Hands-On Usage
occupation_law is commonly used in occupation policy-related decisions or national focus checks, such as verifying whether an occupying country has imposed a sufficiently lenient or strict occupation law on a specific nation to unlock or gate subsequent event chains. Typical scenarios include: triggering an event only when an occupied territory operates under a specific administrative method, or evaluating whether AI behavior trees need to adjust occupation strategy.
# Check if Germany's occupation law for Poland is set to foreign civilian oversight
GER = {
POL = {
occupation_law = foreign_civilian_oversight
}
}
# In a decision's available block, check a state's occupation law
available = {
123 = {
occupation_law = local_police_force_garrison
}
}
Synergy
[set_occupation_law](/wiki/effect/set_occupation_law): The most direct pairing—first use occupation_law to check the current occupation law status, then use set_occupation_law to switch to the target law, forming a standard "condition check → execute change" structure.
[set_occupation_law_where_available](/wiki/effect/set_occupation_law_where_available): Before bulk-changing occupation laws across all available states, occupation_law is often used to filter specific conditions first, preventing unintended changes to regions already meeting requirements.
[compliance](/wiki/trigger/compliance): Occupation law directly affects compliance growth; the two frequently appear together in limit blocks to ensure subsequent logic triggers only when both compliance and occupation law conditions are satisfied.
[has_active_resistance](/wiki/trigger/has_active_resistance): Resistance activity intensity is closely tied to occupation policy; combined use precisely describes compound conditions like "resistance remains active and current occupation law is too lenient."
Common Pitfalls
- Scope direction reversed: When writing
GER = { occupation_law = ... } under a COUNTRY scope, if PREV is also GER (same country), it checks GER's default occupation law; if PREV is another country (such as POL), it checks PREV's specific occupation law toward GER—newcomers often overlook this distinction, causing conditions to never match or always evaluate true.
- Using on unoccupied STATEs: If a target state has no actual occupier (for example, the state is controlled by its owner nation),
occupation_law cannot retrieve a valid occupation law value and the condition silently fails without error, making debugging very opaque. It is recommended to pair this with [controls_state](/wiki/trigger/controls_state) or similar checks to first confirm the state is actually under occupation.