[gap]

Originally Posted by Muckenberg

Hello
I started a new career in "Happy Times" after updating and became a strange thing. During the attack on the convoy I sank the Greek tanker and the game recognized him as hostile. When I looked at the map, Greece is still neutral, with the exception of Crete. it is hostile here. I will have to look when the British have landed in Crete.

Originally Posted by vdr1981

I'm sure Gap can give you excellent explanation what "free nations" actually are and why they are there , if you contact him...

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

I believe the reason is that you don’t gain renown for sinking neutral ships, while Greek ships were being sunk quite often in real life by the u-boats before Greece was bought into the war. That neutral tonnage still counted towards decorations for the captains and crews.

So the “free Greece” solution allows you to be properly recognised for destroying Greek tonnage in British convoys while keeping “proper” Greece neutral.

Vdr1981 and Cybermat47 are absolutely correct in stating that the Greek ships we see in convoys even before Italy and Germany declared war on Greece, are from the "free greek" roster, i.e. a "fake nation", whose vessels sail under the Greek ensign, which is set as our enemy throughout the war.

In the past, Allied convoys that we see in game featured a mix of Allied and neutral ships. This was in accordance with historical records indeed. Nonetheless, gamewise, the practice of creating "mixed" convoys is undesiderable for at least two reasons:

1. as noted before by Cybermat47, neutral vessels in allied convoys were considered valid targets by the Germans, but their sinking in game is not followed by the awarding of the usual renown points (actually, there should be a penalty instead); there are ways to change that, but then the player would be awarded rewnown points even for the sinking of "real" neutral ships outside convoys.
   
   
2. neutral ships in convoys react differently than enemy ones when the convoy is attacked. Mixing them in one convoy often results in collisions and messy AI behaviours because of the different evasive maneuvers put in place.

Creating "free" copies of some nations was the easiest workaround to obviate the above problems while still keeping realistical convoy compositions. More in general, those "free nations" are also useful for representing:

a) neutrality patrols and convoy escorts accomplished by US warships and aicraft, before the Americans entered war

b) those neutral merchants that, early in the war, contravened one or more of the German prize rules, and for that reason were considered valid targets even though they were not sailing in convoys:

• armed merchant ships or unarmed ships that posed any sort of threat (e.g. by sending S.O.S. messages on being stopped for inspection by German U-boats);
  
• merchant ships that were caught in British waters in the act of smuggling goods to/from the UK;
  
• merchant ships that did not sport obvious national markings (i.e. national ensign and/or neutrality markings on their hulls);
  
• merchant ships that sailed unlit at night;
  
• zig-zagging ships, or ships that put in place other evasive maneuvers

c) ships that kept sailing on the Allied side, despite their nation being conquered by the Germans and becoming a Nazi puppet state (Free France being a good example of that, the only "Free" nation also featured in vanilla game btw).