetan and Manchurian fronts, where the RoC theaters haven't been set yet.
So here's my question to you guys. Since this stupid bug hasn't been addressed by PI in the past 3 patches and probably never will, would you mind if I modded an event that lets the RoC "absorb" the remaining warlord states, thereby circumventing the problem?