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unmerged(213723)

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Jul 3, 2010
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  • Hearts of Iron III
  • Semper Fi
Here's how the current "Invite to Faction" process works in FTM:

To enable the option to invite a country to your faction:
  1. The target country must be closely aligned to your faction (use Influence Nation)
  2. The target country must have an effective neutrality less than 25. (use Increase Threat on one of their neighbors)

After you spend all those leadership points, the option to invite to faction becomes available; however, whether or not your target will accept your invitation is based on another set of criteria completely.

First Criteria: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
If you and your target are at war with the same country, they will accept your invitation to the faction automatically. This criteria overrides all other effects. If this is not the case, we go to the second criteria...

Second Criteria: Acceptance Chance Calculation
The game calculates an acceptance "score" from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates a 0% chance the country will accept the invitation ("Impossible"), and 100 indicates a 100% chance of acceptance ("Very Likely"). We will call this score AcceptChance from now on. AcceptChance is based purely on three things:
  1. Your target's base neutrality, which is independent of how threatened they feel.
  2. Your target's governing ideology.
  3. Country specific modifiers.

Things that do not have any bearing on AcceptChance:
  1. Your target's relations with you.
  2. How threatened your target feels.
  3. Your target's proximity to you.
  4. The popularity of your ruling party in the target country (only that your governing ideology is the same as theirs).
  5. Your target's national unity
  6. Your target's diplomatic alignment with your faction (as long as they meet the minimum requirements, further influencing is pointless).
  7. etc.. (Nothing but the aforementioned three items affect AcceptChance).

The Nitty Gritty: How AcceptChance is Calculated:
AcceptChance starts at 0.

Target's Neutrality Effect
AcceptChance is increased based on your target's base neutrality. Base neutrality is different from effective neutrality. Effective neutrality is defined as base neutrality - greatest threat . Effective neutrality is the "neutrality" listed in the diplomatic screen. There is no way to affect your target's base neutrality, though it can be changed through scripted events. The calculation is:

If Base Neutrality > 70, then AcceptChance is increased by (100 - Base Neutrality) / 2. (Maximum increase of 15).
If Base Neutrality > 60, then AcceptChance is increased by (100 - Base Neutrality). (Maximum increase of 40).
Otherwise, AcceptChance is increased by (100 - Base Neutrality) * 1.25 (Maximum increase of 125).

Governing Ideology Effect
AcceptChance is increased by 10 if your target's governing ideology is the same as yours. Otherwise AcceptChance is reduced by 20. It's not clear if the governing ideologies need to be exactly the same, or they just need to be in similar areas of the political spectrum. You can use "Support our Party" to try an win an election in your target, or (if possible) you can also "Attempt a Coup."

Country Specific Effects
Some countries have specific effects written into their scripts, others do not. For example, Nationalist Spain will NEVER enter accept an invitation if it is still at war with Republican Spain (AcceptChance = 0). Trying to invite Nationalist Spain to the Axis will incur a penalty unless the Axis controls London and Gibraltar (reduces AcceptChance by 50). Republican Spain is the same. Here are the others (this list should be complete as of FTM):
  • Belgium will always reduce AcceptChance by 10, making them harder to invite.
  • Communist China will only join the Comintern (AcceptChance = 0 for Axis and Allies).
  • Nationalist China will never join any faction (AcceptChance = 0). Note, this is overridden if you and Nationalist China are at war with the same country.
  • Netherlands will always reduce AcceptChance by 10, making it harder to invite them.
  • Italy will not join your faction unless your governing ideologies are the same.
  • Japan will not join your faction unless your governing ideologies are the same.
  • Portugal will never join a faction if the Spanish Civil War is still raging. Portugal incurs an AcceptChance penalty of 50 when being invited to the Axis, unless they have a neighbor in the Axis whose capital is in Europe. Usually, this means Spain has to be in the Axis before Portugal will consider joining the Axis.
  • Switzerland will not join your faction if you are at war. This is overridden if Switzerland and you are already at war with the same country.
  • Sweden will not join any faction if Oslo and Copenhagen are under Axis Control. Otherwise, they will always reduce AcceptChance by 20, making them harder to invite to a faction.
  • Turkey will reduce AcceptChance by 50, making them considerably harder to invite to your faction. This penalty will be removed for the Axis only if the Soviets no longer control Moscow or certain Turkish border provinces.
  • The US only will get bonuses for joining the Allies. It will get bonuses the later the year is (maximum of 30 AcceptChance bonus if after 1943), and will also get bonuses if Japan is being aggressive in China or if China has fallen (Maximum AcceptChance bonus of 50). There are a few other allied bonuses too. Needless to say, the US is encouraged to join the Allies, and this will become more of a certainty as the years progress.
  • Vichy France will not join your faction if you are at war. This effect is overridden if you and Vichy France are at war with the same country.

Clamping Effects
Finally, after all the other calculations shake out, AcceptChance is "clamped" up or down. If AcceptChance > 60, then it is set to 100, if AcceptChance < 20, then it is set to 0.

Example 1
Your target has a base neutrality of 65 and your ruling ideologies are the same. They always incur a 10 point penalty as a country specific effect.
AcceptChance = 0 + 35 (Neutrality) + 10 (Ideology) - 10 (Country Specific) = 35
Your target has a 35% chance of accepting your invitation.

Example 2
Your target has a base neutrality of 20, and your ruling ideologies are different. No country specific effects.
AcceptChance = 0 + 100 (Neutrality) - 20 (Ideology) = 80
AcceptChance is over 60, so it gets clamped up to 100.
Your target has a 100% chance of accepting your invitation.

Implications
FTM seems to discourage diplomatic faction building. Inviting countries to your faction is made much more difficult: there is no way to adjust Base Neutrality, Threat and Relations have no impact on your target's willingness to accept, you must expend espionage points to nurture (or force) your governing ideology in your target. In fact, given the Leadership Points required to enable inviting a country to your faction, and then further expenditures to simply give you a chance that they'll eventually accept, it seems to be much more efficient to just invade a country and puppet it. This is (I'm sure) the option most players opt for in lieu of this frustrating diplomatic system.

I'm not saying that inviting to a faction should be easy, but I think that it's a little disheartening how simple it is to reduce effective neutrality by increasing a neighbor's threat, and then just DOW/Puppet; meanwhile, the diplomatic (and arguably more historical) option requires you to jump through much MUCH more difficult hoops.

This also has some distinctly ahistorical effects too. It's difficult to get Romania into the axis, for example.

Proposed Changes
I have a few changes that I'd like to implement for my games. If this idea catches on, perhaps I can share the script lua files and everyone can benefit. I think relations should matter somewhat (though not too much). I think there should be a little more of a bonus if political ideologies are the same, or that bonuses/penalties should be based on political separation (Fascist inviting a Commie nation would incur a larger penalty than inviting a socially conservation nation). On the more complicated level, I think threat should be considered. If the inviting faction can show that it has the strength to protect the target against their biggest threat, then they should get a bonus (determined by threat level, etc). If the target's biggest threat is of an opposing ideology, they should be more willing to join a faction of similar ideologies (even if they aren't exactly the same).

I'm open to suggestions. Anyone have any constructive criticism or ideas to adjust the faction-building system for the better?
 
Hats off to you sir (or ma'am), this kind of information is long overdue and should be placed somewhere it is easy to find. I might recommend the HOI3 wiki but I don't think it's been getting any updates since FtM was released. How exactly did you get all these exact figures?

Something I have always found annoying is that it is basically impossible to recreate the historical Axis via diplomacy. Aside from getting in Italy and Japan, it requires special events to rope in Finland, Hungary, and Romania, and even Bulgaria is more difficult than you might expect, but at least Bulgaria is a possibility. This information explains why this is the case. Likewise, even the Allies, the game's de facto diplomats, can't create their own historical faction since again the base neutrality of most of their members has to be lowered by special event first.

Am I correct in assuming that the `we're both at war with the same guy` clause also overrides all the country-specific effects? It also looks like some countries that have 80+ base neutrality are always going to be at 0 accept chance even if you coup a favorable government into them (such as Sweden).

It looks like the general rule of thumb is to first make sure your target has a favorable government, and then start to influence them, since you get an influence bonus by having matching governments anyway. Make a list of the starting base neutrality of every nation and work on those who are the lowest first.

There is a silver lining to this dark cloud: threat doesn't matter. This means you don't have to worry that your chances are going to be zero trying to get nations on different continents who aren't threatened into your faction. So for example Germany has a shot at recruiting the fascist-leaning countries in South America. Is there a simple way to tell what ideology is in force in a country? If you use the Diplomacy tab, you can see the ruling party of a country, but if you don't already know what the `QRXHGDT` Party represents, you have to pop over to the Intelligence tab to look it up. On the Intelligence tab, you can look at what ministers are in charge, but this isn't entirely accurate (one of the Asian countries has a Fascist ruling party but the ministers are all Communist), and in some cases looking at the ministers causes a crash.
 
Romania almost always joins when the Soviets take Besserabia or shortly there after.

Yes, but that is a special event that has nothing to do with diplomacy. If you want to get Romania into the Axis with diplomacy *before* they lose their territory to one of those demands decisions, it is nearly impossible.
 
Second Criteria: Acceptance Chance Calculation
The game calculates an acceptance "score" from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates a 0% chance the country will accept the invitation ("Impossible"), and 100 indicates a 100% chance of acceptance ("Very Likely"). We will call this score AcceptChance from now on. AcceptChance is based purely on three things:
  1. Your target's base neutrality, which is independent of how threatened they feel.
  2. Your target's governing ideology.
  3. Country specific modifiers.

Follow-up question: does the ideology have to match *exactly*, or does it merely have to be in the same grey/blue/red flavor? In other words, do we both have to be paternal_autocrat, or can paternal_autocrat still get the bonus with national_socialist?

EDIT:
@nofun:
Honestly I'm not sure why you wanted to `hide` all this useful information, since discussing it is then extremely difficult if we want to follow your wishes. I would recommend you remove the spoiler tag from your original post.

You have Italy and Japan listed as `will not join unless they share your ideology`, but neither is national_socialist and they will join the Axis without special event, so the answer to my question must be `you only need to share the same area of the color wheel`. As there are 10 government ideologies but only 3 groupings, there must be better vocab to describe the color groupings.
 
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Sorry, it's me again! I'm very excited about this entire discussion (as I'm sure you can tell).

I've put together a spreadsheet calculating the chances to get every nation into your faction, which you can view here.

The main points of interest are the two columns at the very end. The green one shows the chances of success if you are sharing the faction ideology (Fascist, Communist, Democracy) of that country. The red column shows what happens if you don't. Basically your `best chance` and `worst chance`. These pretty much match my actual experience of playing the game. A summary of points of interest is (and keep in mind, this ONLY discusses diplomacy. We all know that countries may join factions if attacked or by event):

The Axis has the best chance of diplomacy since a majority of the world's governments are in the Fascist camp. The Comintern has the worst chance as only Sinkiang and Communist China have Communist governments (out of those that are outside the Comintern already).

Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands will never join a faction via diplomacy thanks to their special country modifiers. If these modifiers were not in place, you would have a 10% chance with each at best. These are also the only three countries for which diplomacy will be impossible no matter what you do or what faction you are. Some other countries are bad but circumstances can arise where you at least have some chance.

Hungary and Persia have the best chances of going Axis if you just influence them into your corner. Finland and Romania will never join the Axis while they have Democratic governments (and once again, since I know somebody will keep bringing this up, yes, they join via event).

If the Italian Social Republic comes into the game, they will join anybody and everybody- the chance is always 100%.

Based on the 1936 setup, only Albania, Guangxi Clique, Shanxi, Yunnan, Ethiopia, Hungary, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Panama, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, South Africa, Siam, and Sinkiang are open to diplomacy by *all* factions, but some of these countries will quickly be eliminated and your chances with many of them are just 10% if you aren't in their grouping.

All of the Commonwealth nations are far more susceptible to diplomacy after the `First Vienna Award` fires as this drops their neutrality by 20. So, for example, the Axis can have a 10% chance to recruit Canada even if they don't coup the Democratic government there. If you know how much any given game event will modify a nation's base neutrality, you can start to total it up in the 'Special Modifiers` column to see how your odds improve as the game progresses.

All of this assumes nofun's data is entirely accurate. I also don't know how the game maps statements like `very likely` or `impossible` to the actual numbers. For example, it will be `very likely` to have Italy or Japan join the Axis even though their base chance is 60%, but perhaps events have reduced their neutrality by then. I've also had a late game chance of `impossible` to get Poland into the Axis even though I should have had a 15% chance, but perhaps they had gone Democratic via internal coup by then (I will have to try and double check). So the game might display `impossible` when the chance is 0% and when it is nonzero but really low. I have seen people claim in the forums that they had success even when the tip said `impossible`, so maybe that is true.
 
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Good points, but most of those things can be modded AFAIK, so it's not a catastrophe. However, in some cases it should be almost impossible to get the country to join your faction, e.g Switzerland, Axis Commonwealth without coups or Japan in Comintern.
 
Hats off to you sir (or ma'am), this kind of information is long overdue and should be placed somewhere it is easy to find. I might recommend the HOI3 wiki but I don't think it's been getting any updates since FtM was released. How exactly did you get all these exact figures?
The info is in the ai_diplomacy.lua file:
(Program Files)\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron III\script

Country specific modifiers are in the individual country file found in the "country" subfolder. (CTRL+F and search for "invite")

You can open .lua files with notepad.

Something I have always found annoying is that it is basically impossible to recreate the historical Axis via diplomacy. Aside from getting in Italy and Japan, it requires special events to rope in Finland, Hungary, and Romania, and even Bulgaria is more difficult than you might expect, but at least Bulgaria is a possibility. This information explains why this is the case. Likewise, even the Allies, the game's de facto diplomats, can't create their own historical faction since again the base neutrality of most of their members has to be lowered by special event first.

Yes, precisely. HOI3 isn't really a true-to-life simulation, it just has certain historical triggers that direct the flow of historical events. The problem is that if you "game" the system and don't play historically, winning the game is stupidly easy. As Italy I can conquer the whole middle east and mediterranean by 1939, and by 1940 have the British Isles and all of Africa under Italian control. No one steps in to stop me because they aren't scripted to go to war until German invades Poland.

Anyways, a "sandbox" (ahistorical) game is very difficult to play because of the diplomatic restrictions the game imposes. What's more, these restrictions are overly simplified, which prevents historically plausible events.

Am I correct in assuming that the `we're both at war with the same guy` clause also overrides all the country-specific effects? It also looks like some countries that have 80+ base neutrality are always going to be at 0 accept chance even if you coup a favorable government into them (such as Sweden).
Yes, this check happens before all others, and overrides everything else.

It looks like the general rule of thumb is to first make sure your target has a favorable government, and then start to influence them, since you get an influence bonus by having matching governments anyway. Make a list of the starting base neutrality of every nation and work on those who are the lowest first.
Anyone know where to find this information? I can't seem to find base neutrality anywhere.
Edit: props to Eqqman for getting this information. This will be very useful.
 
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Anyone know where to find this information? I can't seem to find base neutrality anywhere.

Edit: props to Eqqman for getting this information. This will be very useful.

It was my pleasure! These are all from the `countries`.txt files. I sent you a PM on one issue- where did you find the bracket formulas? I wanted to verify that they are chosen based on "greater than" vs "greater than or equal to" base neutrality, since that makes a huge difference in who is eligible for diplomacy.

I'm also suspecting that there is still another factor that can come into play on accepting a faction invite. I've done two games as a "diplomacy only" Axis, and the first time through after I used a coup to get France out of the Allies, they were either `maybe` or `unlikely` (I forget which, but the point is they did accept an invite), however in my second game they are sitting at `impossible`, even though the factors that affect diplomacy as you outlined are the same.

In game #2 I haven't been able to get any nation to join me whose chance is less than 20%, which includes France (15%). In this game I have a handful of other nations that should be giving me 10 - 15% chance but are sitting at `impossible` (and 20%, from Brazil for example, was `maybe`). So it seems something else is also coming into play, and I don't know what yet. But at least now we have a solid footing for further research and aren't just guessing.
 
Nice info. Good to know. I just put the cart in front of the horse and invade all those countries and take over for the leadership bonuses, so I never actually worry about their political aspirations. And yes, from Hungary, to Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria to Romania, it is all gray. Why worry about useless puppets and their sub-par infantry units and poor AI, when you can just own them wholesale.
 
Why worry about useless puppets and their sub-par infantry units and poor AI, when you can just own them wholesale.

Well, you know you can win already, so it's a change of pace...

I think I've identified factors that lower your chances by 15% for every nation, but I still need to test it to be sure.
 
Nice info. Good to know. I just put the cart in front of the horse and invade all those countries and take over for the leadership bonuses, so I never actually worry about their political aspirations. And yes, from Hungary, to Yugoslavia, to Bulgaria to Romania, it is all gray. Why worry about useless puppets and their sub-par infantry units and poor AI, when you can just own them wholesale.

The only proper way of testing how useful are Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania is multiplayer. Destroying these countries as Germany in 39-40 IMO won't pay back before Barbarossa in 41. MP, LP and resources you get from them is a long term investment. In 41 you need to defeat SU asap and the divs of minor Axis countries are big advantage. If you cannot substantially weaken or defeat SU in 41, the profits you would have made from annexing minor Axis countries has no real use in 42, 43 or 44 because it may be too late. I am talking about the situation where GER and SU players are both at least decent players who can use the potential of their countries (in IC, units built, research etc.) to the fullest. Axis minors of course are not spearheads but they give the numbers which is a waste for GER to achieve on its own. Axis minors can just stand on the static sections of front or cover beaches in the Atlantic etc. If you had to use your own MP for these tasks (like garrisons in the Atlantic coasts and other ways of wasting MP in multiplayer against human UK and US), you would get to zero MP much faster IMO.

If any of these minors are very hard to invite (Romania?) in the latest vanilla version then maybe I would reconsider this given the amount of LP needed to get them in.


But of course in single player on normal difficulty, a below average player can pretty much do anything he wants (like building no armors) and still win easily. It is no benchmark for evaluation of Axis minors.
 
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I have not got FTM yet but did get a chance to play it recently with the latest Lua files. It was bizarre. I did not enable the mods on that install, just the lua and ran a hands off to see what happens. 1945 and USA still has not been attacked by Japan, Sweden joined the allies, The Swiss joined them too, as well as many other countries that simply are committing suicide to do so. I turned off FOW and was amazed to see that the UK had one single division protecting India with stacks of Japs pouring in through Burma. Stupid AI. The last straw was in 1945 when Vichy France joined the Comitern. Weird. I was keen to buy FTM and reinstall HOI3 on my PC, but not so keen now. Changes like the OP mentions are worth investigating. The AI needs a complete overhaul for this game to get closer to its potential. Perhaps it was just that lua beta, but my test run of FTM showed more bizarre AI behaviour than I saw in SF.
 
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Well done. This is a great explanation of the related lua file, so everyone can better understand it. Good job, man.:)
 
+1 Sticky
 
Veldmaarschalk has added this to the `Major Threads` sticky, so we're good!
 
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