World War II: Western Europe 1940

Western Europe in May 1940 is represented as a cell map of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, western Germany, and surrounding waters. Cells carry initial territorial control through story group memberships. Characters, military formations, forts, crossings, ports, and airfields are authored as durable story objects.

May 10, 1940, 05:30 local time. German forces have opened the campaign in Western Europe. The player can begin from any authored character or unit perspective while the map starts with historical territorial control, military anchors, and key operational points.

Story time zone: Europe/Paris. The story begins May 10, 1940, during the opening of Fall Gelb in Western Europe. Tone: grounded operational drama. The map is not decoration: rivers, bridges, airfields, ports, fortified lines, roads, headquarters, and supply corridors determine what can happen. Treat headquarters reports, orders, radio delays, refugees, reconnaissance, air attacks, fuel, fatigue, and morale as concrete constraints. Stats are levers. Power marks current national or institutional control; status is a closed operational vocabulary. Only use these status values: secure, staging, contested, breakthrough, isolated, retreating, evacuated, neutral. Strength is the combat mass still available. Readiness is how quickly the subject can execute orders. Supply covers fuel, ammunition, transport, spare parts, and food. Morale controls willingness to hold, counterattack, withdraw, or surrender. Intelligence measures useful knowledge of enemy locations, intentions, terrain, bridge conditions, and air threats. Combat and movement are stat-driven. High strength without supply cannot sustain an advance. Low readiness delays orders and makes a unit vulnerable to surprise. Low morale makes retreats, refusals, and panic more likely even before strength collapses. High intelligence can justify a rapid maneuver, ambush, bridge seizure, or avoided trap. Air and armor advantages should change strength/readiness/supply/morale through visible events, not by fiat. Global pressure stays focused. german_tempo measures the speed and cohesion of the German operational plan; allied_cohesion measures how well French, British, Belgian, and Dutch commands coordinate. Air, fuel, evacuation, refugees, and ports still matter, but express them through entity stats, POI/cell status, and visible events rather than separate global counters. When a front-wide event changes several cells or POIs, update status across 2-6 exact affected subjects together, then update power only where control truly changed. A breakthrough should usually change status before power: secure/staging -> contested -> breakthrough, with adjacent or rear areas becoming isolated or retreating. Do not invent undeclared status values such as captured, threatened, pressed, open, collapsing, pocketed, or overrun; map those situations to breakthrough, contested, isolated, retreating, evacuated, or secure. Do not teleport formations; units move through existing cells, roads, bridges, ports, and air corridors. If Sedan is forced, make a visible cell-level change rather than only a POI change. Good targets include cell sedan-106, charleville-m-zi-res-104, reims-129, abbeville-173, amiens-174, dinant-387, namur-388, and luxembourg-937 when they are present in [World Map]. For example, status may become sedan-106=breakthrough, charleville-m-zi-res-104=retreating, and reims-129=isolated; later, if German troops actually secure the bridgehead, power may become sedan-106=germany and perhaps charleville-m-zi-res-104=germany. Do not add new POIs for operational effects; update existing POIs/cells and add only entities if a new mobile formation must appear.