Land Morale & Organisation FAQ

1. The AI has higher morale than me. It must be cheating. The AI does not cheat on morale
2. Come on! I have 15/25 army techs, my soldiers have the newest weapons and the best doctrines and artillery. It must be cheating. The AI does not cheat on morale. It researches army leadership techs
3. But it only has L1 leadership tech, The Command Principle, just like I do! It probably has a Jominian Attitude while yours is Clausewitzian
4. Ha! Neither of us have any attitudes, thank you very much, but their forces have 30 morale while mine have only 20! To be precise, their cavalry has 30 morale, while your infantry has 20 morale. This is working as defined. If you recruited cavalry, it would have higher morale as well.
5. Erhm. Well, its infantry has 30 morale as well! Don't tell me that that is right. Americans with less morale than Mexicans!? Yeah, right! You are playing the US vs. Mexico in 1836. The Mexicans start with an infantry division with an attached engineer brigade. Engineer brigades add +10 morale.
6. Right, in that case, smart guy, what exactly determines morale? Thought you would never ask

Index:

1. Morale and Organisation, a definition
2. Divisions and brigades
3. A Question of Attitude
4. Technologies of Note
5. Inventions of Note
6. Examples
7. So, Which Attitude is Better?
8. So, I am facing a Clausewitzian in the early game...
9. So, I am facing a Jominian in the early game...
10. So, I am facing a Clausewitzian in the late game...
11. So, I am facing a Jominian in the late game...
12. Are there any current known morale bugs?

1) Morale and Organisation, a definition

It is impossible to discuss the concept of morale in Victoria without also considering organisation.

Morale is the measure of your soldiers' willingness to fight. Their willing to go on against all odds, to keep on fighting till the end. To laugh in the face of death even as you punch him in the teeth and steal his boots. It is the stuff from which legends are made, and last stands as well. Morale is what keeps you in the fight.

In contrast, organisation is the sordid quality that allows you to jury-rig some damn good field fortifications, dig trenches on the double, and regain shattered morale quicker, because war is a serious business and you know how to go about it in a methodical fashion. It may affect other factors as well (and probably will in future patches).

In Victoria, each unit has a level of morale and organisation which is determined by its troop composition, its nation's technologies, and its inventions. The morale of a unit is also scaled by the army maintenance setting: In the following it is assumed that the maintenance is 100%

Outside battle, organisation helps with many small details essential to the modern army. In battle, morale determines whether your troops stand and fight or break. Each day the opposing forces will inflict casualties on each other based on their firepower and inflict morale damage on each other based on their shockpower. When the morale of an army becomes low enough, it breaks combat and flees. It does not always break as soon as one province reaches 0 morale, but it is only a matter time.


2) Divisions and brigades

Each unit has a base morale defined by its division type and brigade type. As a general rule, cavalry has better morale than infantry. The exact numbers follow:



3) A Question of Attitude

Which is better? The brave and the bold or the merely practical? This question is fundamental to your army's outlook and is, in Victoria, represented by your nation's choice of either Clausewitzian Theory or Jominian Attitude. In later scenarios the choice between the two paths has usually been determined already, in 1836 it has not. As soon as your nation gains the army doctrine of Post-Napoleonic Thought, which most civilized nations have on game start, your nation is eligible to go down one of either of the two paths. Which military tradition is chosen is random.

The immediate effect is a hefty bonus to either the morale or to the organisation of all your army units, the long term effect is that subsequent inventions in the army leadership tech branch give different bonuses depending on outlook.


4) Technologies of Note

Many technologies boost the organisation of your troops and a few of them boost the morale as well. These are the MILITARY SCIENCE and ARMY LEADERSHIP techs. It is a common error to ignore these techs and focus solely on the army techs that boost the immediate killing power - the result is typically an army that is really good at killing the enemy if it gets the chance, but which breaks morale at the sound of a charge. While the bonuses for the techs, as listed below, are substantial, the real boost comes from associated inventions. These are listed in section 5). Note that the MILITARY SCIENCE branch of army research includes a special headquarters organisation bonus that stacks with the default headquarters bonus. In total, a headquarters brigade can have up to +40 organisation over the default division it is attached to.



5) Inventions of Note

As mentioned in the preceding section, the really big boosts to morale and organisation come from inventions associated with army technologies. In general, each invention comes in two flavours - one for nations with Jominian Attitude and one for Clausewitzian Theory. Like all inventions these have a startdate, the earliest possible date the invention can become available, and a deathdate, the date after which the possibility of acquiring the tech rapidly approaches unity. As an example, the inventions for Military Plans have (1850-1860). If you acquire Military Plans before 1850, you will not receive any of the associated inventions before 1850, and they will likely arrive over several years. If, on the other hand, you acquire Military Plans in 1870, after the deathdate, you will likely receive all three associated inventions of a period of a few months.



6) Examples

In the following, the morale and organisation from techs and inventions will be tallied for a few common cases. In each case, it will be assumed that all inventions associated with a tech have been achieved. Listed are the morale and organisation values based on tech and invention in the left column and the values for an infantry division without attached brigade in the right column.



7) So, Which Attitude is Better?

That is a hard question. The benefits of breaking an enemy's morale when you are attacking is obvious - you'll be able to begin taking control of his provinces earlier and he will have less time to reinforce defenders, and looking at it from the other angle, having a high morale makes it harder for your enemy to do that against you.

On the other hand, the ability to entrench quickly at higher tech levels where high levels of entrenchment are possible should not be underestimated, and no matter how high your troops' morale is, it will break in a fairly short time if you are facing massed high-tech artillery or tanks (that is, if the opposing forces do not eliminate eachother before either breaks) - and once the morale is broken and it is time to regroup, organisation is the determining factor in how quickly your troops regain morale.

As a tentative answer to the question, I would venture that Jominian Attitude is superior in the early game - certainly the easiest to use - while Clausewitzian has the better long-term prospect. Certainly, from L3 (Decision Making/Military Statistics) I prefer Clausewitzian theory.

That said, I think Clausewitzian Theory is a bit weak in the game, and hope that organisation will gain increased importance in later patches.



8) So, I am facing a Clausewitzian in the early game...

Add cavalry.

Seriously. It will soon be too late to use cavalry in serious battles, but for a short while yet divisions killing power is low enough that cavalry's lack of defense does not doom your forces. A force of cuirassiers can utterly demoralize any Clausewitzian enemy very rapidly. Of course, they wont do a lot of damage and they will soak casaulties, so you might prefer using them as support for your infantry divisions.

More importantly, this is the right time to learn how to use hussars! Swift and, well, if not deadly, then very annoying for the enemy. Using several divisions of hussars operating in their own very swift army-group you can rapidly take control of large areas of land. Use your infantry to fight set battles, and your hussars to rampage across the countryside. Their shockpower should be enough to break smaller armies. Again, they wont inflict many casualties, and if they ever hit a nasty enemy army they should retreat, but used correctly they can seriously hamper an opponent. Especially useful when fighting over large stretches of territory geographically.



9) So, I am facing a Jominian in the early game...

And he is overrunning my Clausewitzian armies with cavalry, and my morale sucks big time.

So what else is new? Remember rule one of morale: An army breaks as soon as ONE division within it breaks morale, and rule 2, brigades can add morale in the early game, which is very, very, helpful.

Basically, you are reduced to either attempting concentrating enough killing power that the fact that your armies will always break morale first is not a long term issue because your opponent will run out of manpower for reinforcements, or you will have to reduce his morale advantage. For the first, artillery is not really the answer, for artillery is not all that strong in the early game. Rather, you should employ massed infantry/engineers if available or infantry/guards. Engineers come with a hefty morale and organisation bonus, that can brunt a lot of a Jominian horse attack, and guards divisions are so nice in adding both a bit of morale, organisation, AND firepower to your infantry, that it would be a shame not to use them. Just remember, if you use them together with any divisions without morale boosting brigades, you are likely to see your armies fleeing earlier than you would prefer.

An alternative solution is to fight fire with fire. Sure, your infantry may have a base morale of 20, but your own hussars will start at 40! That may be enough to enable them to tie up cavalry forces in skirmeshes while you prepare to hit them with good infantry.



10) So, I am facing a Clausewitzian in the late game...

Do not give him time to regain morale and entrench! Harass! Harass! Harass! You can either try to match him in sheer firepower, or use massed artillery to both deal heavy damage AND break his morale. If you follow the latter strategy, having some swift skirmishing cavalry to harass and engage the retreating army in its target province will prevent it from recovering too much morale before your artillery armies arrive.

If you are a Jominian, you should remember that your high morale, which often equates to a death-wish, can be a boon. When sacrifices are necessary, you can tie down enemy forces for a long time, by absorbing casualties while preparing the counterstrike. High-tech Jominian engineers (with their really high defensive values to go with their high morale) can hold a well entrenched and fortified position for weeks or even months, unless the enemy brings a really big hammer.

Hussars, of course, are still your friends - but they are not really suited for participating in any sort of battle any longer. They are still excellent for harassing and disrupting the enemy's rear.



11) So, I am facing a Jominian in the late game...

Add infantry artillery or tanks to destroy his morale or use massed infantry guards or regulars to kill his forces. I suggest the latter. The Jominian high morale almost guarantees that the enemy armies will stick around until you have destroyed them completely, unless he remembers to withdraw them before destruction. Remember that quantity kills as well as quality. You can support quite a lot of infantry with the regulars brigade for the cost of one infantry artillery division, and, combined, they have much greater killing power than the artillery. In fact, you might even consider giving up on those nice guards brigades, except in A-team killer corps, and just have a large standing army of regular and engineering brigades with a bit of artillery backup to boost the efficiency. It may not be glamourous, but they sure are good killers, if your manpower can support it.

If you are a Clausewitzian, then remember that leapfrogging forces or retiring forces from the front while pushing in replacements favours you. When you reinforce your divisions, their morale plummets, and the higher Clausewitzian organisation means that morale increases more rapidly. When troops only have minimal time to regroup before the next battle, it does not really matter how high their morale could potentially rise given enough time - only how high the morale actually manages to rise. Obviously, this is most important in large-scale wars between worthy adversaries and of less importance in small bush-wars, but, on the other hand, it is the large-scale wars that determine the fate of your nation.


12) Are there any current known morale bugs?

Not that I know of. That does not necessarily mean that none exist, of course. Unconfirmed reports of people seing 100+ morale armies early in the game have been sighted, but without some way to recreate such a situation, it is hard for me to judge. There may be a bug, there may not. One thing that I am certain of is that the AI does not cheat morale in general. Whenever I take the time to look up an AI nation's stats to compare with its displayed morale number, I have gotten a clean match.

The most common morale issue is that many players tend to neglect the ARMY LEADERSHIP techs in favour of high-powered weaponry, as a result of which their Clausewitzian infantry gets run into the ground by a Jominian Attitude AI that splits its military research equally over the different branches of the military research tree, and, as a consequence, has double or triple the morale of their own troops.

Thus before submitting a bug report on morale, please consider first whether that might be the case.