Expeditionary forces
Expeditionary forces are units that your allies will send you. In vanilla HoI3, the AI will send these units to a player without the possibility of refusing or controlling them. A player must transport or move the allied expeditionary forces to their home territory before they can be returned. As a result, expeditionary forces in vanilla can be quite annoying. In Semper Fi, expeditionary forces will only be sent by an ally if the player has identified ally objectives. Expeditionary forces that a player sends to an ally will be returned in 30 days after the request is made in the diplomacy screen.
Do not expect much to happen with expeditionary forces you send to your allies, the AI won't know what to do with them and you have no control at all over them. For instance, you could send the Afrika Korps to Italy and find it being used to guard the Swiss frontier.
To get an expeditionary force sent to you, you can try two things:
- Set war goals and objectives for your ally, and issue a Call to Arms. Then wait and hope for some troops to be sent to you.
- tag to the country, and get it to send you the troops you want.
To do the latter, you SAVE AND PAUSE the game, then press the tilda "~" key on the keyboard to bring up the console. Then you type "tag COUNTRYCODE". For instance, if you want to tag to Italy, you type "tag ITA" - it is case sensitive. This puts you in command of the allied country.
Once you have control of the allied country, you select all the troops, ships, and aircraft you want to be in the expeditionary force, arrange them to have the correct division compositions and generals, and put them in an army or army group. Then you go to the Diplomacy screen and select the country you want to give the expeditionary force to (e.g. Germany). If there are enough diplomatic points avaialble, you will get the option to send the expeditionary force and be asked which army or army group to send. Once you have sent the expeditionary force, immediately tag back to the recipient (e.g. "tag GER") and click the icon at the top left of the screen to accept the expeditionary force. All the troops you selected are now under your command and supplied by your country. They have your country's colour and you can change their leaders to your leaders but you can't change divisional, fleet, or air unit compositions.
Note: when you tag to an ally, you will probably find all sorts of things you would like to fix. Go ahead and do that, but any movement orders to armies or navies will be rescinded as soon as you give control back to the AI. If you decide to unpause the game, the AI will take control of your country and completely mess it up. You can prevent that by issuing the "aipause XXX" command (where XXX= your country name) prior to tagging to the allied country.
