What conditions generates an automatic surrender?

[Nelson 1812]

Interested to know what conditions, or the formula that generates an automatic surrender.

Thanks

[Michael Emrys]

SFAIK, the precise formula, if there is one, has not been made public. But from observing the way that the game plays out, it seems that once a certain portion of objectives have been attained, and a certain specified level of enemy casualties have been inflicted, most of the conditions required for automatic victory have been fulfilled. Doubtlessly it can get more complicated than that though, with designer specified special conditions needing to be met, such as exiting units or preventing enemy units from exiting; the capture or destruction of (a) specified unit(s); or the capture of a specific objective.

Michael

[womble]

It has been said that it's 50% casualties. Last time I saw anything to support a view either way was in a QB where I was defending against an AI assalt with a serious Attacker force bonus, and at the point where it was obvious the Germans weren't going to get into my village I ceasefired, to see a Total Victory with something like 85% casualties in the overall German force, and 100% casualties in the "other vehicles" but only 12 out of 25 German tanks destroyed. That there were only three runners (the rest were immobilised or abandoned in places I no longer could reach with my ATGs or PIATs - no tanks or TDs in my defenders) in the German force didn't seem to count. Out of interest I reloaded to see what might cause the attacker to surrender, and a minute or two later got a kill on one of the remaining tanks, which precipitated the surrender. My working hypothesis is that you have to kill 50% from each of the total, tank and other vehicle numbers to make the AI give up.

Edit: Should be clear this was in BN, and it might conceivably have changed in v3/RTv1. Also, the turns between the "real" ceasefire and the "experimental" surrender might have had one or two more Broken PzGr (they were all Broken or casualties by the time I hit Cease Fire; it was the plight of the poor guys rushing forward across my fields of fire and just turning tail at the first sight of bullet splash which persuaded me to call it a day).

[womble]

SFAIK, the precise formula, if there is one, has not been made public. But from observing the way that the game plays out, it seems that once a certain portion of objectives have been attained, and a certain specified level of enemy casualties have been inflicted, most of the conditions required for automatic victory have been fulfilled. Doubtlessly it can get more complicated than that though, with designer specified special conditions needing to be met, such as exiting units or preventing enemy units from exiting; the capture or destruction of (a) specified unit(s); or the capture of a specific objective.

Michael

The designer doesn't set any surrender conditions, Michael. They can force the on-map forces to fight to the bitter end by putting never-appearing reinforcements in, which means the total forces can't lose enough to put them past the threshold, but other VCs, if they're considered at all in the calculation of surrender (my previous example had the attackers never even put a VL into contention, and I held them all from the start, so provides no evidence on their inclusion or otherwise), are just VPs.

[MikeyD]

I was sure that had been pretty well covered back in CMSF days. I had believed the info was in the original manual but Iguess not. The CMSF website is now past 200,000 posts, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find the thread covering that issue.

[Michael Emrys]

The designer doesn't set any surrender conditions, Michael.

I don't know one way or the other, but it was not my intent to claim that they do, although my wording might be misleading on that issue. But what I actually had in mind was that the designer does determine what gets counted for points and how each category is weighted. Or at least that is my understanding, having no personal experience with designing scenarios.

Michael

[Nelson 1812]

I did read that a fanatic soldier never surrenders in the V3 manual.

Thanks for the thoughts Guys.

[Holman]

I'm under the impression that the AI surrenders when all of its surviving units are panicked, broken, or routed. There may be other conditions, but this is something I notice when scanning through enemy units in the endgame review.

I know the AI will sometimes surrender even if it still controls objectives. This is possible because low-morale units can panic just from knowing that other friendly units are dead.

[Michael Emrys]

I'm under the impression that the AI surrenders when all of its surviving units are panicked, broken, or routed. There may be other conditions, but this is something I notice when scanning through enemy units in the endgame review.

That rings a bell. Maybe somebody posted to that effect a few months back.

Michael

[womble]

I'm under the impression that the AI surrenders when all of its surviving units are panicked, broken, or routed. There may be other conditions, but this is something I notice when scanning through enemy units in the endgame review.

I've sometimes seen good-order survivors when the enemy surrenders before I've been able to engage some small portion. It's true that by the time you've killed half of them, the rest will generally be in a poor state. But in my example above, while nearly all the infantry were Broken, there were one or two teams at Rattled and of all the surviving armour, only one mounted crew was that far down the road to giving up. The few surviving dismounted crew were uniformly Broken, though, so that probably drags the average for the armour component down some...

Having gone back to check numbers and states, I have to revise my hypothesis a bit. I went back to a couple of turns before the last one I had saved, and ran it through, intending to Cease Fire and find the enemy's state before it surrendered, but it surrendered when I hit the BRB at the end of the minute, earlier than last time.

It turns out my recalled figures were slightly off. There were 4 operable half tracks remaining, making casualties there only 90%, and one of those was only Nervous, because he was parked in the enemy setup zone. There were 24 total tanks, and at surrender time this time around, 12 of them still had their icons, with 7 still in fighting state. Of those, one was Rattled with a full suppression meter, most of the rest were OK. The 4 immobilised tanks had states ranging from OK to Rattled. I have no idea whether the one abandoned tank crew was still alive... The only material change in the minute that I noticed was that a tank got heavily suppressed by 20mm cannon fire (I also forgot that I took a trio of AA tanks for lolz, not that they were very effective), which might also have depressed its morale state to Rattled.

So it's not just casualties in categories; there must be some assessment of morale too.

I know the AI will sometimes surrender even if it still controls objectives.

I'm not sure how much effect objectives have, though it might be that you need to have a majority of those too, as well as crushing all the different categories of target. The interaction of the 4 categories in the end screen (cas, tank, AFV, other) and a VP-held ratio would produce a sufficiently complex variety of win conditions that you'd have to do some careful looking to disentangle the components. Especially if there's a little random wiggle on the end of any/all of them.

[Combatintman]

Pretty sure it is numbers of enemy remaining that is the dominant factor. Some of my earlier CMSF scenarios set in Afghanistan with the AI Red always set on 'Fanatic' automatically surrendered due to casualties. One of my scenarios (Op GLACIER 2 I think), the enemy pretty much always surrendered despite being in control of the main objective on most occasions and despite the fact that they had bonus VPs as part of the setup conditions and points were allocated to Blue for knocking them down as well.

However, what the ratio is I have no idea but it will be in the 50% ballpark. It took me a while to understand that the way to get an AI enemy to hang on in there until the bitter end was to allocate reserves that never arrive.