A FAIRE
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Morale
Unit Morale is an extremely important characteristic and a major influence on whether you win or lose a battle. If you go to your country tabs (click on the shield at the top left of the user interface) and select military you have a display of preferred unit types and other information. Hover your cursor over the stars for land units and you get a unit Morale tool tip as illustrated below. This will show you what your maximum morale is and how it is made up.
One of the most important things to understand from this is what all those percentages mean. They are very misleading as what they mean is a simple
additive bonus to your morale level. +50% means that 0.5 is added to total morale. This makes some of those available bonuses rather less attractive than you might first think, especially the +50% for selecting military drill as a national idea.
I think this display shows examples of all the possible sources of morale increases breaking down as follows.
- Technology – ranges from 0 to 3.5
- Current Ruler – I think this is 0.1 x military rating
- Sliders, +/-0.1 Offensive, +0/0.1 Land Naval, +/-0.05 Serfdom
- +0.5 for military drill
- +0.5 Defender of the faith
- +0 to +2.0 for land maintenance
- + Half of prestige (+0 to +0.5)
In my view one of the most revealing aspects of this is the poor showing of the military drill national idea and the tiny effects from slider settings. After viewing this I would seriously consider ignoring the morale issue when considering slider settings. If you want extra morale then it is worth considering defender of the faith rather than military drill especially if you are a large country. You can achieve the effect of military drill for 1,000 ducats, admittedly a lot of money but national ideas are quite precious.
A very important issue is the rising significance of the technology contribution, which will slowly reduce the importance of all the others. Also, rather obviously, maintenance has a profound affect on morale especially at low technology.
Morale recovery rates are currently quite unclear and some player experimental data would be gratefully received. Morale increases on the 1st of each month the same as reinforcements are received. This occurs whether the unit is retreating or not and is therefore received every month no matter what. Some brief experiments suggest that the recovery rate is variable but may be something around 15-20% per month in enemy territory and twice that in friendly territory (not sure what the definition of enemy and friendly is in this context). I will update this post when proper information is available.
IF YOU CAN DO SOME EXPERIMENTS OR SIMPLY COLLECT DATA AROUND THE TURN OF THE MONTH IN A GAME YOU ARE PLAYING THEN PLEASE POST IN THIS THREAD. If you do collect data then please provide
Morale before/Morale after/Max Morale/Status (moving, stationary, sieging)/Province status (owned, allied, controlled, enemy)/Army maintenance level
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Auteur original: Kanitatlan
Voili, voilou, bonne lecture !
