In a dev diary released back in January, developers announced the coming changes to battle and morale systems. Now, they are making a balance follow-up.
With patch 1.33, Paradox decided to change some things with combat. The core idea was to remove some weird traps that uninitiated players and the AI would easily fall for. In particular, having a large army without a full back row of artillery could be disastrous.
However, those changes also caused some unintended balance effects:
- Battles last longer, sometimes a lot longer.
- Morale is much less important.
- Stackwipes are much less common though this is mostly caused by the AI accidentally exploiting the Zombie Regiments bug, by shift-consolidating troops before battle.
- Tech Groups’ impact through unit pips has been amplified.
The changes for morale in patch 1.34 were affected due to these balance issues. The long battles in the early game, and morale being less important, and has now been reworked in 1.34 to as follows:
- Deployed troops take a daily morale damage of 1% of max morale.
- Reserves take a daily morale damage of 2% of max morale.
Only the reserves are affected by the Professionalism modifier, so it remains mostly a QoL modifier, although its absolute effect is now much bigger. Max morale is not based on the regiment itself, but on the average of all regiments on the other side. Such that, in a standoff between a Prussian and a regular soldier, where neither is shooting, the regular soldier will run first.
