Strange battle behavior

[unmerged(15337)]

I'm running into consistently bizarre behavior in several battles during a current war. My armies' morale gradually drops during fighting as usual, but then all of a sudden it drops like a stone from around half to near zero. One battle in particular follows this script every time: my army besieging an enemy castle is attacked by their army. Both start at just above half morale. They fight for a day or two with a very small loss of morale, then both instantly drop to a sliver. Following that, I get the "victory" screen saying that my army won the battle, with just a few dozen casualties on each side. Then, instantly, my army disappears and the enemy army is left standing. What is going on?

 

[Auvar]

Is this after reloading the game? There's a bug in CK where quitting and loading a game causes the morale of active regiments to drop to zero, so army morale will appear to drop like a stone as soon as the maneuver phase ends.

You should try to fight wars without quitting in the middle if possible, and always disband (in your territory) and re-activate any regiments you have active after you load a game. If you don't, the morale bug will cause some strange behavior a lot like what you're describing.

 

[unmerged(15337)]

This particular battle happened exactly the same way, both on the original playthrough and after reloading from a save the previous month (several experiments with the reload). Why would my army get annihilated after I "win" the battle?

But I'm getting the same morale drops in every battle in this war, even after several months of play. Almost every battle is lost with my troops' morale dropping to nothing just about as fast as I can check on them. No matter the odds -- my fresh 7K against their 1K, I lose most of the time. Can't figure it out and what should be an easy war against a rebellious Duke is turning into a nightmare. It's essentially an even fight although I have maybe 5-1 odds on him overall.

 

[Zsrai]

Is your marshal disloyal? I'm pretty sure that if he is, then events can cause armies to disband/lose morale/other bad stuff. Another thing could be the disparity between army commanders. A 20 martial enemy commander will decimate your units, even if you out number them greatly, if your commander has a lower martial score.

 

[unmerged(219985)]

I'm sure you've got this covered, but ... Is your army maintenance slider somewhere sensible? Zero maintenance would produce effects similar to the ones you are experiencing.

 

[unmerged(15337)]

My understanding in CK, unlike EU, is that army maintenance governs attrition rather than morale. In any case in this particular war I had the slider all the way right since a lot of the action was in enemy territory (that is, the realm of my revolting Duke).

My current marshal is OK, I think, and his rating is high teens -- 18 or 19. I have seen the event with a disloyal marshal where a regiment goes AWOL, but when that happens you get a popup message about it. In this war, I've had that happen with no message, no warning, no information -- just poof! -- and the army is gone.

Mercenary regiments seem to perform very poorly by this point in the game (1300s). But the problems I described extend to my entire army.

Some of my regiments did have anonymous commanders, and it makes sense that, all other things equal, a named commander should be better. But my king, marshal, etc, didn't appear to do a whole lot better than the nameless ones.

In the end I did slog through the war and finally overpowered the rebellious Duke. But it was a huge struggle, far more difficult than the raw numbers would have suggested. Only with repeated attacks with much larger armies was I finally able to prevail.

 

[Barsoom]

Might just be a run of random bad numbers. For a period of about 2 or 3 years in my last game, I couldn't seem to win a single battle (unless with 5 to 1 army size). I couldn't find any reason for this. Then, suddenly, I started winning again. Several decades later I had a period where I didn't lose a single battle, no matter how bad the odds. Again, no discernable reason.

By the way, I rarely fight rebels because usually the war score for vassalization plus confirming them in their titles is far enough negative that they'll accept it without a battle. If they don't, sit tight for a while. They'll raise their armies, whether or not any of yours are near. Soon, their money will run out and they'll start offering peace. (I refuse and offer vassalization plus confirming their titles.) This works even better if they have a long way to go before reaching any of your provinces. At times, I've waited until their armies were safely on the march, then raised armies next to their domains from other vassals (or rather: vassals of vassals so I don't suffer the hit to relations).

 

[Zarco]

Commander = marshal or your duke/count/king?

 

[unmerged(15337)]

Commander = marshal or your duke/count/king?

Sorry, I don't remember anymore. That campaign is pretty much ancient history by now and I'm an old man. But in the games I've played since then I never ran into a bad streak with battles like this one. I'm satisfied it was just a fluke run of very bad luck.

 

[Aardvark Bellay]

I had this once as well, i think it happened as my king was coward, shy, merciful and weakling.
That made it impossible to go to war.
Every army was retreating. I avoided battles, that was the only way to success.