trouble with neutrality

[slayer114]

Hay everyone. Bit of an old question here but I am having trouble lowering my neutrality enough to be able to attack my neighbours.
I'm playing at Italy and after dealing with Ethiopia I want to occupy Yugoslavia and Albania. Trouble is, I can’t attack them because my neutrality is too high. I tried quite a lot of techniques to worsen my relationship with them. I embargoed them, I get my spies to increase the threat, but it seems to only have a very small impact (lowering my neutrality by like 2%).
I also agreed to intervene in the Spanish civil war but that seemed to have very little effect. I could not declare war on republican Spain, all I found I was able to do was offer Nationalist Spain a lend lease.
I could not form alliances with any other powers, but I did proclaim guarantees with many of the axis powers to improve my relations with them, but It got to 1938 and I had only lowered my neutrality by about 5%
I know I can cheat to lower my neutrality but I would rather not. Anyway if anyone could help me with this I would appreciate it.

 

[son of liberty]

Are you using spies to increase the threat of one of your neighbors? Try increasing the threat of France or UK.

 

[GrandVezir]

To flesh out what son of liberty said: you lower your neutrality faster by increasing the threat of neighbors outside your ideology that also have large amounts of IC. Yugoslavia is a paternal autocrat with relatively low IC, so raising threat on them will not reduce Italy's neutrality by much.

So as Italy you want to raise threat on the UK and France to reduce your neutrality quickly, and you also want to raise threat on whichever neighbors you actually want to attack. (You can probably skip Albania, since you can take them over via event in 1939 anyway.)

 

[Kovax]

Normally, GER will enact a few diplomatic decisions which will drastically lower Italy's neutrality. Anschluss of Austria in early '38 gives a token reduction, but Munich near the end of '38 and 1st Vienna in early '39 should tip you over the edge, if you've bumped FRA's threat up a bit, or if the Republic wins the SCW and your spies target them instead.

The "cheezy" way to handle it is to pick the most restrictive production laws in early '36, choose ministers who actually reduce IC output (if available), and if necessary you may have to create a little Dissent by lowering consumer goods to create an IC penalty; a bad event might help. If you can get your "effective IC" below 30, a decision appears titled "Prepare for War", which lowers your Neutrality gradually over a 6-12 month span by something like 50 points.

After enacting the decision, you can undo the damage: pacifying the angry consumers, changing your laws back to more aggressive ones, putting competent ministers in place (assuming you've got a competent minister to put in that place), etc., and wait for the effect to lower your Neutrality. Combined with a bit of Threat in the right place, you should be good to go ballistic by the end of '36 or so.

Of course, your own increase in Threat for declaring war will in turn allow FRA, the UK, and possibly the SU to enact better laws, and therefore offer a harder challenge for GER. Go for it, but beware of the consequences, or else wait for GER to do its thing and take advantage of the chaos they create.