historical question

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Kaptan Tommy

You know, this is a good question. I finally got a download of all the flags so I at least know who I'm shooting at (or about to). But I'm not sure about who gets included in the 'enemies' list, and when. I've been letting Norway go, but sinking all English ships. At what point did Hitler give the "free range" order?

Well, I believe that hitting the F1 key will show you a list of all the countries and when they became enemy combatants (not sure if that was stock game or a mod like RUB that does that). There were also various orders during the first few months of the war about allowing attacks on neutrals in certain circumstances and not in others, but none of that seems to be modeled in the game as far as the renown impact goes. One approach to "solving" this is just to mod the .cfg files to remove the renown penalty for sinking neutrals, and just exercise your own discretion - this is basically what I do - i.e., be careful about confirming identity of lone merchants and not attacking neutrals, but not worrying about it if they're in convoys (especially armed or escorted convoys) as they aren't acting as neutrals in those cases and are fair game to be attacked (and you shouldn't lose renown in those cases, IMHO).

Good luck and good hunting!