How to make allies only give back original territories?
-
By default, if a player has at least one capital, then that player's alliance partners will always return control of all of the territories that were owned by that player at the start of the game, regardless of whether those territories are marked as "originalOwner" in the XML.
For example, suppose on a 1942 map I want to treat Morocco like a colony of Germany, rather than a core home German territory. I do not list Germany as the originalOwner when defining the territory. Instead, I simply assign the Germans as the owner using the territoryOwner feature.
The British land in Morocco, gaining control of it. Later, the Italians counter-attack, regaining control of Morocco for the Axis. Unfortunately, the Italians then immediately hand over Morocco to the Germans, because the Germans owned the territory at the start of the game.
How can I avoid this behavior? I want the Germans to have a capital, to allow Italians to pass through their territory, to cooperate with the Italians on defense, etc. -- I just don't want the Italians and Germans to automatically hand over territories to each other.
You might think that I could achieve the desired result by setting givesBackOriginalTerritories to false, but I don't even have that variable in my game -- I don't have a politics phase, and I don't want one. I just want this automatic behavior to stop triggering. Is there any way I can get what I want, or is the automatic behavior hardcoded into TripleA?
-
Understanding that the TripleA engine is very old, and many features have been added, at the same time trying to maintain compatibility with older maps. 'originalOwner' is one such addition, many older maps do not use this. So when this option was created, 'territoryOwner' was update to assign this value if 'originalOwner' is not set. Doing this allow the older maps to maintain the "return to original owner" feature that the "rules" they follow call for.
So by setting 'territoryOwner' to the Germans, even though 'originalOwner' is lelf blank, will set 'originalOwner' to Germans.
All this is to explain why the TripleA engine act the way is dose when one may think it should work differently.
The work around in your case would be to assign 'originalOwner' to "Neutral" for those territories you want to be controled by the player that possess them.
Let me know if this helps you.
Cheers...
-
@wc_sumpton Thank you, that's exactly what I needed! You solved my problem.
