POWs, Surrendering

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    • POWs, Surrendering

      In reality, a nation doesn't wait until its entire army is destroyed, nor do they wait until a unit to get destroyed before surrendering. This game does not currently incorporate this feature of war. So this is my proposal:

      Surrendering a unit: I propose a new button when you look at a unit that's fighting that reads 'surrender' beside the retreat button with a white flag as its symbol. Then at least one enemy infantry unit must go to the territory to pick up the prisoners to put them in their nearest POW camp. If every enemy unit in the territory/city leaves before the surrendering unit is picked up, it goes free, and if it can capture territory, it reclaims the territory.

      Surrendering a country: With this function you can surrender your country (not that many players would) to any country you are currently at war with. This would make all your units go to a POW camp, and all your territory, resources, and missiles to be handed over. The cities would not be annexed when handed over. Units that are surrendered CANNOT recapture the territory they're in, whether they can usually capture or not. If they leave a POW camp, and win the subsequent battle, they still cannot capture the territory. Of course, other countries can also surrender to you!

      POW camps: Can be built in friendly and annexed cities as a building, and upgrading it increases the amount of units it can hold. If the city is captured, or the building is destroyed, all the prisoners move to the nearest friendly territory. If they cannot, they will be stuck in the city, but as a free unit. If the building loses a level, the number of prisoners more than the new capacity return to the nearest friendly territory. If any units are evicted, they will automatically attack units in the city, and if they succeed with something that can capture territory, the city is theirs. So be careful with where you put these camps and what you use to guard them.

      What you can do with the prisoners: I propose several options of what you can do with you prisoners. They are as follows:
      1. Kill them (requires a unit that does damage).
      2. Convert to your troops. Takes 1 day. 50% chance of success. If it's a failure, all you've wasted is time.
      3. Release them. If you're feeling especially nice, you can release the prisoners to their territory. Of course, this option doesn't work if the country had already surrendered.

      If you don't have a POW camp, but an enemy surrenders: In this case, the prisoners remain where they are, and if you have a unit that does damage there, you can choose to destroy the unit. If it's just the unit, you can release them as well.
    • It's a good idea, but it could be taken advantage of by cheaters. If they created a fake account on a different IP address and take control of an opposing country then they could surrender it to their real account. Even if the cheater is caught the damage would already be done. So I would suggest putting some limiters on when you could surrender.

      For the country to surrender it must have at least one of the following:
      A) At least half of it's territory conquered. If they are at war with multiple countries they can surrender to the country of their preference (that they are at war with). So that people can't just go to war with a favorite country when they are nearly defeated just to turn their remaining stuff over to them I would suggest putting a time limit on how long you have to be at war with them. Say about 7 days.
      B) All of their units destroyed.
      C) All of their cities conquered + all infantry units. If they can't mobilize anything and they can't take anything over then there really isn't any point in continuing.

      Of course these limiters wouldn't completely eliminate the cheaters but they would slow them down considerably.

      On the subject of what you can do with prisoners my modifications would go as follows:

      A) I wouldn't call it conversion I would call it brainwashing. You would also have to research this in the tech tree and there would be units called Interrogators who would have to be present during the process. Just like units conquering cities, the more Interrogators you have present the greater likelihood of success you will have in brainwashing them. The effectiveness of the Interrogators will be controlled by their level of research.

      B) Prisoner trades. You can trade prisoners (only to the country they came from) for anything you could trade for in a normal trade (i.e. Provinces, Resources, Relations, and (of course) other prisoners. I'm not sure how you would add it but I would also add a counter that tells you how many of your units have been captured by the enemy and what countries have them.

      On the units themselves. As my brother pointed out, it usually isn't the country that gives a unit the order to surrender. So instead of having a surrender option I would give units a morale bar and If their health and morale are both below fifty percent then a chance of surrender bar will appear.
    • tinydragon303 wrote:

      It's a good idea, but it could be taken advantage of by cheaters. If they created a fake account on a different IP address and take control of an opposing country then they could surrender it to their real account. Even if the cheater is caught the damage would already be done. So I would suggest putting some limiters on when you could surrender.

      For the country to surrender it must have at least one of the following:
      A) At least half of it's territory conquered. If they are at war with multiple countries they can surrender to the country of their preference (that they are at war with). So that people can't just go to war with a favorite country when they are nearly defeated just to turn their remaining stuff over to them I would suggest putting a time limit on how long you have to be at war with them. Say about 7 days.
      B) All of their units destroyed.
      C) All of their cities conquered + all infantry units. If they can't mobilize anything and they can't take anything over then there really isn't any point in continuing.

      Of course these limiters wouldn't completely eliminate the cheaters but they would slow them down considerably.

      On the subject of what you can do with prisoners my modifications would go as follows:

      A) I wouldn't call it conversion I would call it brainwashing. You would also have to research this in the tech tree and there would be units called Interrogators who would have to be present during the process. Just like units conquering cities, the more Interrogators you have present the greater likelihood of success you will have in brainwashing them. The effectiveness of the Interrogators will be controlled by their level of research.

      B) Prisoner trades. You can trade prisoners (only to the country they came from) for anything you could trade for in a normal trade (i.e. Provinces, Resources, Relations, and (of course) other prisoners. I'm not sure how you would add it but I would also add a counter that tells you how many of your units have been captured by the enemy and what countries have them.

      On the units themselves. As my brother pointed out, it usually isn't the country that gives a unit the order to surrender. So instead of having a surrender option I would give units a morale bar and If their health and morale are both below fifty percent then a chance of surrender bar will appear.
      I didn't think of much of this actually, it occurred to me after I posted (but I was too lazy to edit my post). But these are my thoughts:

      A) Half of its territory is too vague, in my opinion. A game might be running for tens of days and maybe a country has lots of captured territory as well, but it wants to surrender (maybe it doesn't have much units and is getting quickly overrun by another). Do you mean half of its homeland territory or half of its territory including captured territory?

      B) I disagree with this one. Half of my post was so that this was to be prevented.

      C) I disagree as well, but not completely like last time. For example, Nazi Germany surrendered with thousands, whole divisions, of infantry. I'm not ignoring that they once had millions, but they still could fight on for a little while had they not surrendered. They also had some cities left, so I propose this instead:

      Half of cities taken and 75% of infantry units killed. I admit my suggestion is not without fault, as cities can be defined by all cities or only homeland cities included.

      What to do with prisoners:

      A) I agree with this one, and can't think of anything better.

      B) I agree as well. This is a feature in real war I overlooked.

      The morale bar for units suggestion: I would like to expand on that. Perhaps morale can also show how well units fight (directly affect damage values), as well as determine surrender. I have seen this request in a lot of other threads as well (the morale bar), and think it could be part of the game sometime soon. That said, I still want to keep the surrender option, because if you see no point in fighting on or just want to tie an enemy unit to a position, you can manually surrender. But this is not to say your suggestion is at all bad.
    • Thanks for your input. I hope some of the moderators are watching this thread because I think it's a good idea. In response to some of the discrepancies you had:

      A) I agree with half being too vague. I think that it should be all conquered territory + half of the homeland territory.

      B) It may have been the reason why you made the thread but I would still like to have it as a card on the table. Some people like to fight until the last man but once they're out of men they've got nothing and realize they've lost but don't want to wait until everything else is taken because that's just salt in the wound for them.

      C) I agree with your input and for clarification just like A, I would say all captured cities + half of the homeland cities

      I agree with your input on the morale bar and I could see how still having the surrender button would be useful. I hadn't thought of it that way.
    • My response:

      A) and C): I think we shouldn't need all captured territory, because I've been in a game where a country lost virtually all of its homeland territory but had plenty of conquered territories&cities. I believe that it should be and/or with these two.

      B) I don't think either of us can change each other's minds on this issue, and I think someone else (moderator other user) should settle this debate. I don't see any viable solution with just the two of us on this issue.
      But other than that, I believe we now have similar views on all the other parts off this suggestion. Again, I must thank you for your input on this idea.
    • I think just keeping it to the units themselves is fine but an entire country can be problematic.

      Units in the game currently fight to the death. I see very few times any retreat and that has only been due to an airstrike.

      I think 50% morale is too high. 25% morale should be at the point to where a unit may break. POW camps et al sounds too bulky and getting too detailed. A lot of this game is abstract. If the units just break then they can just run away. They either cease to exist on the spot meaning people dropped their gear and said screw this poop (censors) or they retreat "orderly" and hopefully if they are your troops you can recover them and return them to the fight. If not they just keep retreating away from enemy forces. You can either choose to ignore them or continue to fight them to put them into their own Dunkirk situation but with no fleet of fisherman to help them out.

      When I played Squad Leader the counters had three stats. Strength, Range, and Morale. Germans had the highest morale, especially the SS. Americans had one of the lowest. The rationale for this was that when a unit broke and it retreated you had to roll for morale again to bring them back to order. Americans were the easiest to rally. Germans were not. They were tough to break and fought to the end a lot due to this but if you could break them then you were more assured they would not return the next day.
      Ain't Nothing But A Thing!
    • Always nice to read AAR's from an old wargamer ;) Ah the days. ASL was awesome.
      The Germans of course were hard to rally once they broke cause they could run home to mommy (where they then would be hanged by the FJ and SS - but that's a different story...)
      PC wise this was picked up by the amazing Steel Panthers Series and even later the Combat Mission Series.

      Right now we do not have a real morale system in the game because we wanted to keep the decisions in the hands of players.
      Generally, online PVP players prefer to have their units react to them rather then having to react to the units. It's an elemental difference to SP or regular MP.
      I personally love morale in units cause to me it always breaks the suspension of disbelief if troops repeatedly advance into certain death. But I guess that's my "old-school" wargamer heart speaking.

      //G
      "Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion." Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
    • Squad Leader was yes awesome. It was PvP though. I was disappointed when SSI decided it would not patch the Steel Panthers series. I have both old DOS based ones. I have not checked out the Combat Mission Series to see if I can play them on a Mac and only recently discovered its existence.

      Steel Panthers though had a morale just like Squad Leader minus the rally part, at least I do not recall you rallying them. If you pounded a unit they had a good chance of running away. I had a friend who played and he was always a meatgrinder commander. I would cringe at the losses he took. If he had actually won I might way well he has some method to his madness.

      In the context of all these games you are the same, to include this one, a theater commander not a line commander so much, and especially this game. You are giving basically movement orders or attack orders etc but not down to the foxhole orders. Each of these units represents 100s to 1000s of people.

      I understand that today's PvPer may want omnipotent power but as you said this breaks the suspension of disbelief if all my troops act like fanatics and fight to the death. AHHH, which would mean that Special Forces, ie our fanatics, would have the highest morale and hard to break. If a morale system were in place it would have to include a rally function. Both of which are dependent on the level of that particular troop type. So maxed out say Motorized Infantry would have a higher morale and rally than a basic of the same type. Having a rally button in case they do break would give players more control.

      Some of this AI creates these really HUGE stacks. Even Insurgents. I just cleared Munich of 20 units of insurgents. I lost a whole Div going in there thinking that since their effectiveness was a lot lower than mine I would had killed more of them. 20 btw is what I noticed after falling asleep in my chair and waking up to say hey where did my infantry div go? So 5 modern mot inf got mauled. Oh well. It took many cruise missiles and sorties from Strike to Gunships to bombers get rid of them. Munich will probably never grow because everyone is living in mud huts now. Egypt had two stacks of 15+ attack subs. The point I am making is that this morale would work for and against the AI as well.

      Just a thought.
      Ain't Nothing But A Thing!
    • Even if the rest of the idea isn't implemented, at least make a country surrender when it loses all of its territory. I had one game where I had captured all of the Philippines, only to discover 2 weeks later that an anti-air vehicle was hiding in the South China sea the whole time. No wonder why I occasionally lost aircraft around that spot...

      That said, I still back the rest of the idea. I don't think much of it is too complicated; POW camps aren't that much less abstract than the rest of the game. Surrendering is a move that many battles end with, and exactly 0% of battles in this game end with a capitulation.