Morale is still an issue

K.Rokossovski wrote:

ryanb96 wrote:

DoctorDR1 wrote:

Friendly reminder to be polite. I don't want to intervene, but I will if I have to.

Sorry, but I'm becoming incredibly frustrated at people repeatedly just spewing nonsense like "just put troops in them" or "move capital" or "recapture them" or "don't move so fast" and not actually reading my posts to understand why that doesn't solve the problem, and the flaw in the morale system that needs a dev to look at and fix. Meanwhile, here's todays look at how much morale has fallen on the most recent day change:https://gyazo.com/9152a7c172d923317c432b160e56bde4

As you can see, the penalties are killing me!

FYI: in the pic, the "red glowing provinces" mean they are now at chance of revolt

Dude. We're trying to help you. Many of us manage large empires; none of us have problems like you. You don't want to listen to suggestions, that's fine; but you might want to consider to stop shouting and blaming the whole world, then. One user's problem isn't going to move any developer from his butt, though.

YourGaurdian wrote:

K.Rokossovski wrote:

ryanb96 wrote:

DoctorDR1 wrote:

Friendly reminder to be polite. I don't want to intervene, but I will if I have to.

Sorry, but I'm becoming incredibly frustrated at people repeatedly just spewing nonsense like "just put troops in them" or "move capital" or "recapture them" or "don't move so fast" and not actually reading my posts to understand why that doesn't solve the problem, and the flaw in the morale system that needs a dev to look at and fix. Meanwhile, here's todays look at how much morale has fallen on the most recent day change:https://gyazo.com/9152a7c172d923317c432b160e56bde4

As you can see, the penalties are killing me!

FYI: in the pic, the "red glowing provinces" mean they are now at chance of revolt

Dude. We're trying to help you. Many of us manage large empires; none of us have problems like you. You don't want to listen to suggestions, that's fine; but you might want to consider to stop shouting and blaming the whole world, then. One user's problem isn't going to move any developer from his butt, though.

First of all u need to look into ur language. Yes, I have also managed large empires too. But this dude, idk, is kinda not listening to the advice. He doesn't even have continental empires. He has all from Australia to russia. U need to make a centralised capital. If u are conscious about the morale, u need to go slow. Leave what has happened. From the next time, go slower. When morale of a city becomes 35, leave it and make a prop office. It won't cause rebellions. Resources production is to be handle before military expansion. U need to make sure u already have a full fledged economy before expanding continentally. Who's ur enemy btw?

Lads youre literally not reading what im saying.

Even if you do go slowly, the same problem will happen eventually

Even if you move the capital, the same problem will still happen eventually.

The province morale never gets to 35, because it never goes up, because the penalties out-weight the morale to negative!

The reason, when you first start a game, that the morale goes up, is because there are no penalties.

e.g. when you start, you have 0 expansion penalty and 0 distance to capital so the "target morale" is 100%. As you get bigger, these penalties increase so large, that the "target morale" is only 18%, hence morale goes down, not up

I think it is you who doesn't read.

You have a problem.

No one else does.

So it is unlikely that it is about the system.

Many other players I talk to also complain... Im giving the detail

The penalties are cumulative. First, your empire gets on a downward morale trajectory (due to distance and size), then the neighbor penalty kicks in. If you expand quickly (faster than you can build garrisons or propaganda offices) then the downward morale pressure becomes an avalanche.

I'm going to be facing a similar situation, because I started in Australia. I'll have to build propaganda offices everywhere, move my capital, and still there's a problem..... because I don't have a good spot for my capital. My conquests include Africa and South America. I've stayed out of Asia so far because it requires such a large land army, and my coastal approach doesn't work there. By the time I *get* to Asia, morale is going to be a serious problem. And then taking enough of Asia to finish the game will be a chore.

But look, everyone. This is not fun. The end game needs to be a lot faster, and a lot more interesting. Building propaganda offices and militia all over the map is tedious. I know it's *possible* to win a large map eventually, but please consider making this less of a chore.

z00mz00m wrote:

The penalties are cumulative. First, your empire gets on a downward morale trajectory (due to distance and size), then the neighbor penalty kicks in. If you expand quickly (faster than you can build garrisons or propaganda offices) then the downward morale pressure becomes an avalanche.

I'm going to be facing a similar situation, because I started in Australia. I'll have to build propaganda offices everywhere, move my capital, and still there's a problem..... because I don't have a good spot for my capital. My conquests include Africa and South America. I've stayed out of Asia so far because it requires such a large land army, and my coastal approach doesn't work there. By the time I *get* to Asia, morale is going to be a serious problem. And then taking enough of Asia to finish the game will be a chore.

But look, everyone. This is not fun. The end game needs to be a lot faster, and a lot more interesting. Building propaganda offices and militia all over the map is tedious. I know it's *possible* to win a large map eventually, but please consider making this less of a chore.

You probably explained this entire thread better in your first paragraph than I did this entire thread, nice summation.

I think hat yes morale is an issue. There shall be some changes to balance games in full world maps. The distance to capital and neighbour penalty should be decreased. However I don't understand how it makes sense to add an expansion penalty. Yes, you want to make large empires weaker so that the smaller nations can catch up and have a chance of winning, however if Nazi Germany took the world then why will its people we sad and upset about there country covering nearly every land area on the earth.

KingVarchasv wrote:

I think hat yes morale is an issue. There shall be some changes to balance games in full world maps. The distance to capital and neighbour penalty should be decreased. However I don't understand how it makes sense to add an expansion penalty. Yes, you want to make large empires weaker so that the smaller nations can catch up and have a chance of winning, however if Nazi Germany took the world then why will its people we sad and upset about there country covering nearly every land area on the earth.

It makes absolutely no sense to have expansion penalties in your cores though...

Yeah, but many nations are there which expand over many ethinicities or as in the game cores. Like India, it has hindus, marathas, sikhs, tamils but still the Indian government tolerates them. So there could be a policy. You will tolerate them and get buffs to morale and debufs to something else, or you don't tolerate them andyou will get debuffs in morale but buffs somewhere else.

I think the point of having such penalties is to counteract hyper aggressive players. If you conquered 100 provinces a day that is absurd and there should be a high morale penalty for that - It's just simply not realistic. I have never had morale problems like what you are describing and I have played a fair number of 100 player maps.

I'm less deterred on attacking by the moral and more by the fact that bots hate me.

Yes I do not really care about morale now because I have a stratergy for that. However, I am most concerned about popularity.

It doesn't matter how slow or fast you take the provinces, you will still hit the same issue eventually - it's literally unavoidable, because maths is maths, you can't argue with it. If you havent had the issue, you just havent been in a game long enough to experience it, or been large enough to experience it in a 100-player map. Follow my maths in my previous post, you can't argue with it.

• Your starting provinces after 2/3 days are 100%, if you take maybe 1 neighbouring enemy, after couple days sure those new provinces are 100% too.
• Few more days, sure you take maybe 3/4 more countries and within a few days their morale is now 100% too. At this point in time, you barely have any penalty for the "Expansion" penalty, so the "Target" morale is high.
• As you get bigger, your expansion penalty starts to grow, and your distance to capital penalty starts to grow, thus decreasing your "Target" morale
• Few more days, you're 1-2 days travel from your capital, and your distance to capital penalty is now -20 - you will notice the provinces you take now, will never reach 100% morale without propaganda offices. (100-20=80, so the target morale = 80%. Those provinces will rise in morale to 80%, then stop moving and sit "stable" on 80%)
• Few more, you're 3-4 days travel from your capital, you'll notice you now have a -30 distance to capital penalty and your provinces remain at around 60-70% morale, unless you build propaganda offices
• Fast forward 2 weeks, and you're now holding all of Asia & Oceania. Your expansion penalty is so large that all of your provinces slowly decrease in morale because of this penalty
• Fast forward another week, all your provinces are now lower, because as your previous penalties took effect, you started incurring a "neighbour" penalty too, causing your provinces to get lower
• That "neighbour" penalty is now creating additional neighbour penalty, causing provinces to go lower still
• and so on - It's a downward spiral.

If you haven't experienced it, you just haven't got there yet. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, except build a LOT of propaganda offices, or finish the game before you get to this point.

But as you get bigger and bigger, you get to a certain point of being so large, that expansion penalty increases, and you hit that negative trajectory/trend. The game I had particular issue, there were 2 of us who were MASSIVE in asia (about 50% asia each) - so there are no capitals left to take. I then took all of his land, to take all of asia, so I was taking maybe 200+ provinces, without any capitals to temporarily boost me.

AO I disagree - taking a province should increase morale of other provinces. When Britain conquered a new country, it boosted morale of the UK, not decreased it.

ryanb96 wrote:

If you haven't experienced it, you just haven't got there yet. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, except build a LOT of propaganda offices, or finish the game before you get to this point.

- The math above presumes that you NEVER took a capital in the entire game. That's hard for me to believe, given the size of such an empire. If you really didn't and left ALL capitals to others, maybe you should focus on that a bit more. Did you have some kind of policy in place that made you specifically evade taking capitals?

- You seem to play an extremely long game. Several time you say "fast forward x weeks", do you really mean that nothing happened in these weeks? Was this game dragging on for like half a year or so?

Maybe not useful to you right now because this was apparently an old game, one of the morale penalties (forgot which one, sorry) was recently dropped by 5 points. Such a change usually affects only new games.

Edit - and your reluctance to move your capital is also quite striking. You moan about high "distance to capital" penalties while it is in your own hand to decrease them.

ryanb96 wrote:

It doesn't matter how slow or fast you take the provinces, you will still hit the same issue eventually - it's literally unavoidable, because maths is maths, you can't argue with it. If you havent had the issue, you just havent been in a game long enough to experience it, or been large enough to experience it in a 100-player map. Follow my maths in my previous post, you can't argue with it.

• Your starting provinces after 2/3 days are 100%, if you take maybe 1 neighbouring enemy, after couple days sure those new provinces are 100% too.
• Few more days, sure you take maybe 3/4 more countries and within a few days their morale is now 100% too. At this point in time, you barely have any penalty for the "Expansion" penalty, so the "Target" morale is high.
• As you get bigger, your expansion penalty starts to grow, and your distance to capital penalty starts to grow, thus decreasing your "Target" morale
• Few more days, you're 1-2 days travel from your capital, and your distance to capital penalty is now -20 - you will notice the provinces you take now, will never reach 100% morale without propaganda offices. (100-20=80, so the target morale = 80%. Those provinces will rise in morale to 80%, then stop moving and sit "stable" on 80%)
• Few more, you're 3-4 days travel from your capital, you'll notice you now have a -30 distance to capital penalty and your provinces remain at around 60-70% morale, unless you build propaganda offices
• Fast forward 2 weeks, and you're now holding all of Asia & Oceania. Your expansion penalty is so large that all of your provinces slowly decrease in morale because of this penalty
• Fast forward another week, all your provinces are now lower, because as your previous penalties took effect, you started incurring a "neighbour" penalty too, causing your provinces to get lower
• That "neighbour" penalty is now creating additional neighbour penalty, causing provinces to go lower still
• and so on - It's a downward spiral.

If you haven't experienced it, you just haven't got there yet. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, except build a LOT of propaganda offices, or finish the game before you get to this point.

But as you get bigger and bigger, you get to a certain point of being so large, that expansion penalty increases, and you hit that negative trajectory/trend. The game I had particular issue, there were 2 of us who were MASSIVE in asia (about 50% asia each) - so there are no capitals left to take. I then took all of his land, to take all of asia, so I was taking maybe 200+ provinces, without any capitals to temporarily boost me.

AO I disagree - taking a province should increase morale of other provinces. When Britain conquered a new country, it boosted morale of the UK, not decreased it.

I think there must be more to morale than the headline numbers. Here's one of my outlying provinces with morale penalties of 82. By your calculations the maximum it could be is 18%, yet it's morale is 38%.

Is the additional 20% from two capitals captured after I took this province?

OldPotatoes wrote:

I think there must be more to morale than the headline numbers. Here's one of my outlying provinces with morale penalties of 82. By your calculations the maximum it could be is 18%, yet it's morale is 38%.

Is the additional 20% from two capitals captured after I took this province?

OldPotatoes wrote:

I think there must be more to morale than the headline numbers. Here's one of my outlying provinces with morale penalties of 82. By your calculations the maximum it could be is 18%, yet it's morale is 38%.

Is the additional 20% from two capitals captured after I took this province?

No this falls in line with my calculations. The "Target Morale" is indeed 18%. If you look, you see "Morale Trend" and its "Falling". It will fall every day on day change until it reaches 18%.

Please can you post another picture now?

If it was 18% and you since took 2 capitals (= +2x10%) before the day change, then yeah, it would be 38%, but fall again on day change

@freezy it would be really cool if it was possible to add "Target Morale" field for each province as a separate line underneath the penalties in that info window

ryanb96 wrote:

Hi OldPotatoes,

No this falls in line with my calculations. The "Target Morale" is indeed 18%. If you look, you see "Morale Trend" and its "Falling". It will fall every day on day change until it reaches 18%.

Please can you post another picture now?

ryanb96 wrote:

K.Rokossovski wrote:

ryanb96 wrote:

RBoi200 wrote:

What I don't understand is WHY you have morale problems... if you play right, you shouldn't.

Clearly you've never had a very large empire if that is your view.(Also, country has a large impact. If I was e.g. Kazakhstan, then I might be okay because my overall distance to capital and length of empire would be smaller. But as New South Wales, it means my empire is extremely long due to its natural placement)

Heck I have managed large empires and never had ANY sort of the problem you described, as many people on this thread have said. So I'm afraid, and I'm really sorry for being the one to break this to you, that it is something YOU are doing wrong. I still think it is in capital management (doing this correctly will mitigate neighbor effects as well), but the issue me and others have raised, as you do here yourself now as well, is that your own capital is too remote. You ARE aware that you can move it, and "be like Kazakhstan" as well, right? Why do you insist on keeping your capital in that remote place, if it might help solve your problem?

Like I explained, this will not solve the issue - and quite frankly will be extremely counter productive.

Look:

My Capital is in New South Wales.

By the time I reach IndoChina, my distance to capital penalty is already at -30.

https://gyazo.com/0ecd5f09cd0282450b53f36c8f41d875

So YES, I COULD move my capital here. BUT if I did this, then all of my CORE provinces would sink to 10-20% morale due to the penalty. This would absolutely cripple my production of resources and cash, and troop production.

Not only that, but the distance to my frontline would STILL BE -30!

https://gyazo.com/1330cc2b7adc372daa5aa0482b72978f

This second pic shows my frontline at Russia from Tsari (Tibet/Indo area) - so sure, this would help my morale in central Asia, but it would destroy my morale in all of Borneo, Philippines, Sumatra, Australia, NZ etc. (where almost all of my high level industry is) - particularly my core provinces.. and the other end (my frontline) would still be just as bad anyway.