Neighboring Province Morale

I would like to see the neighboring province morale influence receive a better balance treatment. As it is, now, you can only get a maximum of +15 morale from neighboring provinces. But you can have a bad morale effect with a much higher maximum much greater than -30 morale from neighboring provinces (and this doesn't count neighboring enemies). And, I don't think you get any effect from neighboring allies.

The problem is that a province has to be in the green to give a positive morale to its neighboring provinces. That means that it's already at 80% morale or higher. But, a negative morale kicks in just below that. So, unless you have a very high morale, over all, your provinces will try to bring each other down. This is especially problematic in far-flung map-spanning empires where your distance-to-capital morale modifier has a strong effect up to -39 for most of your provinces. Since the Fortress bonus has a maximum positive effect of +25, there just isn't enough to alleviate the stacked negatives fighting against you. Add on to that the fact that occupied provinces only produce resources at a maximum of 25% of their original potential and you have a piss-poor economy that must be maxed out early and often just to keep from sinking. And if you want to keep your economy from going into the starvation death spiral (another negative morale modifier), then you have to farm a bunch of enemy and NPC capitals just to keep yourself afloat.

This becomes so tedious. The micromanagement required to keep your economy up when you have a large empire is exhausting and totally takes away from the time needed to properly manage your forces and engage in combat. I'm in a match where I have over a 1000 units and half the world's army, and yet, I can't spend any time controlling them and I keep losing units to my enemy's hit and fade tactics simply because he's online a lot more than I am. Even if I used build queues with High Command, I can't stop the micromanagement necessary to keep my economy in the black....and I have an epic economy! My empire spans almost all of Eurasia and North America, most of the Middle East and parts of Africa and Australia. I'm about to invade South America to end the match, but I need to advance slowly just so I can try to raise my stats against the guy that's currently fleeing before my armies (to try to even out our scores; he's killed far more of my units than I've killed of his).

Now, if the neighboring province morale modifier was more balanced, say, having a value of zero not at 80%, but at 50%, then empire could be mostly in the green around the world...and that without my farmed capitals. My nation is Finland, yet I took over eastern Europe and then Asia and then North America and now the rest of Europe. I have most of the northern hemisphere and I've centered my capital in mid-Asia. Yet, my empire has lots of green morale provinces even in North America because I keep taking a capital every day (sometimes two!).

Sure, my strategy for morale is strong enough to combat the horrible imbalance. But most players aren't that savvy with their economies and morale. And it's really not fair to punish a player for empire growth by ruining their morale both with the distance-to-capital and neighboring province morale factors. There aren't enough positive factors to counter this (after two years, there is still no positive modifier buildings aside from Forts and the capital). The negative factors outweigh the positive factors by four or five times. The negative neighboring factor is more than twice as big as the positive neighboring factor. There is no positive (ally) neighbors whereas there is a negative (enemy) neighbors factor. And there's the ubiquitous distance-to-capital factor as well as the number of enemies factor. Add in the occasional nuclear explosion and you can have a combined negative factor adding up to nearly -200 points whereas the most you can get positively (outside the capital itself) is +40 with Forts and green neighbors.

So, the following possible solutions can bring fair balance to this issue:

• Lower the median morale level for neighborly influence (+/-) from 80% to 50%.
• Add allied neighborly influence.
• Reduce the distance-to-capital morale influence.
• Add secondary "Forbidden City" secondary capitals.
• Add other buildings for positive morale effects (i.e., monuments, city halls, recruiting centers (which could also increase Manpower growth)).
• Add a way to naturalize conquered provinces (like in Conflict of Nations).
• Add hero/leader units that can raise morale like a portable capital.
• Add a regular unit that can increase the effectiveness of a fort's morale influence by a small percentage (cumulative up to and additional 25%, for example). Or allow existing units to automatically accomplish this by fortifying enough of them in a fortress.
• Add a "trending" morale modifier for players who are generally winning or losing in war in their troop counts casualty lists (e.g., if 20,000 of your troops die to 30,000 of enemy troops, it would give you a national positive morale modifier of +5; if 40,000 of your troops die to 10,000 of enemy troops, it would give you a negative morale modifier of -10). This could have a day-to-day spillover effect for overall trend across multiple days (older values would be weighed less against the overall modifier. Additionally, coalitions and teams could have an option to have shared combined values that can be turned on or off in the match creation.