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Dear Hubert & Bill:

I bought the game with the hardback manual upon release - and never got around to playing it until last week. It has been consuming me of late (I tend to focus on one serious game at a time).

Everything made sense with the AI - until I DoW on Spain after running France completely off the continent as Germany. The diplomatic penalty from the USSR and the USA did not make a lot of sense to me - unless this is a programming feature for game balance.

The USSR hated Franco. And the USA was not fond of him. Germany could have contrived something to generate a reason for the war especially given how disliked Franco was by most everyone.

I realize I can change a couple of scripts to eliminate the severity of this diplomatic reaction (something I love about the game design), but that does not resolve why this is built into the game.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Avery

PS - working on a strategy guide for Germany and a potential AAR. But I'll have to delete the steam version and load from my disk due to the steam overlay messing up the ease of taking screenshots.

Balance issues aside I think that if in real life GE declared war on Spain a couple things would occur.

1) Italy would probably reevaluate their commitment to the Axis (why a "fascist" country attack another "fascist" country - especially one that it had sent help to during the civil war). I think Maybe Italy would need to take a 25% NM hit if GE invaded Spain.

2) Additionally how would Germany occupy the Iberian Peninsula? One of reason Germany did not occupy Vichy was the mind boggling chore of "ruling" over a country that you "invaded." This was actually a huge problem in WW1 after the treaty of Brest-Litosvk (the WW1 game does a great job of making the CP player keep actual units there to show the actual manpower required). Similarly if GE invaded Spain, Portugal would happen right after and that was allied favoring which would induce the US (Roosevelt was looking for reasons to join the Allies he just didn't get it until Pearl Harbor). Having to police this much land (let alone before Yugoslavia and Greece) would completely hamper the Wehrmacht in my opinion. I'm pretty sure a USSR increase would also be realistic - Spain was an ally and if Germany disregarded that then the Soviet Non-Aggression pact would presumably be also moot too.

3) Invasion of Spain essentially secures a land invasion of Gibraltar. Now the Axis control via Denmark the Baltic Sea and basically the entire Mediterranean Sea (Malta would probably starve out if Gibraltar was closed (this would allow subs / capital ships to pass through on the Axis side).

I don't know if you have triggered this event yet but if you invade the Vichy territories or something and Spain is above a certain threshold (like 50%) you an pay like 800 MPP to get Spain to join the Axis. I think if an Axis player really wants Spain they should be able to bribe their way as opposed to invading it. I would need to look up the specifics b/c that script has only happened once.

Hi airboy

Good to see you!

Essentially the penalties are there to reduce the chance of a cookie cutter strategy working, one that allows the Axis to rampage at will, attacking countries that they never historically invaded without significant drawbacks.

That said, an attack such as this could have been seen as an over-extension (think of the French in Spain in the Napoleonic Wars) and therefore an opportunity, as well as signifiying that Axis territorial ambitions in Europe were unbounded, and therefore even more dangerous than they had yet shown themselves to be. Not forgetting that Stalin was opportunistic, seeing everything through the lense of what benefited the USSR.

Admittedly when we introduced these scripts many years ago we didn't have a feature then that we do now, which is to penalise Germany and Italy's NM for such a move. By doing so, Germany's NM will drop by 3,500 points and Italy's by 2,500.

We could perhaps think about reducing the impact on the US and USSR and increasing the NM penalty to compensate.