(OT) Do you prefer to know game formulas?

[Chazar]

The hidden mechanics of the morale system is fine to me, since it is suffciently complicated to make it impractical to be learned from repeated experiments:

I think that the question should rather be what is a desireable factor for "successful" play: It seems proper to me that an experienced player has an advantage, but I do not like it if this "experience" can be obtained by simply assiduous experiments, e.g. I do not like the "wish" spell: "Wish" is certainly funny for SP, but would anyone use it blindly in MP? Certainly not! But acquiring the knowledge how "wish" functions requires no genuine insights, but just a large enough amount of time for solo play against a weak AI (or map modding expertise).

On the other hand, learning the morale system also needs time, but it still requires some thought, for the number of possible battle setups (troop compositions, placements & scriptings) is just too numerous. Thus there is no obvious way of experimenting. The only way to learn more about it is to gain some intuition by conducting a great variety of battles.

So I would want that all simple things are made easily available to save me the hassle to conduct boring experiments instead of playing the game. I do not want to tediously study the game before being able to play in MP! Or in more aggressive words: Anything that can easily learned from playing against a simple AI should also be easily accessible right from the start!

[jeffr]

I'd prefer to have all game information available in-game via icons, right clicking, turn by turn battle summaries with detailed results [i.e. attack 15 (base 13 + 2 for exp) vs def 13: chance to hit = 70%: HIT for 5 damage (spear 3 + strength 15 - 13 protection)].

The battle summary might be a bit much considering the number of units that participate in a battle. But having the etheral unit icon say somtheing like "75% of non-magic strikes ignored" or having a spell say the type of damage it does (and hence you could figure out what resistances reduce that damage) would be good.

The detailed information could be made available only by explicitly clicking on an icon, battle report, etc. Only people who were interested in the detail would have to look at it.

Or you could have a Preferences option that gives greater detail for help text.