Territory Transfer Bug

[Wushuki]

There seems to be a somewhat confusing bug in the game (v 1.02) that occurs when a minor nation that has troops in another nation surrenders. Take a look at the following screenshot:

The Soviet Union is just about to take Romania with that corps and you can see three Romanian units garrisoning Russian cities. Now look at the following screenshot and see what happened the turn after the corps took Romania:

Odessa and Kiev have suddenly switched control to the USSR without any Soviet troops entering these cities. So cities that were occupied by troops of a nation that surrenders are suddenly captured. Note that Riga did not change ownership, which is definitely very odd. You'd expect that either all cities switch ownership, or none of them do.

This bug is moderately severe, especially if you are not aware of it. In my last game my opponent lost Odessa and Gibraltar when I captured Bulgaria. My opponent was not aware that he lost these cities and therefore did not respond to it, leaving them both under my control. This eventually turned out quite devastating as it led to an easy invasion into Spain with normal transports. The point is that I believe that this issue is severe enough to be fixed, if another patch is made.

[Hubert Cater]

Do you have the saves for this so I could take a look?

[Hubert Cater]

I tried to repeat this with a simple test and it did not result in what you described above, rather no transfer of control occured in Odessa and Kiev once Romania surrendered and the Romanian troops were removed.

Perhaps these were partisans that occupied your cities once Romania surrendered?

[Wushuki]

You can find a zip file with the savegames here. My apologies for using rapidshare, but I don't know how else to send it to you. If you prefer to receive it some other way, please let me know how.

There are 2 files in there, both are multiplayer hotseat. The first is the test that I described above. The second is another similar test that gives a bit more insight in why this happens.

I will explain the second savegame with screenshots. Look at the following picture, it is the same situation as above in every way with 2 differences:

1. The romanian HQ and the Romanian corps have switched positions.
   
2. While moving the Romanian corps to its new location it was temporarily moved to Minsk.
   

Now take a look at what happens the turn after the russian corps captures Bucharest:

Riga remains under control of the Axis and Kiev and Odessa switch control, this shows that the fact that Riga did not change ownership had nothing to do with the type of unit in it. More important however is that Minsk changed ownership as well, even though there was no Romanian unit present there. This leads to the hypothesis that Romania "captured" the cities from Germany once it moved a unit into it. Once Romania surrendered, all Romanian territory switched to the USSR, including the cities that Romania had "captured". This is also shown by the ownership of the tiles surrounding the cities. All squares that Romanian units moved onto have turned red, all squares that Romanian units did not touch remain under German control.

It remains odd that Riga did not change ownership. An explanation for this might be that Riga is a bit of a special case: there is a trigger that switches the control of the city from the Baltic States to the USSR. Apparantly that prevents the city from switching ownership in this way.

Feel free to download the savegames and run the experiments yourself. I ran it several times and the same thing happened every test.

[Wushuki]

On second thought, I think I understand why Riga did not change ownership and why you found different results. It has to do with operating units, I operated the unit to Riga and moved them manually in the other cities. Operating the unit to Riga did not make Romania capture the city. I think that when you did your experiment with this you operated your Romanian units to Odessa and Kiev, which is why you found a different result.

That solves all questions and gives a clear understanding of what happened. In summary:

If you move a unit into a tile that originally belonged to a hostile country, that tile becomes property of whichever country owned the unit (even if the owner of the unit is a minor country). This is true even if the tile was already under control of an ally of the nation that moved the unit onto it. If you capture a nation, all tiles of that nation become property of the country that defeated the nation, including tiles that were captured by this nation. Here, all tiles that were captured by Romania were transferred to the USSR. Many of these tiles could be far away and may seem to have no relationship with the conquered nation at all. So when an active minor gets captured you lose tiles all over the map and you don't have any ability to see which tiles you will lose until it happens. Unless of course, you remember exactly at which tiles the units of that minor have been.

This seems to be a rather severe issue and should be fixed in my opinion. Unfortunately, it might not be very easy to fix. It seems to me that the best solution would be to change the territory transfer rule, so that when you capture a minor, only the territory that minor originally controlled gets transferred to the capturer of the capital. So in this example, when Romania is captured, the USSR would only gains control over all tiles that are actually inside the borders of Romania.

[Hubert Cater]

Thanks for the files and the detailed information, much appreciated. I have a few ideas for adjustments and will update this thread shortly.

Hubert

[Colin I]

Interesting. I was wondering about what happened here but Axis were overextended so I assumed I'd moved a unit away from Gibraltar, forgot to cover it and that it was captured with amphibious assaults. Yes, this needs fixing.

When Italy surrendered to the Allies, German units swiftly took control of key points, mostly before the Allies could react. I'm wondering if its possible to script to deploy (create) a 3 strength (weak, not upgraded) German corps to replace such a surrendered minor unit in a foreign city but debit 50 MPP (or other amount). If there are no MPP or if an Allied land unit is within 2 tiles or the city is isolated you do not get the cover. This leaves the city vulnerable but not a complete walk over and simulates an emergency deployment to cover a crisis but at a cost.

[Hubert Cater]

What I've ended up doing is using the code that I have to handle pockets of controlled territory that now get swallowed up by the majority controller of an area.

For example this was introduced I believe for the WaW release and it handled cleaning up the map when there were no units or resources that could exert control over abandoned areas of the map. In these cases, i.e. lets say there was a pocket of German territory deep in the USSR that no longer had any units or controlled resources associated with the pocket of territory, then the routine would have the USSR swallow it up if USSR territory surrounded the pocket.

For the territory issues Wushuki discovered this routine would also be applied but albeit a modified one. In this case, the territory of the surrendered country itself would still be handled the same but territory outside of the surrendered country, i.e. the tiles that Romania controlled in the USSR including the cities such as Odessa and Kiev would now fall under German control as they are the major power controlling that area.

Under the tests I've run it is working as expected now and in fact very seamlessly that you would not even realize that there was a previous issue. This will be a part of the next patch.

Hubert

[Colin I]

Thanks Hubert.