I would miss the minor factions.  Even if they go bye-bye now, bring them back when/if we have bigger maps so there is more room for them.

And if they go, nuke the message in one of the start/wait screens that says that neutral shops have been known to sell exotic goodies from before the cataclysm.  I never saw anything all that exotic there anyway.

The Orekeepers actually have some decent armor slots and weapon for early game if you can find them in time otherwise they're pointless for mid to late game.

I too would like robust minor factions long-term.

1. How will this work?

2-3. Huh, how is it done now?

4. A good change that shouldn't take to much time. I would think you could do it all in XML.

5. Including Monsters?

I always thought morale was a cheap and dirty way to enforce a kind of supply line on players. At current, the player can send super powerful waves of units around the map for years without really resting.

I'm a big fan of supply lines. Now I really want to know what morale does...

Yeah, agreed. I personally wouldn't mind seeing a small, cumulative penalty to starting morale for ending a turn in foreign territory.

Agree. Morale would be a good way to provide negative performance for extended campaigns in hostile territory.

Actually I just thought of something, you add some nice info when setting up a game like what each spell book gives you. Now when picking a Faction to play as under their given tech for example like Gilden you get Civics but in the description it just states "Faction starts with Civics technology" what exactly is the tech giving me in the description would be nice ie "Palace, Town Hall and Pub are unlocked".

Also In the Heirgamenon some of the techs have a description and unlocks. But some are missing their unlocks, (yes very tiny detail but just letting ya know).

I for one would like for morale to be simple and straightforward, like the casting cost for spells.

Morale serves a purpose for the game: to enable better AI in tactical battle. Why should it be more complicated than that?

I would imagine a battle starts with a set morale for both sides, not a value that gets tracked on the strategic map. Turns on the tactical map slowly eat away the morale from both sides. The flow of battle also affects morale, losing units for example hurts morale. That's why the attacker will be forced to attack: his morale would end first.

While you have point about adding some mechanic to penalize an attacker for waiting for the defender to engage, I am unsure how morale would be this mechanic. In most tactical battle games, this mechanic is usually some kind of fatigue statistic or turn timer, which would both be pleasant additions to WoM and FE in general. However, in my mind, morale is the abstraction of a unit's will to fight, and thus would be effected both on the tactical map and the strategic map. For instance, on the strategic map a unit might have a base morale statistic which slowly lowers the long he is outside his own territory, while in a tactical battle the unit might have an instanced morale statistic which is determined by his base statistics as well as effects from particular enemy forces. This would keep a player from having one party on an infinite war path, as this party would be unable to keep up the momentum forever.

As for your point about morale helping the AI in tactical battles, this makes absolutely zero sense to me. In most game featuring morale, it is used in tactical battles to aid the flow of combat. For instance, in the TW series, morale serves a method of determining when a unit decides to run away, which in turn effects the morale of units around them. In those titles, the player and the AI are given this as an incentive to engaging units with lower morale in order to make fighting the rest of the army easier. Since WoM has no rout mechanic, It would seem more interesting have unit death hurt the instanced morale, but this would not make the AI "better".

One of us is misunderstanding this post:

I believe the problem is that the AI players rush humans on the tactical map (to their death) and Frogboy wants to use morale to overcome this problem. My post above was just thinking out loud how that might be accomplished. I do agree it has it's problems.

Either that, or he's talking about the strategic map and I'm way off. But this conversation has been focused on tactical combat and the update notes say: "Tactical battles: Morale reintroduced."

It's a poor way of overcoming that problem. Morale in the early versions of WoM never made sense. It was really just a timer that eventually forced one side to do something. But it worked badly, because you'd see stuff like on turn 1 you use magic to kill half the army on the other side, and in turn 2 your side's morale goes down.

Wait, what? With the battle going that way morale should soar. And since it really had no bearing on what was going on anywhere else it was something of a half-baked mechanic that really wasn't needed.

If defenders have a terrain advantage, they should sit and wait for the attackers (and the attackers should lose the fight if they can't take the position within a time limit). The only reason for defenders ever to go charging at attackers is if the attackers have ranged weapons and the defenders don't. Morale doesn't factor into this.

When ever i used moral in a game I designed (for funzies, never a published game). I always used something like the following.

Morale is a % modifier to all skill abilities. In elemental this would translate to accuracy, dodge. This is not a direct translation. What I mena is that if your morale is at 50 percent, you don't have a 50 percent penalty to accuracy and dodge. You might have a 20% penalty.

Morale Modifiers

Unit lost- subtract the % the units starting combat value was from your total combat value. That same loss applies to morale. So if I lost 20 CV out of 100 I take a 20% morale hit. The other team gains an amount of morale equal to half the amount lost.

General Killed- If the leading hero is defeated, in addition to the CV penalty, 20% morale is lost. a 10% bonus is given to the other team.

Entrentched- If the enemy army was fortified (I think you can do that in elemental, like in CiV), then the defenders gain 10% morale. 20% gain per level of city defense structure if defending a city (20 for wall, 20 for castle etc).

Time- Each round 2% of morale is depleted from both sides representing fatigue.

Obviously spells and certain attacks can modify morale but i'll leave that for another time.

Hope this helps.

without going through all 7 pages, why not make minor factions a setup option, let players choose for themselves, like notable locations and random events...?

Brad - please consider removing harbors from sandbox mode until you find time to massage some love into naval stuff (i.e. AI even using it, different types of ships, etc). Just one man's humble opinion.

I want to automatic battle option at every battle

1. chaneler allow to melee fight [y/n]
2. allow to cast spell [y/n]
3. allow to cast max spell level [1-5]

I agree, these options would be good.   (Especially if the new autoresolve is just AI controlled tactical battle speeded up.)

Best regards,
Steven.

I agree these would be nice. Though hypothetically, I would also add a slider for some kind of total mana usage, so i can specify how much mana the AI can use to cast spells.

would that be next week this week?

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Three options, a slider and preset configurations. Sounds like too much feature creep.

If I got to vote, I would go for one option (automatic or manual combat) plus Kenata's slider (max mana to spend if automatic). If the battle is important or complex, it should be fought manually.

Yeah, that does sound more reasonable.

Best regards,
Steven.

Does anyone else not care for the difficulty settings applying to all factions?

I like the idea of varying difficulty levels and tough if some are too stupid to figure it out.

LCD, my ass.

I think, and I might be wrong, that changing the world difficulty will change the "DEFAULT" difficulty of the AI factions.  I think this means that if I set the world to "Normal" all the AIs will be default to normal, and then when I get to the Faction page, I can then change the individual AIs. 

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