Thank you for your contributions, Xamand!
I would like to address your points as best I may from my example. After your experiments and from my own calculations, I would postulate that your theory is correct. A nation surrenders to the nation that took the most provinces as long as that nation has taken at least one VP. Your tests 1 and 3 as well as my example removes the possibility that a nation surrenders based on who captures the capital. Your test 2 seems to indicate that you must take at least 1 VP to be considered for the surrender event.
With reference to your first post about your Hungarian conquest of France, I would like to add that the number of VP provinces probably does not matter (except being used to calculate the total number of provinces conquered) as opposed to the number of VP points. My own Japan game bears this theory out. The Germans had conquered a total of 7 VP-bearing provinces whereas I had only conquered 2 VP-bearing provinces, and Italy had conquered 1. Yet France surrendered to me.
I will support the theory with a re-look at my own game. I reloaded my game as Japan on the surrender date and found that:
French VPs captured by Germany:
- Reims (4)
- Lille (2)
- Dunkerque (2)
- Troyes (3)
- Paris (25)
- Le Havre (1)
- Caen (5)
- TOTAL: 42 VP points from 7 VP provinces
French VPs captured by Japan:
- Hanoi (5)
- Saigon (10)
- TOTAL: 15 VP points from 2 VP provinces
French VPs captured by Italy:
- Lyon (2)
Therefore, Germany has the clear lead in terms of both number of VP points captured and number of VP provinces captured compared to Japan/Italy or even Japan + Italy.
French Provinces captured by Germany:
- 44 in Northern France
French Provinces captured by Japan:
- 100 in Indochina
French Provinces captured by Italy:
- 14 in SE France
- 4 in North Africa
- TOTAL: 18
Therefore, Japan now has the clear lead in terms of number of provinces captured compared to Germany. That lead is further increased if you add Italy into the equation. The proposed theory would explain why France chose to surrender to Japan. When it's surrender bar reached 100% (percentage of VPs occupied > National Unity score), it checked and found that Japan had conquered more of its provinces and at least 1 VP, and therefore it surrendered to me.
This could conceivably be explained in practical terms by the programming language used. If you are familiar with HOI3's programming language, you would not find the following line too hard to imagine (for example):
Surrender logic
Surrender_to = TAG { country which captured most provinces }
As a caveat, a programmer could have foreseen that a VP province would need to be captured before a country would consider surrendering to an aggressor and added the following line (for example):
Surrender_to = TAG {{ country which captured most provinces }
AND {country has captured a VP = YES }}
I will now delve into the question of whether the identity of the country that captures the 'tipping point' VP (which, as the name suggests, is the last province to tip the Surrender bar into/over 100%) matters. In my example, if I could prove that Germany was the one that captured the tipping point VP (yet France surrendered to someone who did NOT capture the tipping point VP i.e. Japan) then this would mean that the tipping point VP does not matter. This would matter, because imagine if a country only surrendered to an opponent which captured the tipping point VP, then the game would be open to exploitative 'kill stealers'.
I will attempt to prove that Germany did capture the tipping point VP by calculating the impact of such a capture on the Surrender bar.
As you can see from the picture, at the time of surrender, 51.8% of France's VPs were occupied, and their national unity value had fallen to 47.9%. Now, France has a total of 114 VPs in total. This can be verified by loading up France on 01/01/1936 and looking at the Statistics tab. A total of 59 VPs were occupied at the time of surrender, and 55 VPs remained unoccupied. Divide 59 by 114 and multiply by 100 and you will get 51.75, which rounds up to 51.8%. So far, so good. Now, how could we determine that the Germans captured the tipping point VP and not the Italians, given that the only other savegame that I possess was too far away to provide evidence? The Japanese certainly did not capture the tipping point VP. I had captured the 2 Indochina VPs about a month before France surrendered. Therefore, either the Italians or the Germans must have stole the cheese. Fortunately, we may observe that 3 German captured VPs were located on the front line and 1 Italian captured VP was located on the front line. Coincidentally, the VP captured by the Italians was Lyon (2VPs), and the VPs captured by the Germans were Troyes (3VPs), Reims (4VPs), and Caen (5VPs)! The number of VPs in each provinces was different. Let us use that to calculate the tipping point VP.
Now the math comes in:
We know that France's VP occupied percentage must have been below 47.9% the day before the surrender. Otherwise, France would have surrendered a day earlier. During the day of surrender, France's VP occupied percentage must have risen from below 47.9% to 51.8%, hence leading to the figures as seen in the screenshot above.
Difference in VP percentages:
51.8% - 47.9% = 3.9%
Lets express those percentages in VP points:
3.9/100 * 114 = 4.446
Therefore, during the day of surrender, a
minimum of 4.446 French VP points may have been captured. Why minimum? Because if you had captured less than that number, France's VP occupied percentage could not have rised from 47.9% to 51.8%.
For example, assume I had captured 4 VPs:
4 VPs in percentage terms:
4/114 * 100 = 3.5088%
Assuming that France's occupied VP percentage was 47.7% just a fraction below 47.8% (by no means necessary)
47.7% + 3.5088% = 51.2088%, which falls short of the screenshotted figure of 51.8%
Therefore, the tipping point VP cannot have been a VP of less than 5 points, which neatly rules out all VPs besides Caen. Hence, the award goes to the Germans for capturing Caen as the VP to tip France's surrender bar over 100% and cause their surrender. My earlier guess that Reims was the tipping point VP has been proven to be wrong. Since Germany captured the tipping point VP but France surrendered to Japan, the tipping point VP cannot be the deciding factor. Therefore, kill stealing is quite out of the question.
