Re: Fear mechanics
 

I read all the thread but in the end wasn't so clear for me how fear works now ... is JK come back from golfing and can tell us how fear is coded ?

Anyway is always great to see how the game is growing faster than the developers are able to follow ... it is a sort of magic! ... probably in the future, if needed, I'll try to write a "Manual Addenda" also for dom3.

good play
Liga

Re: Fear mechanics
 

bump - still curious to hear the definitive explanation for fear mechanics :)

Re: Fear mechanics
 

Still no conclusion?

Re: Fear mechanics
 

How does one counter fear? Does spamming sermon of courage do anything or does only the first cast effective?

Sorry to necro an old thread- thought it would be better to keep the discussion in the appropriate place.

Re: Fear mechanics
 

Sermon of Courage only works once. It applies a single +2 bonus

Standards make a fairly effective counter to fear, since they raise morale every round. Only up to base+standard bonus, of course.

The best way, if you can arrange it, is to use troops immune to fear: mindless or berserkers.

Re: Fear mechanics
 

The best counter to fear is to use it yourself

Re: Fear mechanics
 

Berserk is also a counter for fear.

Re: Fear mechanics
 

Ideally, you use large groups of troops who have morale high enough to stand up to thugs w/ fear. Of course, that won't help you against Baalz' idea about massed troops with overlapping fear auras. It also doesn't help if you have nothing but troops with crappy morale, but against a single thug troops with high enough morale (and in great enough numbers to keep their average squad morale up) should stick it out longer. Troops hold or rout as a squad, so it's the average morale of the squad that matters.

For example, if you have sacreds like Mictlan's jaguar warriors (another example of how Jags solve many problems?) they start with a base morale of 12, but you are likely to be blessing them which would get them to 14. If they have any experience their morale will be even higher, but let's assume no experience for now. Assume you're facing a Prince of Death with significant fear - I'm not sure exactly how much it reduces each individual guy, but it seems to usually be in the realm of -5 to morale..?

Based on KO's description (and what I've seen agrees) the fear aura isn't just adjacent to the unit with fear, but but extend tendrils of fear to non-adjacent squares. But for our purposes let's say that half of the Jags end up effected by the fear because of the haphazzard way the aura extends out. So 10 of 20 Jags facing a PoD have their fear reduced (by 5? or something in that region?). From a blessed morale of 13 (-1 for being in enemy dominion, which is where Jags frequently find themselves), 10 of the Jags have been reduced to morale 8. That's a huge drop, but the average morale of the unit is still 10 (10.5 rounds down I think?).

That's actually low enough that there's a decent chance they may rout. Add some sermons of courage on them and you can bump their morale up by 2 though. Likewise, Jags do pick up experience really quickly. Jags with 1 star and Sermon of Courage in addition to the Blessing are going in to this fight with morale 17, which would average out to morale 14 in this example where half of them are reduced by 5 from the fear aura. Bringing more Jags to the fight would also increase the number that are probably outside of the fear aura, bringing up the average morale for the unit.

Or you can use demons. All of the 5 types of demons summoned by Ritual of the Five Gates have morale 30, which means they are immune to fear (they can still rout due to 75% HP loss for their side of a battle).

The net result seems to be that mundane troops are very susceptible to fear, but buffed elites like sacreds with higher morale tend to hold out well, and end game troops like demons ignore fear altogether.

--

BTW, a battle I just watched confirming the manual's (and KO's) description of the fear aura AOE pattern (ie. random dispersal extending to non-adjacents):

Dom v3.27:

A bunch of C'tis militia (base morale 7 +1 for friendly dominion = 8) facing...
A Rudra w/ horror helmet (fear 8).

The lizzards cluster in front of the Rudra as depicted above. The "v" guys in the front, all 5 squares, are affected by the fear aura right away (morale reduced from 8 to 3). The units in the uppermost and lowermost affected "v" squares were not adjacent to the Rudra prior to their morale dropping.

The militia continue forward and surround the Rudra, with some of them briefly recovering morale from 3 back up to 6. As the Rudra is surrounded, some of the milita who recovered morale back up to 6 are reduced again and now have a morale of 1, while others previously unaffected are affected for the first time and brought down to 3 (from 8) and still others have yet to be affected at all by the aura and are still at base morale 8.

Is morale always reduced by fear in increments of 5? In this example, it seems to recover in increments of 3.

What I'm still not sure about is if the morale loss is something that can be resisted by higher morale troops (like my Jag example above, which now seems likely to be quite inaccurate given that morale can be reduced iteratively on subsequent combat turns). Would high morale troops resist the morale loss (a resist role vs their higher base morale?), or would they simply start with a higher base morale allowing them to shrug off the effect for a round or two before the inevitable rout?

Re: Fear mechanics
 

Its hard to tell the exact mechanics on this from testing due to the randomness, but anecdotally units within the fear aura have their morale "damaged" at a level corresponding to the fear aura with random variation, then a route check is performed. Each round morale "heals" a certain amount and if the unit is still in the fear aura (which varies as described) re-damaged. So, with any significant fear the moral is steadily dropping faster than it's healing adjacent to the unit and even very high morale units will drop down and route in a few turns with no casualties. Of course battle has to last that long...which is one obvious counter.

On top of the fear counters already mentioned here, morale 30 units are immune to fear and only (I think) route due to the total hps of their side dropping to 20%. Also, fear has a limited range and morale checks are for the entire squad, so if you've got decent to good moral and a huge squad such that most of the squad's morale is not dropping then you'll be fine (unless you're taking big casualties). Keep in mind berserking and mindless units don't bump up the morale of other units in their squad.

Re: Fear mechanics
 

A great way to exploit this is to put slow movers with high morale with fast movers with low morale. For example, Elephants with Hypaspists.