Hi,
I previously in the CoW 1.5 feedback wrote a post relating to morale being a major issue (I was having 30+ revolts/day, and on speed rounds it just wasnt manageable).
Anyway since then propaganda offices have been introduced... but morale is still a massive, massive issue.
For example, I am playing a round at the moment, I am New South Wales. I have taken all of Oceania, all of East Asia and Im now working on West Asia pushing to Europe. As you can imagine, from New South Wales to Kazakhstan, my "Distance to Capital" is already at a penalty of -30.
With the new "Expansion" penalty, that is now at -21 aswell.
This combination, gives me a -51 penalty on every new province I take before I even start.
Obviously, now we have the neighbour penalty. Some provinces have 6-9 roads coming into them... a province on (100-51=49% morale) gives a -5 neighbour penalty. -5*6 = -30... so now many, many of my provinces have penalty of -30, -30, -21 = -81 morale. This means that even when I conquer newly taken provinces, they are already falling, with a high chance of revolt.
Obviously the new propaganda offices increase morale, level 1 = +10, level 2 = +23, level 3 = +40.
At 25% morale,
Level 1 takes 10.5 hours
Level 2 takes 21 hours
level 3 takes 1 day, 7.5 hours
Which means that in the first day, I can only build a level 1 - assuming there are at least 10.5 hours left until day change, which often there isnt.
This gives me a penalty of -71%
On the first day change, the morale is still at 25%, which means many of my newly taken provinces all revolt - including the ones building the propaganda offices. So now, I am back to square 1.
I have spent the last 5 days building nothing but propaganda offices and light tanks to hold the fort until more prop offices are built. Going by current speeds, I have at least another 5 days of building prop offices until I am stable. That is not fun, and needs to be fixed. Furthermore, my ally has been supplying me with resources to build prop offices - without his help, I would have lost many many provinces to revolt. My resource production (+/- 2.3k/day on WaW map) is not enough to keep up with the number I need to keep building prop offices anyway.
I would propose the following changes to fix this issue
- When propaganda offices are built, they instantly adjust the morale of a province (e.g. when built 25% becomes 35% immediately). This means the provinces in which propaganda offices are built, will not revolt, and gives me a chance at least to start building a morale cluster in new provinces before they start revolting
- Expansion and Distance to Capital penalties are capped at -20, but neighbour cap is increased to -40. The reason for this is because the -21 + -30 penalty is too much instantly, that it doesnt give me a chance to recover morale, so my neighbour bonus is instantly lower too, and its a downward spiral. IF however, this "immediate" penalty was only -40 (from 2x -20 caps on expansion and distance to capital) then on provinces with e.g. only 3 neighbours, the penalty will be -21 for neihbours on all newly-taken.. total penalty being -61 (worst case scenario) - which means all my smaller provinces, or those with less access will ALWAYS end up on at least 39% morale, and therefore will never drop low enough to revolt.
This in turn makes their neighbours (which may have 8 or 9 neighbours) have a reduced penalty and slowly go up
Long story short, it gives you a fighting chance of recovering morale on newly taken large empires without spending days on building nothing but propaganda offices and spamming level 1 troops to hold provinces until the prop offices are built.
....look at this, what a joke lol
https://gyazo.com/0478f5c974e2ff6603797fa2b45cf58e
This image below you can see my nice green morale coming up through ocenaia, papua, borneo etc. But following that, its just a mess, even in east china provinces which I took days ago, and are now at risk of revolt too. You can see I have experimented with a morale cluster around north india, but it doesnt spread far enough.
https://gyazo.com/66b13880cd78d9355627d8279c501437
I currently have 47 level 3 prop offices, 21 at level 2, 19 at level 1 and have had 0 resource spare (due to HC Queue) for the last 5 days. And from the picture, you can clearly see, I still have nowhere near enough to stabilise.
