Global Morale

[Michael Emrys]

I posted this in the Scenario Talk Forum, but it didn't seem to garner much attention there, so I thought I'd try it here:

Is it possible in the editor to have a side begin a scenario with reduced global morale? It doesn't look like it to me, but I want to make sure I'm not missing a trick.

Michael

[Sergei]

No.

Unless a house rule is made that a side must exit some units at the beginning of the game, because I recall exited units pull down the global morale. You could lock them to a corner, surrounded by cliffs, even try giving exit points for them (neutralized by a point bonus or similar arrangement on the other side) and give no ammo so to discourage their combat use. AI wouldn't understand it, though.

[Mark Gallear]

As I have caught Michael in a good mood - thought I would bend his ear and give some thoughts to him on features for CM2 !

I have never really missed this feature - suppose it would be useful for campaigns but even then - the second game should give enough time for the troops to recover their "morale.”

However, I am a bit worried, I remember playing a miniatures system, which had a test on units lower down the command structure automatically imposed if you had a unit higher up the command scale morale break. You could get a whole army to break if the force commander was routed. Sometimes you could do this on turn 1 if you had your artillery land on him - a lot of players fielded almost all artillery armies. The Russians with a tank troop of 3 against the German 5 had inherently worse morale - 1 tank gone is 33% loss plus you had to pay for more leaders proportionally. (The CM lists stop this tactic!) However, I do want to see Squadron Tank structures modelled and a better command structure simulating the real thing.

It might be useful to have the option to include routing and broken troops available to scenario designers. In "My Road to Minsk" operation I wanted to start with the large preparatory artillery strike to Bagration but realised all the artillery would then be available for all future games. Got round this by cutting the rounds available short and starting the game at the point in the battle when the barrage is almost over.

(It might be nice to have brewed up vehicles available to scenario designers as well for scenic effect. You could do a fight inthe desert for the recovery of Yestedays tank losses!)

To simulate this I edited in casualties from the barrage and as bad as morale as the game allows - you can’t have routed units and without some artillery landing on them must troops would be back to normal by the second turn. (The effect of this will be to lower global moral to some extent – far as I’m aware the only way you can do this on purpose.)

Another possible new feature for CM2 would be reinforcements or troops in CM2 that are only available for a limited time - sort of reverse reinforcements - so I could have the big guns available in game 1 but take them backing for the following games to simulate the rapid advance leaving them behind.

Sorry Michael

[ February 01, 2004, 09:45 AM: Message edited by: Mark Gallear ]