The Vietnam peace deal in All the Way is... weird

Signing a Vietnam peace deal in All the Way requires 2 things: Having the necessary political capital and having enough war leverage. The more leverage you have, the better a deal you can secure for the south. That's the first part where things get strange, because you can't make a more dovish peace deal if you have a lot of leverage. I suppose the south wouldn't accept a dovish peace when they feel they're winning, which I disagree with, but whatever.

The most baffling part of the whole thing is how a peace deal will always fall through if an "October surprise" happens. Some of them make sense, like France having a communist revolution, a second Korean war, or the Soviets invading Romania, since it would divert the US government and make the Vietcong think they can win. Others would have no reason to affect the Vietname peace negotiations, like George Wallace being shot, MLK marching against LBJ, or LBJ's son-in-law dying. There's 13 such "October surprises" and it's really easy to trigger at least one of them. This makes getting a peace deal damn near impossible without looking at the code (not to mention some of these October surprises are triggered in ways that I could write a whole rant about).

What makes this even even funnier is how the Vietnam peace and October surprises only trigger if LBJ is running again. Normally not having at least some support for south Vietnam leads to an early fall of Saigon, tabking LBJ's polling. If you abandon Vietnam but someone else becomes the Democratic nominee, the Vietcong will kindly refrain from taking Saigon. The Soviets won't invade Romania (even though the trigger for that happening is based on the DNC doing poorly which is the same thing that causes LBJ to drop out). All the Way certainly has some interesting ways its mechanics interact with each other and the player's choices.