A simple method to force garrisons, emulate partisans, and encourage puppeting

[unmerged(19545)]

While reading a CORE thread this morning, where several folks were actively discussing ways to encourage players to follow Germany’s historical route of creating puppets, rather than the much more game-effective route of simply annexing their historical allies, it occurred to me that a potential solution exists. It is incidentally a solution to two other problems as well: the fact that partisans aren’t enabled, and that a conqueror has no need to garrison the provinces groaning under the oppressor’s heel.

I suggest we use the same event types that create India or Nationalist Spain, or allow a player to free a puppet. A series of events for each country likely to be conquered, where the event tests to see if the country is annexed, and if so, creates it, would have the desired effect. I am not intimately familiar with the inner working of these commands, so I don’t know if they three different command sets, or the same used with different triggers, but the way the Free Puppet option works would do nicely.

When the event fires, and Romania, having been annexed by Germany, is created, any provinces occupied by German units remain German, but any without garrisons immediately become Romanian again. Supply might be cut, perhaps disastrously, which emulates partisans nicely. The loss of resources and production would hurt too. Even if the provinces were immediately recovered, their ic and resources don’t return to full levels for some time. And then later on, the event would fire again. The only way to avoid this would be to garrison every occupied province, or at least key ones. Or even better, make puppets or allies, which was done for good and valid reasons not simulated in the game.

If the event can be made (I’m not certain how these work, someone who knows better will have to fill in this blank) to fire while countries still exist, captured but not garrisoned provinces would simply return to the Rodina, the Mother/Fatherland, uncle Sam, or His Majesty the King. (The vast area of Russia that simply accepts a new owner, when the front has moved 1000 km past them and a German soldier hasn’t been seen for 2 years, always bugged me.) This is what happens when a player chooses the Free Puppet option, before they have liberated/captured all of a country.

Rather embarrassingly, I don’t know if an event can be made to repeat itself at set intervals, or if a new event must be written for each time you want a partisan uprising, but in the Tech Share Thread in the CORE forum, McNaughton et al were blithely talking about creating 8000+ events to simulate aspects of history rather more esoteric than this, so I don’t think the Event count is likely to be a large issue. Either option would naturally work well enough. The frequency with which these events fire would be set to simulate how vigorously a given region historically resisted foreign masters.

Well friends, I hope I haven’t just wasted 5 minutes of your lives reading this. If so I heartily apologize, and promise to make restitution when possible.

 

[unmerged(14603)]

In your post you've added an interesting benefit of garrisons/partisans that I don't remember being mentioned before - encouraging historical puppeting instead of HOI favored annexing.

The garrison/partisan issue has flared up a number of times on this forum over the past year. Although I generally favor the idea it seems to me that the majority view is that forcing garrisons/partisans would reduce playability.

Opponents of garrisons/partisans present a number of powerful arguments. Some that come to mind are:
1. In spite of the publicity partisans played a very minor role in WWII. The number of Axis troops tied down was insignificant.
2. Garrisons tended to be smaller than the HOI unit size.
3. Garrisoning and hunting down partisans would be micromanagement hell.
4. The AI would be even weaker. (I favor exempting AI controlled occupiers.)

AFAIK partisans/garrisoning is handled in mods like CORE implicitly thru events that penalize the occupier with lost resources caused by assumed partisan activity.

The mechanics of creating explicit garrisoning/partisans is reasonably straightforward. A series of (quarterly?) events would trigger persistent (repeatable) events. The quarterly events would have whatever trigger conditions you desired while the persistent events would contain the actions. The number of events for a country such as the USSR would be extremely large but hopefully would not choke the HOI engine.

For countries whose provinces were "controlled" by the occupier but not yet "owned" there would be no need to create a new country. For fully annexed countries "ownership" would have to be transferred by event to the occupiers's enemy - a new country (recreate Romania) or an existing country (USSR). I prefer the latter. The occupier would have to reoccupy provinces without garrisons - most players would probably use a few mobile units rather than bother with numerous garrisons. However reoccupying the province will cause output to temporarily be reduced as you have mentioned.

 

[unmerged(17501)]

Partisans weren't insignificant. I believe Germany lost several hundred locomotives to them in a year in Russia alone. Something like 400?

The flaw in this is that it needs division size to hold down a province. This isn't totally realistic, in fact, its pretty silly.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

DC, your posts are never a waste of time!

. . . instead, much like mine, they are just occasionally a bit rough around the edges.

I was very keen on modeling the partisan war last spring and took a hard look at what the code could do and what the AI could cope with.

I really wanted actual partisan divisions in the field, because there were a number of actual cases where partisan forces were organized into divisions and actively held a "liberated zone" -- Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, and the USSR being the most prominent. Other division-sized forces only sprang up in the very late stages of German collapse, e.g. the "secret armies" in France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Norway, or launched very brief attempts to create a liberated zone and failed -- Poland 1944.

So obviously the case can be made. Partisan divisions everywhere. But as I thought about it more, I saw some major downside problems.

First, I don't think the AI will ever consistently meet a garrison requirement no matter what priorities you assign to particular provinces. If you have an event that will fire when a German-owned Greek province has no land division garrison in it, I guarantee that event will on average fire much earlier than it did historically. Garrison requirements are something a human player can deal with, but the AI can't, and it's a heavy disadvantage to have new "republics" springing up in your back yard.

Second, small liberated pockets are unstable. The human player will annihilate such positions quickly, while an AI opponent is likely to leave gaps in its security cordon and allow partisan units to slip out and roam around devouring huge tracts of Europe. The Greek resistance army ELAS only held the equivalent of 2 or 3 provinces, with about 50,000 men organized in 10 divisions. They remained in that static zone for 2 1/2 years, only expanding when the Germans withdrew in Nov-Dec 1944. But if we assign 5 MIL to each of two provinces, then on the one hand that's not enough strength to stop even one panzer division plus one tac bomber. So a human player faced with a Greek uprising will curse, strat-move the panzer into position, rapidly kill every unit ELAS has, and strat-move back, probably without bothering to set up a security cordon in the first place. Meanwhile an AI player might manage to kill the pocket, but more likely would fumble around and let ELAS conquer Yugoslavia.

You see the problem . . . If the Germans conquer Greece on schedule in Apr-May 1941, then as early as June 1941, as soon as the German units have moved to the Eastern front, or somewhere else, Greece will erupt in full-scale rebellion -- and depending on circumstances, the rebellion will be crushed in two weeks or will overrun the Balkans. While this is entertaining in a game sense, it's bad history.

I think where a new scenario calls for a liberated zone at game start, we can do that because the action will tend to be fairly prompt. For example, a July 1943 scenario, with the Allies ready to invade Sicily, would need to show Tito's partisans and ELAS in some form, and this would be good because the Allies could invade Italy, make it collapse, and give the partisans a big, prompt material boost from surrendering Italian forces. But a long-term solution of the general case -- some sort of event that would work with the 1936 scenario -- I think will be more elusive because it won't yield the kind of long, drawn-out, battles of attrition and static fronts that partisan warfare actually involved.

So I looked at simulating the material effects of partisan units using events. I came up with some really interesting ways to capture the dynamics of partisan warfare using the existing HOI event engine. I'll discuss them in my next post.

 

[unmerged(15561)]

I would also like to point out that the lack of need to place any garrisons except in frontline or coastal or border provinces is highly unrealistic and frustratingly poor. If only the AI could build and use transport planes with paras, it would add an extremely important and valuable angle to the whole game!

Imagine having the French Channel coastline well defended, only to have a large airborne force land and help assault one of your coastal garrisons along with a bomber strike and amphibious assault?

Now that would really be something and be a substitute for the lack of partisans....IM humble O.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

How to make partisans through events

The key to this approach is to "chain" partisan attacks together, based on how many territories the invader holds and how much time has passed. For example, looking at Greece again.

Event #0 (for Germany)
This event tells the German player that Greek resistance forces have just attacked him, and he has lost 1 manpower and X supplies (X depending on what mods are in play). It's a "persistent" event, which means it can be called by several other events and will fire each time it is called.

Event #1 (for Germany)
Check every six months with maybe 60-40 probability whether ANY Greek province is German-owned, and whether the Greek government does NOT exist. If both of these are true, announce to the German player that local resistance forces have united under the national government-in-exile. Ask if he wants to increase his garrison forces and pursue a policy of heavy reprisals. If he says yes, subtract 50 manpower and 10X supply, but sleep events #2, 3, 4, and 5. If he says no, then fire persistent event #0.

Event #2 (for UK)
If Event #1 has fired, and the German player did not choose to increase his garrison, and Germany is at war with the UK, ask the UK player if he wants to send aid to the Greek partisans. If the UK player says yes, subtract X supply from the UK pool and fire persistent event #0 for Germany. If the UK player says no, do nothing.

Events #3-5 (for Germany)
These events are tied to specific regions. One in the Peloponnese, one in the northwest, one in Greek Macedonia (Salonika). If that region is German-owned, there is no Greek government, and event #1 has fired without 3-5 being slept, fire persistent event #0.

This is just a very simple outline of something that can be quite complex. First, obviously, it needs to be duplicated for the most likely invaders. The Greeks would fight against the Italians, or the Russians, or the Turks, with the same ferocity they showed the Germans. Duplicating the event sequences is pretty mechanical.

But you can also have a lot of decision points that will actually get the player involved in strategic thinking. For example, partisan armies tended to start at about 1/1000th of the captured population in the first 6 months to a year, and then grew at upwards of 60 % per year. So with 65 million Soviet citizens under German control, by March 1942 there were about 70,000 partisans active. By March 1943 that had grown to more than 110,000, despite heavy casualties. Eventually they hit 250,000. You can simulate this by adjusting the spacing of subsequent events, so they first come every six months, then every four, then every three, and so on, and the player gets asked maybe once a year whether he NOW wants to increase his garrison like his advisers keep insisting he do.

The nice thing is that you can make the German player's default choice (the one taken 95 % of the time) the historical one, so the AI will nearly always do what is most appropriate for the simulation, but the human player can still fool around. If you really want to be fancy you can make the default plus two other choices, one more repressive than historical, one less, and then depending on how much economic and military impact you think partisan warfare had, you can fine-tune the costs involved. Is it worth investing 50,000 men to suppress partisan attacks that are basically costing you 3,000 men per year plus some coal or steel or supplies? And you can put in the risk of an all-out rebellion, transferring ownership of the province to MIL divisions, as the ultimate consequence of NOT investing in garrisons. So the liberated zones are in the game, but apart from statistically rare occasions, or human player sang-froid, they won't be popping up with the inane regularity that "Rebel Scum" do in EU II.

This at least is how I imagine the partisan war being simulated. Bear in mind one more thing: materially, it wasn't that big a deal. The Greeks probably killed and wounded no more than 25,000 German, Bulgarian, Italian, and collaborationist troops in four years of fighting. That's maybe 3 manpower points subtracted per year, plus some supply points to represent equipment destroyed. The Russian partisans didn't do much better -- worse on a per-capita basis, as their peak strength was 250,000 versus 50,000 Greeks. The real reason the Germans didn't annihilate the partisan zones was because the cost-benefit ratio wasn't good enough. Sending first-class troops into remote villages of no economic value to flail around trying to hunt down a few thousand guys with rifles and no ammunition was a bad investment, and although the Germans launched some multi-division offensives in Yugoslavia and Greece, they were mostly content to hang onto the urban areas, the mines, the rail lines, and the bulk of the population, and let the partisans own what was left.

Anyway, that's where I see it going. Hope that's helpful.

 

[unmerged(19545)]

Just a minor comment, since as you say, my posts are rough around the edges. I didn't actually visualize there being any partisan units, just the occasion loss of provinces that were occupied (usually by a Prince of Terror), but without garrison. The only units that might come of that, are those the new country might build themselves if left alone for the 45 days it would take to make militia divisions.
Mostly I wanted there to be a very good reason to have allies and puppets, rather than simply annex everything adjacent to what has already been annexed, since none of this would happen in puppet or allied countries.
Well, I also enjoy the discourse that comes from a new idea. There's not much chance I can do much work beside limited things like those spread sheets my Post Grad Advisor asked for: I am trying very hard to gracefully respond to Paul Martin's prudent fiscal management vv RCMP employees on contract. And I have a family that needs all the time I have and more. The best I can hope to achieve, is to occasionally rouse others to something useful.

 

[Soapy Frog]

I am by no means an events expert, however it would strike me that such a partisan system would require a simply enormous number of events...

Is it even feasible?

 

[unmerged(13914)]

It's really not that bad. Because you can use the persistent event for consequences, and call it over and over, you cut the number of needed events in half right there.

One problem I do foresee is the many-to-many mapping involved to cover all the possible invaders. Greece can be invaded by Italy, by Turkey, by Germany . . . even just considering the major powers we start having a lot of permutations. But I'm thinking mainly here of scenarios for 1939 and later, where the alliances are mostly firm, and the list of potential adversaries can be narrowed down. To cover every possible guerrilla conflict imaginable from Jan 1936 onward would be an entirely different thing. However, detailed events for the 1936 scenario tend to get into trouble anyway as history diverges. You get U.S. aid to the USSR even though the U.S. goes fascist, or other equally silly outcomes.

Basically, if CORE can have 20 events just for the relationship between Denmark and Germany, I don't see a problem with giving each occupied country 5-10 events to represent resistance warfare in a basic way.

Of course, at the rate I'm going with my projects, I won't write any of these wonderful events until 2007 . . . but I think it would work.

 

[Soapy Frog]

I also am really only concerned with 1939 on, and covering just the majors should do the trick... but still wouldnt you need basically one event per possible occupied province? Or am I missing something?

 

[Crusher Bob]

Can't you do something like:

if control <> "Greece" and NoGarrison then
trigger partisans
else
do nothing

This way, it as long as Greece does not control the province, then the partisan events trigger.

The events for provinces that have multiple national claims would be the hard ones.

 

[unmerged(13914)]

Crusher Neko,

Nope, you can't do it that way, sadly, because a partisan event has to be for a particular occupying country . . . if you test for control <> Greece, you don't know whether to fire the German event or the Italian one.

Soapy,

In the limiting case, you could do one event per province. You can also do groups of provinces, or just bunch together the whole country as one region:

If province 001 is German-controlled, or
If province 002 is German-controlled, or
etc.

It's very "scalable". If you want to have something quick-and-dirty, just to ensure that partisan effects exist in some form for every European country, you're talking about a half-dozen events per country. If you want to have something more authentic, e.g. making partisan activity much higher in mountains and swamps, and much less effective in open plains, it takes a breakdown by regions.

At some point obviously HOI will slow down because of the burden of added events. But I've yet to see any serious reports of that happening. CORE v0.5 already had a set of partisan events for the Communist Chinese -- about 40 events representing uprisings in individual provinces against the Nationalists, and another 40 representing uprisings against the Japanese. Each event checks every few days for ungarrisoned provinces, and has a small probability of changing control of the province, giving it to the ChiComs, and giving them a militia division and some manpower. There are also some equipment-capture events.

If I had an "allowance" of 40 events for China versus Japan, I'd use it somewhat differently. I'd want more sabotage and attrition events, and fewer uprisings, because the Japanese AI is just never going to cope with garrison requirements, and an uprising of one province is doomed. You can ensure that the uprising stays in supply if you check for lack of garrisons in groups of THREE provinces, then hand over all three at once -- that would work better. But anyway I think this proves the approach is workable.

 

[Soapy Frog]

Interesting. Perhaps I'll work on something like that... after I am done mangling the tech tree!

 

[unmerged(19545)]

I'll be doing some testing today

Does any one know what mechanism is behind the Free Puppet option in the Diplomacy screen? Is the function something we could trigger by command, or is it out of reach?

My testing will be quite limited, just to get some baseline for discussion.

1- In my current game Cze was annexed by Germany in 1939. Now it is 1940, and the large Allied army (mine) based in Poland has liberated about half of it. I will free the part of Cze I control, save, then open as Germany and free the half Germany controls. This will reveal (I hope) part of what is going on inside my favourite black box. I really expect a CTD, but maybe not.

2- Using F12, I will run a simple event like the Create India event, for various countries already existing, but half conquered, and incompletely garrisoned, to see specifically what happens to the country as a whole, as well as garrisoned and ungarrisoned but captured land.

3- I will also use that event to recreate Bulgaria, which was annexed a few weeks after it foolishly joined the axis powers. It is almost ungarrisoned. I am curious if it will CTD, join one side or the other, or just get rebellious and be an minor inconvenience.

As an aside, how difficult would it be to create a new model of militia, appropriate to represent a garrison. I see several problems with the ai's use of it, but perhaps that isn't absolutely necessary.

 

[Soapy Frog]

As an aside, how difficult would it be to create a new model of militia, appropriate to represent a garrison. I see several problems with the ai's use of it, but perhaps that isn't absolutely necessary.

It is easy... you can make sure the AI NEVER builds it, or ALWAYS builds it, but nothing in between. You can make it so that it is completely inaccessible for any country to build.

The AI will always build the latest model of a given unit type that it has the tech for... always.

 

[unmerged(19545)]

Dandy

I knew the mechanics of making a unit to represent garrisons would be easy. Getting them into play without breaking anything would be tougher.

What I'm wondering too, is does the AI when conquering tend to annex stuff, make puppets, or make allies. I guess it depends on how the AI is set up. It certainly annexes Poland right away.

As far as pockets festering away inside AI held areas, I don't think that is really a problem. The AI automatically enters enemy territory with no units in it. It would only hesitate if there were actual enemy divisions there, and that was never my intention. Unless the freed areas stay free long enough to build themselves some militia.

 

[jdrou]

Does any one know what mechanism is behind the Free Puppet option in the Diplomacy screen? Is the function something we could trigger by command, or is it out of reach?

I believe it is identical to the 'independence' event command with 'value = 0' (units switch allegiance to new country).

1- In my current game Cze was annexed by Germany in 1939. Now it is 1940, and the large Allied army (mine) based in Poland has liberated about half of it. I will free the part of Cze I control, save, then open as Germany and free the half Germany controls. This will reveal (I hope) part of what is going on inside my favourite black box. I really expect a CTD, but maybe not.

Once you create CZE as Allies you would need to use 'secedeprovince' to give them provinces that Germany controls. If you try to create a country that already exists with 'independence' it will either crash or do nothing; it won't give the existing country more provinces.

 

[Crusher Bob]

Can't you just use Tibet as the SuperSecret World Partisan HQ, and let it run all the partisan events? If you are using DC's original suggestion that just returns control of the provinces to the original country, you should just have one event per country (more or less).

 

[unmerged(13914)]

Hmmm. So you're saying if province X does not belong to its original owner, give it to the "land of the partisans"? Well, yes, that would probably work. I'm not sure if the "partisans" tag was ever activated but anyway you could create a partisan country using the U01-U19 series of IDs. Good point.

However, that wouldn't produce any of the other consequences I was talking about, for the owning country -- loss of manpower, loss of supply, a decision to be made about committing more troops to anti-partisan operations and garrison duty. So it would achieve DC's original objective although not the other ones I suggested.

I feel like we're switching problems here in mid-flight. If you want to use DC's approach, I don't think the number of events is ever going to be an issue, because you're just going to declare independence or un-puppet and then whatever provinces are covered by that will revolt. It's only if you try to use my approach and define distinct phases of the revolt, distinct regions, and so on, doing it all at a scale below HOI's normal divisional one, that the number of events becomes potentially a hassle.

 

[Crusher Bob]

Can the event scripting language use variables?

If so, you could create a variable named: 'partisanlevel' then have a long list of if control = province X then partisanlevel = partisanlevel + Y. Then have an event fire that says: Partisan attacks over the last month have cost you 'partisanlevel' times Z manpower, supply, etc.

This would also let you 'simply' set occupation policy, with different policies being multipliers on the partisanlevel variable.

This would let you cut and paste most of the code that raises partisan level over and over again.