Research: Unit Morale

[Tamur]

After reading professorspatula's response to my little formations & morale thread in the Colloseum, I did some reading here and at twcenter and found that most people discount morale as a useful stat to modify. Not everyone does, but the majority.

Since I have only seen and read very anecdotal evidence on this subject, I thought I would run a few tests to prove or disprove the theory that stat_mental has limited effect on battles.

Admittedly, my testing was limited, but what I did find was a linear and powerful effect when stat_mental was changed drastically. It seems to have the effect of lowering the speed with which a unit suffers casualties, but seems to have no effect on unit strength at routing.



Method:

1. I am using a double-hitpoint, 70-90% movement mod, with no other modifications to vanilla 1.5 RTW.

2. Twelve test battles were run: three with 63 morale, five with 31 morale, and four with 0 morale.

3. All tests were run with 121 member Princeps units (122 for general unit). This was consistently the Julii vs Brutii, with three units per army.

4. The units had no chevron, armour or weapon upgrades.

5. I recorded the time from the first pila throw to when the unit routed, and its strength at routing.

I thought at first that there might also be a correlation between morale and strength of the unit at routing. However, there was no correlation. 31-morale units routed with an average of 41 of the unit left, while zero-morale units routed with an average of 40.

This test is of course not conclusive. More testing with different unit types at the same morale settings, or mixed morale settings, would be of interest.