Slitherine

Has this ever been discussed before?

It seems that it is somewhat unrealistic to have to crush and eliminate all encircled units when in the real war many surrounded forces--some of them very large--simply surrendered. This could be easily modeled in the game. At the beginning of each turn, a unit with zero supply would check against a chance of surrender. The chance would get progressively higher as the unit's effectiveness fell. If the check was met, the unit would offer surrender to the opposing player, who could accept or decline. You would get a message at the beginning (or end) of your turn that said "Unit Blah Blah (VII Corps) offers to surrender at a cost of 7 PPs. Do you accept?" Then you click yes or no. If yes, 7 PPs (or whatever, this remains to be worked out) is deducted from your account, the unit disappears and the hex reverts to your side's control.

To model the costs of taking POWs, there would be a PP cost to accepting surrender based on the number of steps (i.e., men) in the unit. The cost would have to be high enough to make the opposing player think twice. If it's too low, he will accept surrender every time. If it's too high, he never will. It should be somewhat comparable to your expected casualties from attacking (which are of course unpredictable). Actually, it should probably be higher. If it's always lower, people would choose to accept every time. But one benefit of accepting even with the higher cost is that cost would only be in PPs, not manpower. Whereas casulties of couse incur both types of costs. Or maybe there would have to be some small manpower cost to simulate prison guards but it should be very small.

Of course, if you let units get to zero effectiveness you can attack and be sure you will take no losses. But this takes a long time. You might have to have several units sit near the surrounded troops while you wait for zero. Those units might be needed elsewhere. This would be another reason to accept surrenders and incur their costs: freeing up rear echelon units for front-line duty.

I know that in the real war, POWs (especially on the Easter Front) were treated with horrible brutality. I don't see why this should make a difference to the game. Killing every unit to the last man ain't exactly humane in any case and most of the time it didn't happen in real life.

Anyone else like this idea?

I suppose there would have to be an exception for spawned partisan units or else no one would ever bother leaving troops behind to deal with them. Perhaps another condition of surrender would be that an enemy corps must be adjacent to the cut-off corps before it makes the surrender check.

I suppose that another problem would be that sometimes your opponent breaks your lines and relieves trapped units. If the computer is making a decision about surrender, it is using its "judgement" and not a player's. It might give up when the unit still had a chance of being saved. Perhaps another variable could be the proximity of friendly units and ZOC. If it's possible that they might reach the surrounded unit the following turn, the chance of surrender would be low. If the surrounded unit is five hexes behind the front line, which is completely covered by the enemy, then the chance would be much higher. In addition, after several turns go by, the likelihood of surrender would rise as the chance of relief dims and the hopes of the soldiers fade. Also, surrenders that make the player unhappy would mimic the decisions of field commanders who decided against the wishes of, or without consulting, HQ, which wanted them to carry on. So I think it works.

I like the idea of an easier surrender of encircled units. It has always bothered me that units cut of from supply and without effectiveness (i.e. unable to fight) would not simply surrender, but instead had to be destroyed. During the early stages of Barbarossa, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers surrendered to German forces that were much smaller. In CEAW, even if you attack with forces of equal size, and it will still take weeks (in the case of Garrison vs. Garrison) to make them surrender.

However, I don't think that spending PPs is the right way so simulate that. On the eastern front, the Germans did not care about the well-being of POWs. Further, many of them were actually needed later during the war at home to keep up production. So they certainly don't "consume" PPs. The way the Germans treated them, they actually "produced" PPs.

Maybe only units without any experience could be forced to surrender this way, while veterans (or even regulars) would fight (or rather: hang) on.

Another idea could be to apply penalties (or bonuses) to the stats of the units involved, i.e. decrease survivability for the encircled defender, and increase ground attack for the attacker. But I don't know whether the game engine allows this.

Units without supply will lose efficiency each turn it's without supply. So after awhile it's easy to attack them without taking any losses. Axis minors are usually used to mop up isolated Russian units so the main German units can move eastwards.

Remember that partisans are garrison based units so if units automatically surrender without supply then the partisans won't last long.

I think the current rules work quite well as is. If you get your units isolated you lose most of your movement capability and you will drop towards 0 efficiency unless you manage to get supply again. So it's a BIG setback for a player to have some of his own units pocketed.

If units surrender soon after being pocketed then we will see bad side effects. Since it's possible to pound at the same unit with as many attacks as you want as long as you force retreats or have more hexsides to attack from then it's not that hard to temporarily cut supply to units. With immediate surrender then both players would make pincers to cut off supply to units so they don't have to fight them. You would see a lot of weird attacking instead of the usual grinding.

If a change is needed then the efficiency drop from being out of supply could be increase. I don't think removing units that are isolated is a good idea. Even if we saw large pockets of units surrendering on the east front they we in fact pocketed by units moving around them from all sides. That means the units were squeezed into a small area with no room to retreat. In GS you need to mop up the isolated units by attacking them to reduce their strength. The isolated units can't be repaired so they will quickly be annihilated. I think that's a better simulation than having bold attackers form a big pincer to e. g. pocket 15 hexes and maybe 5 units. It doesn't feel right if 2 armor units could just move through holes in the front line and force and immediate surrender. The defenders surrendered because they were overwhelmed and had no way to retreat. They were often bombarded by artillery to show that the situation was hopeless. Attacking isolated units with low efficiency often yields great odds like 7:1, 8:0. So it's easy to mop up pockets with the current rules.

Stauffenberg wrote:If a change is needed then the efficiency drop from being out of supply could be increase.

Yes, and this would be easy to implement by simply changing the general.txt file value for unsupplied units. Is this so?

That is true.

You can change the following value in general.txt

EFFICIENCY_LOSS_LACK_SUPPLY 10 /*EFFICIENCY points lost when having no supply*/

Right now you lose 10 efficiency per turn you're out of supply. It can be increased to 20 or so to make surrounded units lose their combat efficiency faster.

Well, I can only repeat what I said above.

First, and most important, I didn't suggest that units automatically surrender when surrounded. I said there should be a check, with a low chance at first but that rises over time and based on how far behind the lines they are.

Second, I don't think it's too easy to kill off trapped corps. You have wait many turns for their effectiveness to drop. By the time it does they are often a dozen or more hexes behind the lines. That either requires you to tie up corps that would be valuable at the front or else to use garrisons to kill the pockets. Garrisons will take at most one step per turn even when effectiveness is zero.

Third, it's not realistic that every single unit would fight to the death. That just did not happen in the real war.

Fourth, I said that an exemption would have to be made for partisans. Either they would never surrender, or they would hold out longer.

Fifth, I suggested that perhaps one condition of surrender would be that the trapped corps would have to be adjacent to an enemy corps.