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Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 6:31:33 PM

Flaviusx

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Please change this back to the old values.

I've tried the new patch and the new rules suck. I'm used to having Italy surrender when Naples falls.

That's not happening anymore and I'm practically having to fight all the way up the peninsula to force a surrender, and this is frankly not even worth the bother as the Allies. Under the new rules it is much better to invade France in 1943 and let the Mediterranean hang. Just knock out Libya and call it a day.

For the record, in my latest game Italian morale is at 29% as of August of 1943 and the peninsula is stuffed to the gills with Germans making it extremely difficult to gain any ground. That would be fine, if Italy had surrendered.

Right now Italy is a bitter ender country in a way it never was in real life.

The original rules were fine and worked to force the surrender right around the time and place it happened in real life. Go back to these.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 7:00:09 PM

Steely Glint

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+1. This needs to be restored to what it was.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 7:27:01 PM

DeriKuk

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quote:

I've tried the new patch and the new rules suck. I'm used to having Italy surrender when Naples falls.

That's not happening anymore

I am FOR the new rules. As I type this, my game AI is playing in a game where Italy surrendered at the instant that NAPLES WAS OCCUPIED. I suspect that it goes hand-in-hand with the level of Italian morale at that time. Make an effort to beat up on the Reggia Marina BEFORE you invade, so as to reduce Italian morale.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 8:30:09 PM

Flaviusx

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Okay, I finally got an Italian surrender. I had to take EVERY city south of Rome to do it. This is really too much. Was a hell of a grind, since every one of these was occupied. I also had to hunt down a few Regia Marina units and kill more or less the entire Italian army in the Soviet Union to do it.

By the time Italy surrendered, she didn't have a single unit on the map save the garrison in Albania.

C'mon.

The old rule was better.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 8:34:45 PM

Flaviusx

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quote:

ORIGINAL: hjalmar99

quote:

I've tried the new patch and the new rules suck. I'm used to having Italy surrender when Naples falls.

That's not happening anymore

I am FOR the new rules. As I type this, my game AI is playing in a game where Italy surrendered at the instant that NAPLES WAS OCCUPIED. I suspect that it goes hand-in-hand with the level of Italian morale at that time. Make an effort to beat up on the Reggia Marina BEFORE you invade, so as to reduce Italian morale.

Yeah, except that I shouldn't have to destroy the entire navy and more or less everything else to get a surrender here.

The Italians threw in the towel while still having much of their navy and millions under arms.

The way things stand now you have to destroy them almost to a man and grab half the peninsula to force a surrender. This is pretty close a bitter ender rule. It's to the point where I really question if it is worth the trouble as the allies. I think you're better off going for an early D Day with this bitter ender Italy.

The old rule was fine and worked fine and I don't understand why this was changed.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/9/2017 10:22:08 PM

Capitaine

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That's better than Britain. I'd destroyed the RN, the RAF and occupied the entire island and still no surrender. If the NM wasn't 0% by that time what the heck would it take?

I don't know about the new Italy rules, but surrender "theory" should really be considered and standardized to some degree.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 12:27:54 AM

sPzAbt653

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quote:

The old rule was fine and worked fine and I don't understand why this was changed.

+1
However, at this point I only play the 653H Mod, and that does not include the latest change to Italian surrender so I don't have to deal with it

quote:

surrender "theory" should really be considered and standardized to some degree.

I don't think I agree at all to this. I think each country should be looked at for its individual motivations for entering and leaving the war. In the case of Britain, it was the United Kingdom, and this Kingdom wasn't reliant on the island of England to remain in being.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 4:14:58 PM

Capitaine

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A pleasant fiction.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 5:06:20 PM

DeriKuk

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quote:

... surrender "theory" should really be considered and standardized to some degree.

I agree, but it should not be entirely predictable. Once minimum surrender standards have been met, there should be a fuzzy "barrier" of probability ... but no certainty until another barrier of inevitability has been crossed.

Example: The previous standard of Sicilian occupation could be the Italian minimum, while the inevitability comes when either 1) Rome is taken, or 2) Two of Naples, Genoa, Venice, Turin, Milan or Bologna are occupied and held.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 6:22:18 PM

Flaviusx

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quote:

ORIGINAL: hjalmar99

quote:

... surrender "theory" should really be considered and standardized to some degree.

I agree, but it should not be entirely predictable. Once minimum surrender standards have been met, there should be a fuzzy "barrier" of probability ... but no certainty until another barrier of inevitability has been crossed.

Example: The previous standard of Sicilian occupation could be the Italian minimum, while the inevitability comes when either 1) Rome is taken, or 2) Two of Naples, Genoa, Venice, Turin, Milan or Bologna are occupied and held.

That is far too high of a requirement.

Naples should be enough by itself. Italy was looking for an out by the time Sicily fell, I certainly don't see how they stay in until Rome or some northern Italian cities fall. Again, these are near bitter end conditions. They weren't going to hold out that long.

The whole point of the Italian campaign (or one of the big ones) was to force an early surrender. Absent that and the clear indications that Badoglio and company were looking to bail, it might not have happened at all.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 7:06:21 PM

DeriKuk

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quote:

That is far too high of a requirement.

Naples should be enough by itself.

What I am proposing is the Inevitability of surrender limit. Depending on the existing morale - affecting the probability - surrender could very well take place at the minimum level: the occupation of Sicily.

We should avoid a predictable, mechanisticbarrier. There should be an element of uncertainty.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 9:16:04 PM

Flaviusx

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quote:

ORIGINAL: hjalmar99

quote:

That is far too high of a requirement.

Naples should be enough by itself.

What I am proposing is the Inevitability of surrender limit. Depending on the existing morale - affecting the probability - surrender could very well take place at the minimum level: the occupation of Sicily.

We should avoid a predictable, mechanisticbarrier. There should be an element of uncertainty.

Why?

Things are pretty mechanistic for everyone else. Why is Italy so special?

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 10:05:11 PM

DeriKuk

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quote:

Things are pretty mechanistic for everyone else. Why is Italy so special?

Italy should not be special. It only serves as the example for the general case: Limited uncertainty after the minimal (lower) standard for surrender has been met and is maintained. The probability of surrender on each turn where the condition exists, could be the inverse of the prevailing morale level. Of course, when the maximal surrender standard is met, the probability becomes 100%.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 10:47:08 PM

Capitaine

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Not a bad concept hjalmar.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/10/2017 11:39:20 PM

James Taylor

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Correct me should I be wrong, but wasn't this to stop a gamey move from the Allies to force an early Italian surrender using its Med assets?

It seems you could get an early Italian DoW by moving the Allied Med units while positioning them for an invasion at the moment the Italians enter the war.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 12:29:12 AM

Leadwieght

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Hi Seamonkey (or is it James Taylor?),
Yes it's been my experience that the Allies could both trigger an early DoW by Italy and take advantage of it by making an early invasion as you say. The higher Italian surrender threshold should make this gamey move less attractive.
LW

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 4:21:38 AM

FF_1079

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In my game as the Brits - I thought that the way Italy surrendered was a bit easy - the entire nation suddenly turned into my territory, allowing me to transport - not amphib invade - any Sicily troops directly to Northern Italy. There were few German troops in Italy, 1 Heavy Tank, 1 Corps and 1 Fighter, so only a tiny bit of territory south of Rome stayed German controlled. I had not taken Rome when it fell, though I was close to it - I felt that for me to get all the territory flipped to my nation - I should have had to take Rome, not just Naples.

Perhaps there is a compromise here where a Decision Event allows the Germans the ability to garrison Northern Italy with some troops based on Italy surrendering the next turn.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 7:49:45 AM

Flaviusx

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In real life, Italy flipped entirely, but was also rapidly occupied by the Germans, who anticipated their defection.

If your Germans are having problems dealing with this, that's an entirely different issue than Italian surrender per se.

In may games, Germany generally has already flooded Italy with units and can respond to the flip, although it has a tendency of not dealing quickly with Northern Italy.

It certainly puts up a strong line of units (including engineers building fortifications) directly north of the Allied forces, and makes things quite a slog. Landings in Sicily should trigger a strong German reaction (including pulling units from the Eastern Front.) It's not ignoring the Med. I would tweak this script a bit to place some garrisons/corps in Northern Italy to make sure the entire country can be dealt with when it flips, but otherwise, there is no problem here.

Italy itself should surrender rather easily and if this is a response to the gamey exploit of suiciding the French fleet against the Regia Marina, it is the wrong one. The right one? For starters, weaken the French navy. And make the Adriatic an exclusion zone prior to Italian entry, so as to make prepositioning more difficult. Or, perhaps, lower NM morale worth of the Italian navy.

In actual real life Italy surrendered with much of its navy intact, which promptly sailed into Allied hands. (You could say it flipped.) So I don't buy this notion that sinking the Regia Marina should have such an impact on Italian surrender one way or the other. Italy threw in the towel for good solid, sensible reasons and was never going to go down in flames to the bitter end in German fashion.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 11:08:16 AM

Leadwieght

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I agree with FlaviusX that Italy was never going to be a "bitter ender" like Nazi Germany, but, in the interest of game balance I'd like to keep the higher threshold for Italy's surrender in the game. It was just a bit too easy to knock it out early in the game under the old rules. (BTW, does killing the Italian fleet really lower its NM? Manual Part 1 6.6.3 seems to suggest that destroying a unit raises the NM of the country that destroys said unit--different from SC2). Or, if you lower the threshold back to its old level, then give Italy a few more garrisons at the start, to hold a few of its ports.

I like the idea of giving the Germans a chance to put some units in Italy via DE, but it might work better as an automatic script that kicks in when Italy surrenders. I'd advocate for a SMALL German force--maybe 3-4 garrisons that pop up in Rome, Genoa, Milan, Bologna only if those cities are not occupied by Allied units at the moment. That way, the main decision is still left to the Axis player, whether he wants to commit serious German resources to fighting the Allies as far down the Boot as possible.

IRL, I think the German High Command seriously considered abandoning most of the peninsula right after the surrender and Badoglio's coup and instead fighting it out at the Gothic Line. Since this is a game, and not a pure historical simulation, I think this is the kind of decision that should be left to the players as much as possible.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 1:02:35 PM

Flaviusx

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If this is going to be done in the interests of game balance, then the allied response is simple: D Day in 1943. Only put in enough in the Med to take out Libya and otherwise plan on an early landing in France from the getgo.

I'm not that interested in game balance. I don't consider the ETO a 50/50 proposition. The majority of the time, the Nazis should lose. If the idea of this game is to make both sides equal, than I'm out, because that's not the way it was.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 2:27:10 PM

Leadwieght

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Everyone has their own preferences, of course. For myself, I don't require a 50/50 game balance, nor was I advocating for it. But if the Axis is virtually certain to lose, then it's not going to a terribly interesting game to me to play as the Axis against another person, though it might still be entertaining to try to frustrate the Allied AI as long as possible.

For person-to-person games, if the balance is really tipped heavily towards the Allies, I suppose one could always do mirror-matches and see which player wins faster or more convincingly as the Allies, but that requires more time than some of us have.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 2:57:41 PM

Ancient One

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

In real life, Italy flipped entirely, but was also rapidly occupied by the Germans, who anticipated their defection.

The problem is that the Germans can't do that in the game as easily as they did in history. It's not reasonable to have ~30 locations in Italy and Albania occupied by German units when Italy surrenders.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/11/2017 7:51:20 PM

Leadwieght

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"The problem is that the Germans can't do that in the game as easily as they did in history. It's not reasonable to have ~30 locations in Italy and Albania occupied by German units when Italy surrenders."

Agreed, Zagys. That's why I suggested for the MP version that we have an autoscript with a modest deployment of German garrisons at a few key cities, still leaving the basic choice of where and how strongly to defend the peninsula to the Axis player.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that, when playing against the AI, the German units one sees in Central Italy after Italian surrender are the result of a script, and were not actually moved there ahead of time by the AI

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/12/2017 2:10:33 AM

Flaviusx

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I don't object to putting in a few units to flip over terrain in northern Italy, especially since I first suggested it myself.

What I do object to is this talk about "balance." It has no place in a historical wargame. I don't want balance. I want historicity. And historicity is very unbalanced, happily so in this case, since I don't believe in giving Nazis a fair shake.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/12/2017 3:39:37 AM

sPzAbt653

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This is a larger issue than Italy, as oddities happen all over the map when countries surrender. SC3 has a great mechanic for dealing with Hex Ownership Changes, I think that Hubert must have taken the time to code in a layer of sweet jam. You will notice that hexes will change ownership based on what I am guessing is local unit superiority. This is a great feature and I have yet to come across any instance where this doesn't work well. However, this check seems to happen PRIOR to Surrenders, and that is an issue in most circumstances.
It would not be necessary to change the balance or add unit scripts or anything else, IF it is at all possible to do the Hex Ownership Check AFTER countries surrender.

Edit: The part in red is wrong, apologies to H&B and to anyone else that might have read this. I analyze this a little better in post #28 below.

< Message edited by sPzAbt653 -- 3/14/2017 7:43:36 AM >

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/12/2017 5:15:22 AM

battlevonwar

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If Italy was brought into the War by French, British Aggression or threat perhaps her instincts should be different. For instance a gamy move to force her to surrender just so the Allies can delete a big Navy and bunch of Game Pieces?

With the terrain the way it is the Axis will garrison the heck out of Sicily and Italy(I do in all my Strategic War Games where Italy is hard coded to fold) cause making her fold takes a bit.(one German General was quoted was you should have started from the top down rather the bottom up to the Western Allies or something to the effect)

Italy fought hard in WW1 but like the French I think had a similar emptiness about the loss of life for nothing.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

In real life, Italy flipped entirely, but was also rapidly occupied by the Germans, who anticipated their defection.

If your Germans are having problems dealing with this, that's an entirely different issue than Italian surrender per se.

In may games, Germany generally has already flooded Italy with units and can respond to the flip, although it has a tendency of not dealing quickly with Northern Italy.

It certainly puts up a strong line of units (including engineers building fortifications) directly north of the Allied forces, and makes things quite a slog. Landings in Sicily should trigger a strong German reaction (including pulling units from the Eastern Front.) It's not ignoring the Med. I would tweak this script a bit to place some garrisons/corps in Northern Italy to make sure the entire country can be dealt with when it flips, but otherwise, there is no problem here.

Italy itself should surrender rather easily and if this is a response to the gamey exploit of suiciding the French fleet against the Regia Marina, it is the wrong one. The right one? For starters, weaken the French navy. And make the Adriatic an exclusion zone prior to Italian entry, so as to make prepositioning more difficult. Or, perhaps, lower NM morale worth of the Italian navy.

In actual real life Italy surrendered with much of its navy intact, which promptly sailed into Allied hands. (You could say it flipped.) So I don't buy this notion that sinking the Regia Marina should have such an impact on Italian surrender one way or the other. Italy threw in the towel for good solid, sensible reasons and was never going to go down in flames to the bitter end in German fashion.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/12/2017 3:20:32 PM

Capitaine

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

I don't object to putting in a few units to flip over terrain in northern Italy, especially since I first suggested it myself.

What I do object to is this talk about "balance." It has no place in a historical wargame. I don't want balance. I want historicity. And historicity is very unbalanced, happily so in this case, since I don't believe in giving Nazis a fair shake.

Well, there are a number of conventions and events to bolster the Allies in the game in the name of "balance", because using historical or conventional numbers and rubric were creating too many effective winning stratagems for the Axis. The British and Russian "surrender" rules are among them. Do you object to that? Or do you only object to "balancing" which works against the historical losers?

Personally, I want historicity in all respects, and reasonable, standard assumptions for nations across the board when the events of reality cannot be identified.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/14/2017 7:50:56 AM

sPzAbt653

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I just closely watched an Italian surrender, and what I said in post 25 above is wrong. Here is a screen shot of what we are all familiar with [I am the Allies, computer running the Axis]. At the end of my turn Italy surrendered, all Italian units were removed. Hex Ownership then happened and now that I watched it closely, I can see that it worked as designed and in proper order. The screen shot is from the beginning of my next turn. The reason Italy didn't go back to Germany/Axis is because all the town/cities were transferred to the Allies, and they don't change ownership unless physically occupied. So all the town/cities would have to be somehow Axis occupied to avoid this situation. Or, is it reasonable to Transfer Italy to Germany when Italy surrenders ? Or would that create more nightmares ?

Attachment (1)

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/14/2017 9:12:33 AM

CapitaineHaddock

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Flaviusx

I don't object to putting in a few units to flip over terrain in northern Italy, especially since I first suggested it myself.

What I do object to is this talk about "balance." It has no place in a historical wargame. I don't want balance. I want historicity. And historicity is very unbalanced, happily so in this case, since I don't believe in giving Nazis a fair shake.

This discussion has been ongoing ever since the inception of the series. I am sorry to say that I couldn't disagree more.
Historicity is best sought after in books. What we can all agree on is that we want a degree of credibility, not historicity.
If we have historicity, the axis loose every time.
This game series has a large and loyal following of competitive P2P-fans.
The moment the game becomes too heavily tipped in favor of one side, they will shelve it- and so will those of us who are not really interested in AI-play.
For my part, I will simply play the AI to learn the game mechanics, then I very quickly loose interest.
The good thing is that everyone is free to tweak the game. Perhaps one day even create their own scripts for units etc.
But the Vanilla 39' scenario without tweaking is the reference point and should stay competitive.

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RE: Italian Surrender - 3/14/2017 1:57:51 PM

Leadwieght

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I have to agree with CapitaineHaddock. A "game" where one side can't win is not much of game. Nor is it necessarily a particularly good history lesson.

In SC3, I think that between two human players of roughly equal ability The Allied player will have a slight advantage (maybe 60/40) and I'm fine with that, because the Axis player always has the chance to "steal" a victory if he moves quickly enough in the early years, before Russian and US production overwhelms the Axis.

And, IMHO, that describes pretty well the "historicity" of the period 1939-1941, if not the actual course of events. I think history is fluid and there are seldom, if ever pre-determined outcomes, especially in something as complex and chancy as a world war. Sorry for the sermon, but I'm a bit passionate about the subject of freewill vs. determinism.

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Post #: 30