How to improve peace conference (solution included)

[TK3600]

Yeah yeah, we know peace conference mechanic sucks. It creates border gore when AI decide Japan needs Sicily from Italy. Numerous puppet created with conflicting logic, such as East Germany, West Germany, German Reich co-existing. I know what is needed to fix majority of problem, and it should be very easy to implement.

Problem 1: Puppeting/Liberating is allowed on territory you dont own/your faction dont own.

Why: Normally there is a 10x score cost penalty applied when taking territory you do not control. However you can get around it by puppeting. You will see most of your land you took disappear if AI decide to puppet nation under your control, and they do not pay the 10x cost when feeding those puppet! Now you get nothing because AI took everything via puppeting.

Solution: Correctly apply the 10x cost penalty for puppeting land you do not own. For the most part you should not touch the land your army didnt touch.

Problem 2: When accounting the territory control for 10x penalty, faction member can take from each other without penalty.

Why: Despite in the same faction, country should not able to land other country control. For example, PRC and China both have core on the territory they took from Japan. It makes no sense PRC would give up the land they occupied to Republic of China easily.

Solution: There is already a define adjusting cost multiplier when controled by faction member, currently at 0.5 for some odd reason. It means AI actually prefers taking land they do not control over what they control as they get a bonus instead of penalty. That is straight up silly and multiplier should be 5x instead. That is what I did in my personal mod.

 

[Zeprion]

There are more than 1 type of alliance. The alliance between American and England was not the same as the alliance between America and the Soviet Union. American and England were should we say true friends, as far as states can be true friends, while America and the Soviet Union was an alliance exclusively out of convenience that only lasted as long as the war lasted. Obviosuly America and England trusted each other more than they trusted the Soivet Union.

This is why I agree with your suggestion and I propose it this way:
1. If you are not in the same faction, you should not, under any circumstance, unless the other faciton willingly gives you, take territory occupied by the other faction.
2. During war, if you are USA and the Soviets but also the Germans are next to you, and you are fighting for 1 German provice next to each other, the army that contributed more troops to the fight should get that German territory.
3. If you are in the same faction, then you should get an x10 score penality for regions that you didn't conquer yourself.
4. The option of "Offer Peace" should be more useful, right now it's useless. Anyone should be able to ask for peace and if you do you will only take states equal to your war progression or 25% of the enemy territory, whichever is lower. This way it's possible to end a war in World War I fashon.
5. Beside "Offer Peace" there should also be "Offer White Peace", again, both sides can do it, in white peace no territory is exchanged regardless of how had the advantage.

And most importantly:
6. Casualities should not matter as much as enemies killed for the warscore.

Casualities mean nothing. I assume that Paradox followed Mussolini's quote of "I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought" to make that casualities is warscore mechanic. But they completly forgot that Mussolini was an idiot. An ally country doesn't care how many people died in your war, it only cares what did you do for the cause, how many enemies you killed, how much territory you occupied. An ally cares how efficient you were in the fight against the enemy, he will not praise you for being totally incompetent and losing thousands of troops for nothing.

The best example is Italy itself, it lost a lot of people during World War I, mostly because of the incompetence of their general, but it didn't gain much territory after the war because the Entente didn't consider them that important in the war, in fact they considered them quite idiotic, being unable to beat the worst army in World War I, Austria-Hungary, that was losing everywhere except in Italy. If that was true, the Soviet Union should have annexed all of Europe given how many Russians died during World War II. So no, your war contribution is should not be the more of your troops die, the higher your warscore. It should be, the more efficient you were at killing enemy troops and taking their territory, the higher your warscore.

 

[Ffire]

If you want to get closer to historical reality, power balance at the moment of the peace conference should be as valuable as war score : you can be a big contributor to the defeat of your ennemy, if, at the end of the war, your economy is crippled, your army exhausted, you'll have trouble to make your voice count. That what happened to UK : they fought since day 1, depleted their manpower so much they needed to disband divisions in 1945, and still, the big talking at the end of war was done between Roosevelt and Stalin)

 

[Áurum]

Yeah yeah, we know peace conference mechanic sucks. It creates border gore when AI decide Japan needs Sicily from Italy. Numerous puppet created with conflicting logic, such as East Germany, West Germany, German Reich co-existing. I know what is needed to fix majority of problem, and it should be very easy to implement.

Problem 1: Puppeting/Liberating is allowed on territory you dont own/your faction dont own.

Why: Normally there is a 10x score cost penalty applied when taking territory you do not control. However you can get around it by puppeting. You will see most of your land you took disappear if AI decide to puppet nation under your control, and they do not pay the 10x cost when feeding those puppet! Now you get nothing because AI took everything via puppeting.

Solution: Correctly apply the 10x cost penalty for puppeting land you do not own. For the most part you should not touch the land your army didnt touch.

Problem 2: When accounting the territory control for 10x penalty, faction member can take from each other without penalty.

Why: Despite in the same faction, country should not able to land other country control. For example, PRC and China both have core on the territory they took from Japan. It makes no sense PRC would give up the land they occupied to Republic of China easily.

Solution: There is already a define adjusting cost multiplier when controled by faction member, currently at 0.5 for some odd reason. It means AI actually prefers taking land they do not control over what they control as they get a bonus instead of penalty. That is straight up silly and multiplier should be 5x instead. That is what I did in my personal mod.

I would add a Kaiserreich-like mechanic in which you cannot puppet countries in peace deals, only annex, and there are events after peace deals to release annexed countries as puppets and to return cores and claims to your allies. This completely solves border gore in the same faction because if the US annexes Vichy, it will automatically return it to Free France via event. If UK annexes West German lands, it will return them via event. If Japan annexes Communist China after puppeting Nationalist China, it won't create a new puppet, it will give it to its previous puppet. And so on.

It doesn't completely solve border gore between different factions, but it's a great improvement.