Jo, I have fought possibly hundreds of token wars. In my experience, Special forces do unpaint. I am not assuming, this is fact. I had fought a 6 hours c3 war with Homerdome some time ago, where we did just this back and forth. It was a shining moment for him. He overcame, it just took a while. We took turns painting and unpainting the map. With each update time and less paint my war index replenished.
I really appreciate your attention to this matter Jo but I would really like to hear from the gms and not be the cause of confusion to other members who may read.
For example, if you were right about the population issue, your advice(which I have considered to be the solution) to reduce my health index, directly contradicts what Andy has stated about population loss.
We only heard that you need higher index numbers to "maintain" the age groups from 0-4 and 4-8 and that the stabilization of these groups were directly tied to the health index. Andy's solution was to build more hospitals, yours is to destroy them and allow more people to die off.
Which set of advice are we to take? I am considering your advice because the age groups of 0-4 and 4-8 have never come close to recovering much less stabilizing and still show a downward slope of 45 degrees on my graphs.
I guess what I am trying to say is, thank you for attempting to answer things that the gms should discuss with us on this open forum. Most helpful players including myself and many other do. But we are speaking from a position of pure ignorance in 90% of the cases we attempt to try and solve.
SF should repaint a map and should not be contingent on destroying said special or land forces that painted in the first place. A defender's special or land force only need to reoccupy territory to unpaint it. This has been the case in countless wars and unless I have missed some game news, the explanation you gave is inadequate, but appreciated.
I don't want to cause confusion, but I would rather bring conclusion.
It either is, or is not. There cannot be these if-then hypothesis that are untested and never proven. I have fought too many land wars with ground and special forces to be this unaware of the mechanics of how this "should" work. I am more than aware of how this does work, unless something has changed. If it has changed, point me to the game news that announced it. I will hope Andy has some time to look into this sooner than later as active wars happen all the time.