Fear mechanics

[Edi]

It's the other way around. AOE is increased for every point and resistance penalized for every 5 points. Otherwise it would be insanely powerful.

[Zeldor]

Empowering or getting D booster increases fear?

[Kristoffer O]

Yep

[Kristoffer O]

> I haven't seen individual units rout, just groups

A group is a unit, as is an individual

[Edi]

Units with no innate fear gain Fear(+0) at D5 and every subsequent D level increases the fear by 1. Units with Fear(+0) or more natively get an immediate boost from Death magic.

[thejeff]

I've never noticed units regaining morale on their own. Admittedly, I've never run tests looking for it.

Standards are the counter to fear, since they'll continually boost morale up to base + their bonus. Working much like fear, but in the other direction.

[MaxWilson]

Sombre said:
Fear value is aoe, not power - With fear 14 my monster should have had a fear radius of 20 (6+14) but the only units with reduced morale were directly adjacent.

AoE 20 will be a radius of about 2, not 20. The ones directly adjacent are closer to the center of effect and will get hit more frequently; it's possible that others were getting hit too occasionally and just recovering. (The penalty to morale wears off.) It's hard to say. I'd probably try testing with Fear +50 or something, where the results should be more dramatic and obvious.

Edit: whoops, KO already mentioned this possibility.

-Max

[JimMorrison]

Zeldor said:
JimMorrison:

What do you mean by strength? Isn't it AoE of Fear increased every 5 levels of Fear and every point of fear making it harder to resist?

This notion of resisting is complicated.

As far as I can tell, Fear reduces morale, consistently, and constantly. The implication of what I've seen, is that the effect of having morale reduced, is irresistible.

If when people are talking about resisting, they are referring to making successful morale checks, then this is a bit misleading as well. Since next turn the morale continues to deteriorate, and morale checks are automatic every turn, it starts to seem more that the unit is just "withstanding" the Fear. The actual Fear effect still occurs, morale continues to deteriorate.


And KO, this seems like more than an omission. The problem is that all that we're observing only corroborates what we can observe, and not what is in the manual at all. Also, it might be worthwhile to take a look and see what is actually happening - if the Fear effect reduces morale AND raises the opposing roll, then it is effectually twice as strong as implied. That is, Fear +5 reduces morale by an additional point, and raises the opposing roll by 1 as well, giving an effective balance of a 2 point shift. Also, even Fear +0 will reduce morale by more than 1 point. You can watch it go down each round, though perhaps not as swiftly as with a stronger Fear, but stronger Fear drops morale by more than 2 points etc as well. It looked like the cap might be 5 or 6, but that is a huge amount, it basically means that some less disciplined units can practically be auto-routed by a D10 PoD, even before you start adding a Horror Helm or whatever.

[Xietor]

As far as units getting lucky blows, i had it benefit me twice in the 1st big game where my MA Ctis province defense killed a Bogus thug from Lanka, and later in the game a gor tartarian of Velusion.

So sometimes you just get very very lucky with the dice and your militia kill stuff they should not kill.

[Sombre]

MaxWilson said:
AoE 20 will be a radius of about 2, not 20. The ones directly adjacent are closer to the center of effect and will get hit more frequently; it's possible that others were getting hit too occasionally and just recovering. (The penalty to morale wears off.) It's hard to say. I'd probably try testing with Fear +50 or something, where the results should be more dramatic and obvious.

Sorry I meant aoe not radius. With aoe 20 I would have expected to observe units that weren't adjacent losing morale, which I didn't. However I was unaware units recover morale. That complicates things. I've learned several things from the test and this thread which aren't in the manual and aren't obvious at all.

As for testing with fear+50 - 14 is the highest base fear I could mod. I could have added death magic to get it higher though I'm not sure what the roof is. Base prot has a roof of 40 for example.


With fear decreasing morale constantly it's easy to see why Baalz dumping 6 lesser horrors onto an SC (regardless of his high morale) worked great and caused him to flee almost immediately, possibly autokilling him. The SC can only avoid this by being mindless because the reduction to morale apparently cannot be resisted. I imagine the same trick would work with big squads of ghosts and the like.

And yeah, standard is basically fear in reverse, so enough units with standard can counteract fear. That's assuming standard actually works the way the manual describes which in my experience is not a safe assumption to make.