National Morale

[Gilber]

Hello All,

when a national morale objective is captured, national morale are altered.
on the other hand if the same objective is taken over by the defender the national morals do not return to their original values.

the management of national morals is an interesting concept of the game but I do not find it very coherent to take into account only the initial conquest.

indeed if the Wehrmacht conquers Stalingrad it is normal that the axis receives a bonus of morale, on the other hand this bonus of morale should be taken back if the red army takes back the city.

I am curious to know your opinion.

[Markiss]

I have often lamented that once lost, National Morale is very difficult to regain outside of scripted events. I would like to see some bump from re-taking a lost national morale objective. If the populace was so upset that it was lost, wouldn't they be a least a little happy that it was regained? Seems logical.

But...if that is done, it would probably mean that some other things would have to be adjusted. As of now, the Soviets get large national morale bonuses for the WAllies landing in Italy and France. These bonuses are set to a level that should restore most of the morale lost by the Soviets from the German invasion, which allows the Soviets a chance to turn the game in the historical fashion. If the Soviets were to be given other ways to raise their morale as well, this could create an imbalance.

But I would love to see the British have a way to restore themselves to combat relevance after losing Egypt and the Holy Land. They are just absolutely helpless after that, with no way to ever come back.

[Gilber]

Markiss thank you for your comment, and I hope we'll have the opportunity to play a game together soon !

the landings in France and Italy raise the same problem. the very good players trigger an allied landing in France in 42 to raise the morale of the red army. even if the operation is doomed to failure and 1 or 2 corps are lost it remains an intelligent and profitable strategy but not very realistic.

It seems to me that for the British it would be enough that the reconquest of Cairo and other objectives would restore a large part of the lost morale.

[Tanaka]

Makes sense to me!

[Gilber]

For the landings that are eventually discarded at sea, the balance sheet at the end for national morale should undoubtedly be negative for the attacker and positive for the defender.

if Overlord had failed the result would undoubtedly have been very negative for the allies and very positive for the Axis.

I wonder if this analysis is shared by most players and game designers?

[Markiss]

I too have wondered if there would be a way to apply a national morale penalty for a failed amphibious landing. The planners of such landings were always mortally terrified of the consequences of failure, and with good reason. Amphibious landings are major undertakings, requiring huge amounts of resources and support. A failure here will be seen as a major faltering of the war effort. And an attempt to withdraw the landing force under fire is likely to turn into a slaughter, further inflaming public opinion and calling into question the competence of the wartime leaders.

It clearly has the potential to have a larger effect on national morale then your average, everyday military operation. The problem I have always had is, how do you define failure? Inability to advance? For how long? How far must you advance for it not to be a failure? Is even one hex good? That is where it gets very complicated theoretically, let alone from a practicality standpoint trying to program these rules into the game.

Putting something like this into the game would probably be a major undertaking, but it would be cool and realistic.

Gilber, I hope we have the chance to play soon as well, you are one of the few players I have not played yet. We should have a new tournament within a few days, that sounds like a good excuse. I currently have a game going against nnason as Axis, so I would probably look to play Allies if you wanted to play soon.

[The Land]

It would be possible to mod the National Morale objectives so that rather than one-off events, there is a continual boost from holding them or a a continual drain from losing them (or both). This would need a great deal of planning and testing though, and might not be appropriate for objectives that are expected to change hands early in the game. But it could be quite flexible - e.g .-500NM for Britain and France every turn that the Axis hold Paris until the end of 1940, then +500NM for every turn that they do between end 1940 and end 1944...

It would also be just about possible to have NM events fire every time an objective changes hands, though I can only see this working through chains involving dummy decision events, which would be a pain to accomplish.