Just an idea

[Menschenfresser]

Morale.

Ship morale I think is a good idea. Someone else might have mentioned this before, but I was playing Caesar2 (which I don't like as a whole), and the armies in that game have a morale rating. You lose and it goes down, win, and it goes up.

If it were really done in such a way as to have a serious impact on the fighting ability of ships, it could be an interesting twist.

On a strategic level, as it stands now, there are a few ways for a smaller empire to strike back upon a large neighbor. One could send in several cloaked star destroyers into vital systems, granting that he could fund such an effort, but all in all, SE4 functions like say Risk, in that once you fall behind in most categories, and as long as the opponent is capable, you don't stand much of a chance.

If ships had a morale and it serious effected their battle capabilities, then a smaller empire, simply in choosing battles it knows it can win, could drain the morale of his opponent.

Just rough math here. Given that your ships are equally matched in tech, if your opponent can produce twice as many ships, but you pick your battles, and say there is a 25% plus or minus limit on morale, if he falls to 75% and you up to 125%, then your fleets are then equal, even if he has twice as many ships.....or is my math wrong here.

[Suicide Junkie]

The ship morale already sorta modelled by ship/fleet experience.

You can get 20% using facilities, but then winning battles can boost that up 30% more.
A 60% advantange (ship+fleet) is not bad.
Perhaps instead of a separate morale rating, an extra bonus could be applied to all ships and fleets in the system when you win a battle, and subtracted when you lose a ship/fleet.

[chewy027]

didn't bother ti figure out the math but i like the idea. I don't know if it was discussed here before either, but it sounds like a cool factor that could balance the game a little more. Giving ships with high moral attack and defense bonuses might be a good idea.

However, it would have to only work for ships with crews, and to make it work right there should be no moral raising facility. Also, maybe there should be a moral rating for each of an empires opponents. For instance your fighting a winning battle against one empire but a loosing against another. It would probably be to hard to implement that but it would also be more realistic. The fleet would be more eager to fight some battles than others. Also, it should not be a racial trait or something like that. It has to be something that is earned. Well enough ranting. Lets here other peoples ideas.

[Kadste]

I have done something similar to this with crew Ratings using the ship component. There are 6 levels of crew:
Poor
Green
Regular
Experienced
Crack
Elite

Using the abilities: Combat To Hit Offense Plus, Combat To Hit Defense Plus, Combat To Hit Offense Minus and Combat To Hit Defense Minus I haev tried to simulate the experience and morale of my crews.
Example:
Poor crew
Combat To Hit Offense Minus 10
Combat To Hit Defense Minus 10
Green Crew
Combat To Hit Offense Minus 5
Combat To Hit Defense Minus 5
Regular Crew, no positive or negative
Experienced Crew
Combat To Hit Offense Plus 5
Combat To Hit Defense Plus 5
Crack Crew
Combat To Hit Offense Plus 10
Combat To Hit Defense Plus 10
Elite Crew
Combat To Hit Offense Plus 20
Combat To Hit Defense Plus 20

There is more to this, but you probably get my point.

Make sure that you have to pay for the extra advantages, ie the Elite crew component costs more than the regular crew component.
I am working with the use of tech areas and facilities to tech requirements to create the better crews.

You might also want to experiement with some of the other abilities, like I am trying out the Ship Training ability on a component like a crew. This crew will earn the experience as a crew not as a facility.

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In difficult ground, press-on;
In encircled ground, devise stratagems;
In death ground, fight.
Sun Tzu (circa 400 B.C.)

[dogscoff]

The other obvious advantage to tracking morale is that it could be used to balance the crew insurrction op, which is over-simplified and unbalancing.

If a high-morale crew had a better chance of resisting the op, it would be much less powerful.

Other things to affect morale:
Shore leave: hanging about above friendly planets (own or allied) could increase morale. Perhaps the planet's happiness rating could be taken into account (rioting planets reduce ship morale because the crew don't get shore leave.)

Supplies: Running out of suppplies would reduce morale, because no-one likes emergency rations.

Facilities and components: I think there should be facilities and components for this, but *not* with system- wide affects.

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SE4 Code:
L GdY $ Fr- C- Sd T!+ Sf-- Tcp-- A% M>M+ MpD! RV Pw Fq+ Nd- Rp+ G-
/SE4 Code
Go to my meagre SEIV pages to generate your own code.

[Menschenfresser]

Just as a flip side to Dogscoff idea about shore leave, staying out in space for too long could lower morale. I see it could be a way in which to discourage the tactic of keeping fleets stationed on WPs for the entire game.

I suppose Exp. and morale could be combined, but I think it best if they were separated, as exp. is different from confidence in one's abilities.

I like the idea of running out of supplies as a feature too. As far as facilities go, I agree with having no system wide facilities. Have something like recreation facilities would be nice. They would be excellent things to fill up those near useless moons, and then we here at SE4 could actually say, "I'm taking shore leave on the pleasure moon Galactus Prime."

The idea of having different morale Ratings for different opponents is interesting, but I wonder how it might alter playing styles. I do think that if computer played empires are given morale, it would make them seriously easier to beat. I mean, how easy is it to pick off their strays.

[Rhinestone Cowboy]

You could also have a Component Called Recreation Lounge for putting into Space stations, a la Deep Space Nine. It would have to be large and pricey so people don't start throwing it into every desroyer they build. This would also allow for Pleasure barges roaming the empire bringing joy to the Enlisted men of the Glorious space navy!

To build on what Menschenfresser said, Having a Rec Facility on a planet could also generate a bonus beyond what you might get at another friendly port.

This is of course assuming someone out there can find a way to implement Morale?

[Q]

All good ideas but I share the opinion of suicide_junkie that this is more or less already in the game with the ship/fleet experience.
The new thing would however be that the experience/moral can decrease under the circumstances you mention and that the success chance of crew conVersion depends on the experience/moral of the target ship.
If you do it based on the existing feature of the ship/fleet experience, it might be not too much work for MM to implement in a future patch, so suggest it to them.

[Cyrien]

This also might make emotionless a worthwhile racial trait. Make it so that emotionless races don't experience morale either as a positive or negative. They never get happy or sad. Beat em into the dirt or get beaten into the dirt and still no feelings one way or the other. As it is I really don't see much use myself in emotionless. Far too pricy and easy enough to keep my people happy.

[Lerchey]

This is a pretty cool discussion, and there are some very neat ideas here. Thus, I can't resist throwing in yet another set of opinions.

The idea of buying better trained crews is pretty cool, but it has the opposite effect that the original poster wanted - to give a small, way-behind empire a chance. If I'm running the hugely successful empire, I can AFFORD better crews for all of my ships. The guy who's losing can't, which will only make it even harder for him to do well.

It can easily be argued that morale is factored into the experience/traing bonuses. However, if I wanted to impliement a real morale system, I would not do it that way.

I would have factors to do actual morale checks. Things like:

- ship is facing a larger fleet (1.5:1, 2:1, etc.)
- ship is facing larger enemy ships (eg, my destroyer is facing a battlecruiser would be a detrement)
- ship is x% damaged or has lost critical components

Things like that. In SE IV now, once a ship loses it's weapons in battle, it tries to run. I would think that based on a real morale check, the following things could occur:

- Initial "Shaken" results would penalize the ships offensive and defensive bonuses by -10%
- Next level would penalize by -20% and set the ship to fire only at Max weapons range (eg, stay in the fight, but don't go toe to toe with the enemy)
- Next level the ship tries to run and only fires if in range while fleeing. -30% to offense and defense.
- Finaly failure: the ship surrendurs and becomes an enemy ship (though it would not be able to fire or move for the rest of the current battle)

There would, of course, need to be modifiers for things like:

Master Computer. Sorry, MCs should not suffer from morale.

Mechanoid race. I can't see them doing this either.

Religious talisman. I'd give a bonus to morale for this... these guys are fanatics.

I'm sure there are lots of other things including racial and situational issues which could factor in. This is just a really rough outline.

So, for what it's worth, I think that a real morale system would be cool.

General John
"Napoleon said that morale is to the physical as 3 is to 1. I'll take 3 DNs for each of yours any day. "