Just an idea

[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. "

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by 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.

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Another way to make emotionless worthwhile would be to have it confer other advantages. Maybe planets of emotionless races should be immune to PPP and their ships immune to crew insurrection? I'd almost say you could justify immunity to the Psychic allegiance converter, too, but that might be too much.

Also, as a general morale thing, how about a bonus when defending homeworlds? Ships over a homeworld could have bonuses to hit and militia/troops on a homeworld could have a bonus for 'ferocity'... hmm, would it be logical to remove these bonuses from 'emotionless' races?

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 03 October 2001).]

[chewy027]

Baron i agree with that for adding more depth to the emotionless trait. As it is it is pretty much worthless.

As for morale, as i said before, i think that there shouldn't be a facility and especially not a component to raise it. Granted a shore leave or something would raise morale but if your still loosing battles it shouldn't be that effective. Therefore i think that morale should be based off the ships performance in battle or perhaps discovery of new systems or anything that has to be earned by the ship. Tie it in with experience somehow that would be fine. But the flip side has to remain true to. Morale must have the possibility of lowering. And i agree comletely that ships with high morale and/or high experience levels should be far less susceptible to insurection and conVersion. Enough rambling from me.

[Menschenfresser]

Thinking about this a little further, and it might clear up the discussion between having it as part of the exp or separate.

I think it is impossible to have a ship by ship morale rating unless as I read in another thread, a retreat option is added to the tactical battle. The reason being is that if you lose, the ship is destroyed. Very few ships would actually suffer from bad morale. You are either alive or dead. It is probably impossible to even have a fleet morale rating. Well, I mean you can have one, but it would be worthless...never being negative.

Maybe "morale" isn't the right word...in that it implies the actual attitude of a given soldier, ship, unit, etc. It would have to function on a larger level, and be called something like "status of the armed forces," or even "mutiny rate." Something that is directly effected by an empire's win/loss ratio. As I said before, it could very well be segmented, in that any given empire has a separate rating when facing each different opponent.

A neat feature of this could be a "heroic acts" ability. I don't know how hard it would be to make the engine recognize battles won that should have been lost, etc. I don't know. Still running with the idea, even if I have no idea if it is possible to implement. I don't see much of a way to do it without, like some have suggested, an expansion pack or massive change in future patches.

[Cyrien]

mo·rale (m-rl)
n.
The state of the spirits of a person or group as exhibited by confidence, cheerfulness, discipline, and willingness to perform assigned tasks.

With this in mind there is no reason not to label what is going as morale as opposed to some other label.

Experience should play a roll in morale. I liked the idea of comparisons for fleet sizes especially. Perhaps the more "elite" a force is in experience the lower a morale penalty they would get and the slower morale in general would go down, and the faster it might go up.

Also morale should be empire wide and perhaps divided up by empires. Example being for the Star Trek Universe there would normally be pretty darn low moral when facing the Borg but when facing more common enemies and threats, especially ones that have been beaten in the past morale would be higher.

With this I would say there should be both an individual ship morale and an empire wide morale that is used more as a modifier when dealing with or battling with another empire. For the ship by ship it should work something similiar to planet happiness which is already a modifier of morale on a planet level.

For the system wide it should have one for each foreign empire which would act to reduce or increase morale for individual ships when they engage in battle with that specific empire.

Example:

You have 2 BC's and the enemy has 2 DN's.

Your BC's are well trained and have had several recent victories so their individual morale is high.

The DN's are much larger than your own BC's so your individual morale is abit lower, though not as low as it would be for a green crew.

However, your empire has had a long line of recent crushing defeats against this empire and so this reduces all morale by x amount for this battle.

Or, your empire has had a long line of recent crushing victories against this empire so this increases all morale by x amount for this battle.

The results of the battle come in and you compare it and determine how the individual ships involved where affected morale wise, and then how this affects your empire level morale against that empire.

Seems this would be a fun and varied system to implement as it could also lead to new technologies that could be used. Morale increasing for fanatacism with religious (especially if some holy symbol was built into the ship) no morale for emotionless, perhaps morale affecting weapons for psychic races and even a propaganda intel op which seeks to lower an empires general morale against your own or raise it against an enemies etc...

Morale could be used to help the AI come to decisions as well. Low morale = more likely to agree to peace etc and high morale less likely.

And as for ship by ship not being possible without a retreat option... I disagree. I have had many battles where one side was not totally wiped out, but one side clearly came out ahead. All that is needed is to base it on damage recieved. Even if you win but are badly damaged your morale is affected not as good as it happens. Perhaps make it so that based on simply surviving combat you get a morale bonus and then have it be modified with bonuses for kills made and negatives for allies killed and more negatives for damage done to you with some positives for damage dealt to enemy (Actual damage not shields damage). Store that for a single battle then analyze it at the end or even during combat (take damage moral goes down, deal damage moral goes up, enemy destroyed by my guys goes up, mine destroyed goes down).

[This message has been edited by Cyrien (edited 03 October 2001).]