Tactics and morale

I was thinking it would be neat to have a morale system in the game, I mean who takes on a titan with total confidence? Running from a fight, making rash decisions or disobeying orders due to cockiness would certainly make things interesting if not frustrating with out proper a proper leader or “training” for the citizens of Stonehearth. I could be over complicating the idea of this simple yet elegant game but I just want to put my thoughts out there :smile:

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Quite a few people will probably be against this but as an optional feature or a mod I really like the idea.

Understandable, the difficulty of leading is no easy task and perhaps if they want realism maybe a hardcore mode?

I half thought if there was morale it would be not only based on military but what your civilians are like too. What is there to fight for if you city isn’t thriving with arts, fine goods (clothes and jewellery) and wonderful festivals etc that boost morale. If the town is dead your troops better for dead too.

Hey Ronin,

In this mock up it suggested that the helm provides a courage boost, so I think they’re probably thinking about implementing it in the game.

Yeah I saw that I hope they come through with that. Looks great.

I suggest some kind of toggle to see the morale status of your units. I wasn’t sure if I should put it here or create a new suggestion thread; I thought it better to keep the discussion here.

I won’t discuss the underlying mechanics of morale, but whatever it is I think it would be cool to be able to toggle some kind of indicator. The toggle could be civ-wide or on an individual unit. For morale, I’m thinking something like a color coded-smiley face that hovers over the unit’s head. For example, green and smiley is happy, yellow and flat mouth is just ok (basic default start happiness), red and frowny is bad, and at most a 4th indicator that flashes red or is black with an X mouth or something reflecting horrible.

This would be helpful in general for seeing your unit’s happiness and maybe you could even click or hover on the indicator and it would give you a couple bullet points about why the unit is happy or sad (lost a pet cat, had a good nap). This would also be helpful in battle; when you see a bunch of units red you know the battle is going poorly, and if you see a bunch of guys running away with black X faces, you know they’ve chickened out completely, lost too many buddies, miss their cat, etc.

The morale system… Something many games have and many games have failed to master. The great team of awsome have allready said that fear will be in the game but we don’t know how its going to work. Will they mess it up!? Will they come up with the greatest thing since um… Bread? Well here is how it should work:
A setteler have morale. When morale is really low they may betray, run away and won’t work as good. Soilders may also flee when they have low morale.
To get morale back up the setteler can: Eat, relax, sleep, interact with friends and may get a boost from some classes.
But we need mechanics dont we? And no im not going to be like “update!” Because thats annoying.
Here are sooooooome suggestions.

  • If a setteler sees a monster get killed hes morale goes up. He or she will tell her friends and their morale will go up(not as much). And if the oposite(sees a setteler get killed) the oposite will happen.

  • If a soilder kills lets say four nay five monsters he will inspire his/her men and those around her/him. When he/she dies morale goes down.

  • Lets say your village have been through some rough times. Monster attacks, death, starvation and other such things. They wont react as hard to something bad like a man lost his arm(it happens every day!). They have other things to worry about! Buuuuuuuuuuuut if something good happens they will become way happier then someone that have gropen up in peace and procfidbhbuddbu.

Bye and wait for updates! (Just kidding)

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there are a few minor problems to the morale system you would like to have. 1st i would like to say that instead of the morale system i think RE is going for more of a debuff system which i guess is somewhat the same.

so i know RE said that if they have alot of debuffs or something happens to them then they will run or betray or something of the sort

so lets get to the this list:

  1. not eating will cause a debuff.
  2. sleeping on the hard cold ground will cause a debuff.
    dont know bout the rest.

so these two when turning your morale into a buff/debuff system go hand in hand. if a soldier just the soldier kills 5 goblins then he gets a buff of “Goblin Slayer” which would then boost his attack, if say other soldier then goes and kills a titan then he would get “Hero” which boost all soldiers within a certain radius until the “Hero” would die.

P.S [quote=“Supergamer33, post:1, topic:5882”] Well here is how it should work:[/quote]
now before i rant on this. this is how i hear you saying this when reading it. should is something that people who think they are the boss of the game while they themselves have no control over what the game will be. RE knows what they want the game to look like and feel like and i will support them because of what the told us thus far. now remember i know nothing of what they plan but this is what i have heard and what i think they will do and i’m not trying to say that you are being like other gamers who think they know what they are talking bout when really they don’t.
thank you for listening to my rant

So no updates this time i suspect :stuck_out_tongue:
Also i really like the idea. Morale could also come from:

  • Enough food
  • just had a party
  • their family will maybe be killed if they lose (this counts for soldiers and they will start to fight furiously if fx. a titan attacks because it would probably end with their families death)
  • titans should give debuffs because they are VERY big and scary

Given the number of similarities I’m seeing pop up in this thread, I feel it’s important to cite Dwarf Fortress’ “happiness” system… and the problems with it. To keep it brief, your dwarves can be cold, naked, and starving, but be ecstatic because of a nice dining room… or, everything can seem normal until one person snaps, and it all goes south. IIRC the devs have mentioned something about not wanting the game to be all about managing villager happiness, for reasons almost certainly tied that example.

So if we don’t want players to have to manage villager happiness, it should be folded into something we’re already doing. For this reason, it may be best to tie morale strictly into combat/cowardice rather than having perks/disasters occur as a result of happiness. If positive morale comes from safety/protection (strong soldiers, good armor, high walls, no monster sightings) and negative morale/fear comes from danger (lots of monsters, death, hunger, etc.) then morale could more or less “happen” automatically as you interact with combat.

There’s a lot more implications that we could go into, such as the perks/penalties of courage and cowardice or @Supergamer33 's example of morale events spreading through the populace, but at a basic level it’s important to determine the purpose and scope of the morale system first.

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