Gnish! Gnash! Gni!

[Puzz3D]

well why dont we just reduce musket power in the stats?
would that not be ebough to reduce the morrale penalty?

I mean the people who get shot will still get a morrale penalty.
But less deaths per volley "or not?"

and also (becoming a bit of a stuck record here) make people use h0 muskets.

Would this not help the musket probs..

Yes, reduced kills per volley reduces the morale penalty. The total morale penalty from guns is - x - y - z where:
x = -6 morale from being targetted by a gun
y = -8 morale when the unit drops below 50%
z = temporary morale penalty proportional to the percentage of the unit lost in that combat cycle.

I think you could make the gameplay better by changing the gun stats, but that would mean playing a modded stat. If you are going to do that, you might as well put the infantry movement speeds back to their original values so that hammer and anvil infantry tactics would work better than they do in v1.02.

The muskets in original STW v1.12 cost 175 koku and got approximately 1.0 kills on a target YS unit at max range with a 20 gun volley. Reload time was 21 seconds, and ammo was 40. In STW/MI v1.02, the cost of muskets was raised to 250 koku. This means they should be stronger than original STW muskets, and in developing STWmod for MTW/VI, which admittedly has a somewhat more complex morale system, we found the system tolerated muskets of 1.5x the effectiveness of original STW v1.12 muskets at average morale levels close to what exist when STW is played at 5k koku or slightly higher. We made the Arquebusier equivalent to the original STW v1.12 muskets. Arqs were probably the least used unit in STW. I'd leave the ammo at 20 (musket) and 15 (arq), but have muskets fire in the rain. That could be used as a starting point if you really want to investigate this. You then have to run test battles online to verify the gameplay. Archers will become more useful. Since they can shoot uphill, they were preferred over guns in STW v1.12 when attacking uphill and their melee capability is better.

Other things to consider regarding guns are the range of the back kills and the defend value. Back kills may have had too much range in original STW v1.12, but they also might have too little range in STW/MI v1.02. If affects how far out in front of the army the guns have to be placed to skirmish which exposes them to cavalry attack. This is easily adjusted with one of the parameters in the projectiles.txt file.

The defend value of guns should be lowered if you want them to break faster when hit by cav. This was actually an oversight in v1.02. If they hold too long, then spears can come from greater distance to kill the cav, and, if infantry movement speeds are returned to their original values, the spears will move about 15% faster. You'll also have YA on the field which are quite fast.