Draft dodging crisis; what to do? ( a small guide and warning)

[Oakshield]

In two of my games as Fascist Brazil, I encountered the Draft Dodging Crisis event.
While in one game it was gone the moment I choose the option with the highest PP, in my other game the SNG (Sadistic Number Generator) decided to ♥♥♥♥ me off and go for that 20% option to make it worse. And worse it was.

I'm currently in Widespread Draft Dodging and there's no way out of it.
Here's why:

1) Each and every choice you make, will remove some of your ruling (fascist) party's popularity, remove some of your stability and increase the amount of the communist party. And the result of the latter is that your stability drops even more.

2) The only two available actions to increase your stability have a negative effect at the start.
- Increase workers happyness give you a 0.5% weekly increase after the conversion is finished, however the cost of it is a reduction in productivity of ALL your factories, a higher demand of consumer goods; meaning a lot of your civil factories won't be available for building and trading anymore; meaning in worst case a large portion of your military buildup stops.
- anti communism raids do increase your stability, however, at a starting cost of LOOSING 10%. Yes, the 0.7% weekly gain looks nice; however by the time the event is finished you have gained a total of 12% stability. In other words, you gained a netto 2% stability. So it's not worth it.

3) Because of the high demand in PP for the decissions ànd the lowered stability you'll have to quit using your National Focus at some point, simply because you can't afford to run it anymore. That also means that it's getting harder and harder to get the "good" side of the SNG.

4) Assigning a popular figurehead to your government helps. For a while. The 15% stability boost is a perma boost, but it doesn't increase your stability after it has dropped again. So use it, but don't expect any miracles from it.

So, what solutions are there?

- Well, changing to Democratic won't help. Even with a democratic politician in your govenment, the stability keeps dropping and the commies keep increasing their party.
I'm going to try to find out what happens if I put a commie in my government.

- Changing your conscription law into volunteers only doesn't help either. Although technically volunteers aren't drafted, the game does consider them as drafties.

- Ending a war doesn't help. I've had 3 wars to conquer territory and was preparing for a 4th when the event hit me. None of those 3 wars took me more as 3 weeks. Even the civil war I had to face at some point took me a week. Including the troop movement! However, peace didn't increase the stability. Which is odd, as everyone would be happy if their child isn't send to war.

So looking at all of this, I can only conclude this event is ill-designed. Unfortunately something that more events in P'dox games suffer from.
What's missing in this event, is a check if a country is at war and how long; if the conscription law is set to one of the drafting modi or volunteers and if the latest war is won or lost.

What it's also misisng are events to increase your stability. After all, Nazi-Germany got the largest influx of volunteers prior to 1942; when they're winning the majority of their battles. Deserters began to hit them after 1942 and especially 1944 and '45 when they were kicked out of each and every country they occupied.
Therefore, won battles should increase your stability, while loosing them would decrease it.

So all in all, it seems there's only two possible solutions to end this event.
1) turn commie en from there become democratic.
2) use the console.......................................
Now, if I wasn't playing Ironman..........................

So what's the warning you wonder?

Simple. If you got into the loop of this game and play IM: exit the game and start over as there's no way to end the event unless P'dox takes a good look at it and changes it.

Thorin :)

[Oakshield]

No changes after changing from Fascist to Commie to Democratic.

I've been trying to solve this event from late 1941 up to 25 november 1945.
I'm just about to fight - and win - my second civil war; because once again, the comunists rebelled and took over a province.

However, I'm not in the mood for that anymore. I give up and start over again. This time not in IM, so can I can cheat myself out of this event in case I run into it.
And I sure as hell hope P'dox changes it as it's game breaking atm.

Thorin :(

[Mack]

Isn't there a decsion that you can take to fix it?

[GoldenTalon]

Another broken mechanic

[Oakshield]

Originally posted by mack:

Isn't there a decsion that you can take to fix it?

Not as I can see it.
When googling for this event, I found that you need to have a high level war support and a high level stability to increase the chances that it will solve. Best chances to have a positive outcome of this event seems to be when your stability is above 60%. Below that 60% you're screwed.

As I had 81% war support, but close to 30% stability, the event enters a loop you won't be able to escape from. And that 30% was including the 15% perma bonus of the popular figurehead.

As said, trying to use Anti communist raids is useless.
That event costs 50PP and 10% stability, giving you 0.7% increase PER WEEK over 120 days.
When doing the math you notice that it actually does:

120 days / 7 days x 0.7% increase = 12% increase of stability. So you'd think that's nice, however, you began that event by LOOSING 10% stability. So the overal increase after 120 days is a meager 2% stability; plus the loss of 50PP.

Worker happyness increase gives you 0.5% WEEKLY increase for 180 days. So the total increase is (180 / 7)* 0.5 = 12.857 (lets round it up to 13%) increase.

Both look nice, but here's the catch; the Draft Dodging event does a check EVERY 86 days. If you fail to pass that check, the communist party's popularity increases, thus lowering your party's stability effect. Thus making it harder or near impossible to increase your stability.

Therefore, either one of the two events to increase your stability are ruined by a once or twice check of the Drafting Dodge event. Thus making both events useless.

I have filed a bug report at P'dox forum about this event. It seems it's already bugged since the introduction of the 1.5 patch. Let's hope they're able to fix it soon.

Thorin :)