SUGGESTION: Set Morale

[uneducated]

In Battles, all the troops start in Good Order, if I understand correctly. I think it might be worthwhile to be able to set morale levels for the troops in custom battles. This would represent the sorts of situation where one was trying to retreat a defeated army to a place to recuperate, a bit like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

You might be able to program this by "spending morale" on the troops, in a similar way to "purchasing" troops with points at the start of a battle. For example, if you had 100 Morale points, you could purchase a 30 point infantry unit and it would start the battle Routing (i.e. at 0 Morale), or you could decide to spend 10 of your Morale points to increase it to Fragmented at the start of the game, or 20 Morale points to increase it to Disordered, or 30 points to have it commence in good order.

Some units might come with a naturally high morale, or cost more to reach a higher state of morale.

The concepts of Endurance and Resilience might be represented in Morale too. Troops with high Endurance might be able to suffer much more damage before dropping morale state. Resilience would represent the rate of recovery, the ability to bounce back, rather than the ability to absorb damage without changing. Some units might be very resilient, and recover quickly, others might take ages to recover morale. These features might be useful during extended campaigns.

A High Endurance, Low Resilience unit might withstand a ton of damage, but take ages to reach its peak strength once it has been degraded.

A Low Endurance, High Resilience unit might wilt rapidly on the battlefield, but soon recover its sense of humour if it gets out from under that hail of arrows!

To some extent, these features are already present in the game, but I think they could be developed.

@rbodleyscott

[rbodleyscott]

As you say, these things are already in the game for Campaigns, scripted Epic Battles and Empires battles. Adding them as an option to Custom Battles is a possibility which we will add to the wish list.

However, you can in fact already tweak the troop Quality (aka morale/battle-readiness etc.) in Custom battles by setting the difficulty level to Centurion (tweak morale/quality in player's favour) or Deity (tweak morale/quality in AI's favour) and then adjusting the points for each side using the Advanced Settings. The quality tweak is not taken into account for points - the units cost their normal points costs.