"My dearest Maria"

I am at a loss to tell you that my commanding officer has finally approved medical leave after serving in Angola, I hope I can eventually return to Beja, to our farm, and finally have some good sleep for once. I have stories you might not imagine, the places I have been to, the things I saw, the things I had to do, they just are... too much. I lost an arm at Novo Lisboa from a mortar shell and I believe I am going deaf soon to put it bluntly. So much sacrifice and for what? This war is never-ending, Whenever we hunt down an MPLA cell in one spot, another one pops up, Whenever the secret police crack down on another illegal meeting by separatists, more show up. I don't think I can do this anymore, I have nightmares about Coimbra, the faces of their children flash in my mind, haunting me. Im afraid that your brother, Joao, died in the Zambezi, shot in the head by a communist sniper. I wept for him after receiving the news and delivered a prayer for God's mercy. I pray for God's mercy for us, for all of us, for this sinful and cruel war must end. Thus I hope to join the MFA despite my injured self. I hope you understand...

-Lieutenant Marcelo Gomez , 1974

Hello, and welcome back to CWP, I'm Dairy, and as you will probably know I have been going on in this cryptic vibe talking about a potential "Insurgency Rework" happening to CWP slated for the newest season coming in July. Now I can already expect the questions: "Why do we need this?" "What is an Insurgency Rework and what does it entail." "How is this gonna impact the game and will it make a positive experience for the player base and the mod base overall." To which I answer: "Yes"

So Insurgency Rework? Why is this needed in my opinion: Well for a start, the Cold War as a grand geopolitical game where major powers play along minor powers and non state entities, requires effective moderation when it comes to handling the myriad of characters and players at play within a given region. Insurgencies, Low Intensity conflicts and Rebellions are a core part of the Cold War experience both in handling insurgencies or fighting with them. How we resoed insurgencies before was under the (old) combat system which basically entailed the mod writing a wall of text explaining what happened which I noticed that, resoing these types of conflicts in this model is unbearably boring, unengaging and time consuming. Usually insurgencies do not wage conventional or even that many unconventional major battles where you could feasibly write a reso and make it exciting for the reader, so they are basically handwaived 99% of the time in my experience. The biggest justification I had to develop this new system was my experience modding Indochina in the Disneyland Season in which made it clear that some way of keeping track of insurgencies and making them interactive was desperately needed.

So here is the why, now lets go to the rework itself. In principle, the Insurgency Rework entails the creation of an automated spreadsheet where it can keep track of different customizable modifiers and policies that impact the growth or reduction of Militancy, Compliance and Consciousness in a given region, an intuitive system where mods can easily input and extract data to help players keep track of these modifiers, their garrison numbers and economic data. I must say that it was a challenge to build the original sheet with it's codes and calculations done, but I am happy to say that it was successfully completed and we have a working automated spreadsheet for this system already.

There are so far seven region policy dropdown menus of different types where you can select the policy of your choice per menu. Each policy impacts a myriad of different bonuses, maluses and modifiers which combined can create interesting combinations. For example, Economic Exploitation policies can increase your revenue but also decrease GDP growth in the state and increase "Consciousness" in such state, and vice-versa. If you are to change a region policy, you need to write a post detailing so on Reddit, in which the mods will evaluate and then change policies accordingly. For example French Indochina decides to deploy Metropole Troops to Cambodia and changes from Territorial Armed Forces to Metropole Troops, helping in reducing militancy. The diverse array of policies allows for greater flexibility for the player from an RP perspective to respond to regional crises that may arise and respond to insurgencies more effectively, usually resulting in a side effect or cost of some kind as listed. To clarify as well, the only policies that are mod locked are those that are listed as "Militancy and Consciousness" policies.

Now what are the four key numbers one must keep track off and play with? "Militancy, Compliance, Consciousness, and Manpower" Militancy is an abstraction of how much of your population is strongly willing to fight violently against the governing authority and how radical they are. Compliance is the level of collaboration your state has with regional actors. Consciousness is the popular and collective will of the people expressed indirectly and through peaceful means, Manpower is self explanatory. Your policies are largely tied towards impacting those numbers and careful (and justified) use of those policies can help you manage an asymetric conflict and come out victorious in the long run. Nevertheless should the player be careless or get a crisis chain, things can go out of hand really quickly which may result in the player losing control of the territory either through a declaration of independence (Consciousness) or a popular revolution (Militancy) should either modifiers reach higher than 90%. Thus colonial nations and indeed countries with a lot of "regions of interest" will have to tread lightly so as to ensure their national stability is secured.

Once again, I reiterate that the system I will show you is still WIP even though I am already working on the final touches on the control panel and the player sheet but I welcome the feedback so far for this system and I can always answer questions should it be necessary. I will post a followup to this Dev Diary in the near future once I finish the needed updates.

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