This is going to include a brief treatise on how morale works for those unfamiliar with Paradox's byzantine and confusing combat system, skip to THE PROBLEMS if you already know or don't care. First off, how morale works is this: Each troop has a certain amount of morale, for instance light infantry have 2 morale, heavy infantry have 4 and war elephants have 15 - when a unit dies their morale is removed and 1 morale damage is taken, a flank begins to retreat when their morale reaches 25%, or to put it another way when they take morale damage equal to 75% of their current morale.
As an example of how this works, archers have 1 morale and morale damage is presently 1 so if you have 1000 archers they will need to take 428.57 casualties (round up, obviously, so really 429) in order to flee - they will now have 571 archers left, who have 571 morale, but will have taken 429 morale damage, leaving them on 142 morale, which is <25% of 571.
I made a formula for it if you want to work it out yourself without having to use trial and error, y-(z+x)=(y-x)/4 where y is the initial army size, x is casualties taken and z is morale damage/unit morale, slot y and z in and you get x. Now, keep in mind archers will probably never have 1 moral since military organisation, retinue bonuses, training grounds, religions and other buildings all give morale bonuses, so the following calculations will assume +50%, equal to level 4 military organisation and a level 2 training grounds - so if it says light cavalry have (3) morale, calculations will assume 4.5.
Unit (morale) % casualties needed to flee before patch > after patch
Archers (1) 15.8% > 53%
Light infantry (2) 27.3% > 69.2%
Light cavalry (3) 36% > 77.1%
Heavy infantry (4) 42.9% > 81.8%
Horse archers (5) 48.4% > 84.9%
Camel cavalry (5) 48.4% > 84.9%
Pikemen (6) 53% > 87.1%
Heavy cavalry (10) 65.2% > 91.8%
War elephants (15) 73.7% > 94.4%
THE PROBLEMS
Problem 1: The morale change from 6 to 1 was too drastic
Before the horse lords patch you took 6 morale damage when you lost a unit, instead you now take 1, this has the effect of making armies flee too late and making higher morale and morale boosts less valuable. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been lowered, just that 1 is too low - if you somehow managed to gather a force of only light infantry, that force would only begin to retreat after 7 out of 10 of them were already dead, which on historical basis is ridiculous unless they were fighting to the death to defend their home city with no possible retreat or something. Most forces will have a mix, so unless you're using a retinue you're unlikely to see the specific numbers above, but most armies will only retreat having taken 70-80% of their number in casualties, which is ridiculous. For heavy cavalry, the nobility can lose 90% of their fellow knights and still be all like 'nah, we got this'. This also has a pretty big gameplay problem - it means high morale values are close to meaningless. It means that no matter how tenaciously your defenders give their lives, the attacks will win if they have even slightly higher numbers or combat values, as opposed to earlier where having a large morale boost could actually swing a battle.
This also has the problem of drastically lowering the values of the skirmish and pursue phases - skirmish was too strongly represented before, but horse archers, light infantry and archers, the only units with any real skirmish capability, were all severely nerfed, skirmish has already been hugely lowered in value - we didn't need morale changes so that even a force that lost half their number to arrows would happily charge into melee anyway. Pursuit is much less valuable now too, considering that while before a unit of heavy infantry would have to attack an enemy several times and take skirmish damage each time in order to destroy a unit (which is fair, it's supposed to be your punishment for not bringing any cavalry to chase them down) this is no longer necessary considering a huge percentage will die in the first battle.
Problem 2: Morale boosts are costed the same as attack and defense boosts, yet are far less useful.
Let's go straight to an example so you see what I mean. Let's assume that there's a Scottish and an Italian republic, both of which have taken their cultural troops, have military organisation level 4, heavy infantry level 4, a level 4 cultural building in their capital (which will require some duchy and capital switching, since it means you need a barony as capital) and an administrative office built. The Scottish troops will have 20% offense, 40% defense and 20% morale as a base while the Italians will have +20%/+20%/+40%, and the cultural buildings will give them an extra 60% to their high stat - so +20/100/20% vs +20/20/100%, adding in the rest of the bonuses we get +50/130/75% vs +50/50/155%. Remember that these units have the same cost, are supposed to be completely equal. Plugging these values into the equation earlier we get the Scottish units retreating at 88.7% casualties and the Italians retreating at 92%, but due to the Scottish having 13.8 defense to the Italians 9, at the point the Italians retreat the Scottish would only have taken 60% casualties. I think it should be pretty obvious which is the better choice here - taking 1/3 less damage is not equal to fleeing very slightly earlier.
THE SOLUTIONS
Solution 1: Increase the amount of morale damage taken, add circumstantial morale boosts.
The units here are medieval humans, not Space Marines. They should not uniformly wait until most of their comrades are dead before deciding to flee, regardless of context. By all means, increase the amount of morale they have based on circumstance - are they defending their homeland, on a holy crusade, being lead by their king, in a situation with no possible retreat? Give them extra morale! I'm not averse to units fleeing only when they're almost completely wiped out, but they should need a reason - random peasants levied to fight in a war they've never heard of should not need to almost be obliterated before they decide to flee, and that morale works like that at present makes the skirmish and pursuit phases even less relevant and means that one battle decides a war.
Solution 2: Change how morale works. Make it less binary, reboot the whole system.
As it is, morale still doesn't work properly even if you implement the above solution. So long as it is treated as having the same value as defense and attack, it will never be as good - 100% more attack or defense means you kill twice as many units or take half as much damage, which is always going to be better than 100% more morale even if 100% more morale made you stay in battle twice as long. Compare it to defense - at its best, doubling morale would basically let you pretend you hadn't lost half the units you've lost, while doubling defense would means you actually hadn't lost those units, putting the defense army and the morale army in the exact same spot except that the defense army would have twice the attack because it has twice as many units left.
Now, there are two ways to deal with that - either do a complicated mathematical rebalancing of every individual morale bonus (which Paradox has shown time and time again it is incapable of doing, Paradox balances by throwing darts at a dart board and writing down what happens) or change morale to work a different way, hopefully a less binary one. At present, morale has absolutely no use if you won the fight - your units get to a point where they flee, or they don't. If you were never near fleeing in the first place, morale did absolutely nothing for you, another of the reasons it's less good than offense or defense. Now, I don't know what the solution would be - I don't make games, I don't know anything about maths more complicated than basic algebra, but I'm not the one who makes the game and wants others to pay for it.
Solution 3: If you aren't going to come up with an interesting use for morale, just turn it back to 6 morale damage taken and halve the value of morale increases.
Since I constantly see Paradox take the lazy way out, this is a lazy way out which would balance the game better than it is presently balanced. Take morale damage back to 6, and halve the value of morale boosts - make a 20% morale boost equal to a 10% defense boost, instead of 10% being equal for both. The way you've set morale up means it's significantly less useful than attack of defense, so please stop valuing it at the same price.
AN END NOTE FOR PARADOX
Please, please, please stop being so arbitrary with your balancing. Archers were too good for their cost, so you made them literally one fifth as effective and changed morale so the skirmish phase was a lot less relevant. They were too good, so you swung way too far in the other direction and made them useless. It's been ages since the retinue rebalance and pointless imbalances still exist - the Dutch have a part light infantry part pikemen retinue which is far worse than just having pikemen, several groups like the Lombards and the Russians have pure heavy infantry retinues but Lombards have +10% heavy infantry offense and +10% heavy infantry morale while the Russians have +10% offense, +50% defense and +20% morale and the Ethiopians have a pure light infantry retinue while you've absolutely gutted light infantry. What I dread is you looking at this thread and going 'hmm, everything seems fine except that the Scottish are better than the Italians, better halve pikemen defense' - this stuff is basic mathematics, you're programmers there is no way you don't know how this kind of thing works. On the previously mentioned retinue stuff - give every culture 100% of one type of unit as a retinue and standardise bonuses to 60 or 80%, with morale being counted as half as good as attack of defense (so +40% morale counts as +20%).
As an example of how this works, archers have 1 morale and morale damage is presently 1 so if you have 1000 archers they will need to take 428.57 casualties (round up, obviously, so really 429) in order to flee - they will now have 571 archers left, who have 571 morale, but will have taken 429 morale damage, leaving them on 142 morale, which is <25% of 571.
I made a formula for it if you want to work it out yourself without having to use trial and error, y-(z+x)=(y-x)/4 where y is the initial army size, x is casualties taken and z is morale damage/unit morale, slot y and z in and you get x. Now, keep in mind archers will probably never have 1 moral since military organisation, retinue bonuses, training grounds, religions and other buildings all give morale bonuses, so the following calculations will assume +50%, equal to level 4 military organisation and a level 2 training grounds - so if it says light cavalry have (3) morale, calculations will assume 4.5.
Unit (morale) % casualties needed to flee before patch > after patch
Archers (1) 15.8% > 53%
Light infantry (2) 27.3% > 69.2%
Light cavalry (3) 36% > 77.1%
Heavy infantry (4) 42.9% > 81.8%
Horse archers (5) 48.4% > 84.9%
Camel cavalry (5) 48.4% > 84.9%
Pikemen (6) 53% > 87.1%
Heavy cavalry (10) 65.2% > 91.8%
War elephants (15) 73.7% > 94.4%
THE PROBLEMS
Problem 1: The morale change from 6 to 1 was too drastic
Before the horse lords patch you took 6 morale damage when you lost a unit, instead you now take 1, this has the effect of making armies flee too late and making higher morale and morale boosts less valuable. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been lowered, just that 1 is too low - if you somehow managed to gather a force of only light infantry, that force would only begin to retreat after 7 out of 10 of them were already dead, which on historical basis is ridiculous unless they were fighting to the death to defend their home city with no possible retreat or something. Most forces will have a mix, so unless you're using a retinue you're unlikely to see the specific numbers above, but most armies will only retreat having taken 70-80% of their number in casualties, which is ridiculous. For heavy cavalry, the nobility can lose 90% of their fellow knights and still be all like 'nah, we got this'. This also has a pretty big gameplay problem - it means high morale values are close to meaningless. It means that no matter how tenaciously your defenders give their lives, the attacks will win if they have even slightly higher numbers or combat values, as opposed to earlier where having a large morale boost could actually swing a battle.
This also has the problem of drastically lowering the values of the skirmish and pursue phases - skirmish was too strongly represented before, but horse archers, light infantry and archers, the only units with any real skirmish capability, were all severely nerfed, skirmish has already been hugely lowered in value - we didn't need morale changes so that even a force that lost half their number to arrows would happily charge into melee anyway. Pursuit is much less valuable now too, considering that while before a unit of heavy infantry would have to attack an enemy several times and take skirmish damage each time in order to destroy a unit (which is fair, it's supposed to be your punishment for not bringing any cavalry to chase them down) this is no longer necessary considering a huge percentage will die in the first battle.
Problem 2: Morale boosts are costed the same as attack and defense boosts, yet are far less useful.
Let's go straight to an example so you see what I mean. Let's assume that there's a Scottish and an Italian republic, both of which have taken their cultural troops, have military organisation level 4, heavy infantry level 4, a level 4 cultural building in their capital (which will require some duchy and capital switching, since it means you need a barony as capital) and an administrative office built. The Scottish troops will have 20% offense, 40% defense and 20% morale as a base while the Italians will have +20%/+20%/+40%, and the cultural buildings will give them an extra 60% to their high stat - so +20/100/20% vs +20/20/100%, adding in the rest of the bonuses we get +50/130/75% vs +50/50/155%. Remember that these units have the same cost, are supposed to be completely equal. Plugging these values into the equation earlier we get the Scottish units retreating at 88.7% casualties and the Italians retreating at 92%, but due to the Scottish having 13.8 defense to the Italians 9, at the point the Italians retreat the Scottish would only have taken 60% casualties. I think it should be pretty obvious which is the better choice here - taking 1/3 less damage is not equal to fleeing very slightly earlier.
THE SOLUTIONS
Solution 1: Increase the amount of morale damage taken, add circumstantial morale boosts.
The units here are medieval humans, not Space Marines. They should not uniformly wait until most of their comrades are dead before deciding to flee, regardless of context. By all means, increase the amount of morale they have based on circumstance - are they defending their homeland, on a holy crusade, being lead by their king, in a situation with no possible retreat? Give them extra morale! I'm not averse to units fleeing only when they're almost completely wiped out, but they should need a reason - random peasants levied to fight in a war they've never heard of should not need to almost be obliterated before they decide to flee, and that morale works like that at present makes the skirmish and pursuit phases even less relevant and means that one battle decides a war.
Solution 2: Change how morale works. Make it less binary, reboot the whole system.
As it is, morale still doesn't work properly even if you implement the above solution. So long as it is treated as having the same value as defense and attack, it will never be as good - 100% more attack or defense means you kill twice as many units or take half as much damage, which is always going to be better than 100% more morale even if 100% more morale made you stay in battle twice as long. Compare it to defense - at its best, doubling morale would basically let you pretend you hadn't lost half the units you've lost, while doubling defense would means you actually hadn't lost those units, putting the defense army and the morale army in the exact same spot except that the defense army would have twice the attack because it has twice as many units left.
Now, there are two ways to deal with that - either do a complicated mathematical rebalancing of every individual morale bonus (which Paradox has shown time and time again it is incapable of doing, Paradox balances by throwing darts at a dart board and writing down what happens) or change morale to work a different way, hopefully a less binary one. At present, morale has absolutely no use if you won the fight - your units get to a point where they flee, or they don't. If you were never near fleeing in the first place, morale did absolutely nothing for you, another of the reasons it's less good than offense or defense. Now, I don't know what the solution would be - I don't make games, I don't know anything about maths more complicated than basic algebra, but I'm not the one who makes the game and wants others to pay for it.
Solution 3: If you aren't going to come up with an interesting use for morale, just turn it back to 6 morale damage taken and halve the value of morale increases.
Since I constantly see Paradox take the lazy way out, this is a lazy way out which would balance the game better than it is presently balanced. Take morale damage back to 6, and halve the value of morale boosts - make a 20% morale boost equal to a 10% defense boost, instead of 10% being equal for both. The way you've set morale up means it's significantly less useful than attack of defense, so please stop valuing it at the same price.
AN END NOTE FOR PARADOX
Please, please, please stop being so arbitrary with your balancing. Archers were too good for their cost, so you made them literally one fifth as effective and changed morale so the skirmish phase was a lot less relevant. They were too good, so you swung way too far in the other direction and made them useless. It's been ages since the retinue rebalance and pointless imbalances still exist - the Dutch have a part light infantry part pikemen retinue which is far worse than just having pikemen, several groups like the Lombards and the Russians have pure heavy infantry retinues but Lombards have +10% heavy infantry offense and +10% heavy infantry morale while the Russians have +10% offense, +50% defense and +20% morale and the Ethiopians have a pure light infantry retinue while you've absolutely gutted light infantry. What I dread is you looking at this thread and going 'hmm, everything seems fine except that the Scottish are better than the Italians, better halve pikemen defense' - this stuff is basic mathematics, you're programmers there is no way you don't know how this kind of thing works. On the previously mentioned retinue stuff - give every culture 100% of one type of unit as a retinue and standardise bonuses to 60 or 80%, with morale being counted as half as good as attack of defense (so +40% morale counts as +20%).
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