Crusade morale issues

[Feels Ranger Man]

I'm in act 3, I've conquered all of the Demon forts and defeat every army that shows up immediately but morale constantly drops when I rest. There are some decrees to raise it 10-20 every now and then but it just inevitably drops again despite 'winning' the crusade. How do I stop morale from dropping? I'm currently playing on Daring difficulty and I have nothing to kill any more. This seems like such a poorly implemented system. Am i missing some sort of mechanic like planting a banner at a fort or something that lowers the decrease?

I'm at the point I'd just disable it if I can because it does nothing but drop no matter what.

[reidj062]

The problem is you have done the crusade system too well. The game is designed to alternate between party combat and Crusade combat. Certain areas are locked to certain acts. Therefore, if you clear the entire area you have access to in a given act, you'll see a bunch of armies and forts that your armies will refuse to move near, as if there is no road to the area.

The best thing you can do now is keep doing those decrees or events that boost morale and speed up progress along the storyline with your party.

Yes, I agree it is stupid.

[Feels Ranger Man]

Originally posted by reidj062:

The problem is you have done the crusade system too well. The game is designed to alternate between party combat and Crusade combat. Certain areas are locked to certain acts. Therefore, if you clear the entire area you have access to in a given act, you'll see a bunch of armies and forts that your armies will refuse to move near, as if there is no road to the area.

The best thing you can do now is keep doing those decrees or events that boost morale and speed up progress along the storyline with your party.

Yes, I agree it is stupid.

Nice, so it's a morale system that completely disregards what morale means. I have been switching back and forth actually I'm pretty long into act 3 I assume I'm close to 4. Well that's unfortunate.

Is there anything in the difficulty settings to disable it? I don't want the benefits of it either, it's just such a poor system, I didn't see anything except 'Auto Crusade' and I don't want that.

[Das Licht]

You have to start or finish the Decisive Act, then the Crusade doesn't matter for now.

I did the crusade rather quickly up to the >Midnight Temple< and the quest "Middle Game" was a mystery to me, because it was canceled after you enter the temple. I didn't know that.
You have to do "everything" that involves upgrading to level 5 of the crusade and then you can actually forget about the crusade for now once the quest is done and you go into the temple.
It worked out very well and was logical throughout, but often you don't understand the quest, which you still had to do. Morale always drops because you don't capture any more forts until that event. You have to know what else to do.
This is a problem for the developers, which is why again only 10-15% of the buyers even finished the game. Like in Kingmaker.
If you play it properly in order and are a bit faster than intended, then the game has almost no challenge left on Medium difficulty.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Cursed Life]

How the hell can you conquest all the forts so early? i tought that was impossibile, i conquested the last one quite late and had no morale problems at all (outside the beggining cuz my bad choice in main quest)

[Duder]

Yeah it could have been better, harder. You need to kind of space out your crusade action like said above, seems like you spent a good chunk of time just doing crusade alone and thus your morale is dropping since you have no enemy armies to fight.

It gets much better in Act 3, in terms of difficulty and spacing things out. Just progress the game to retake Drezen and you'll have so much to do you wont have time to do all the crusade stuff in one big chunk.

[Feels Ranger Man]

My mistake, I just realized I said I was in act 2. I meant to say act 3.

[dszombiex]

It was a poorly conceived contrivance that came about during beta to try to prevent people from passing a bunch of time and building doom stacks that would carry over from act 2 into act 3.

Then you have that other contrivance in act 5 to prevent the uh... you'll see.

[reidj062]

The sheer number of enemy armies that the demons have is silly in and out itself. Like they have 1000s of armies to your 2 or 3. Why didn't they squash this crusade the day it began? Were they too busy engaging in sex, murder and drama to work together for 5 minutes?

[Cursed Life]

Also enemies send armies from time to time, so this situation makes no sense to me.

[Duder]

Originally posted by Charmed Life:

Also enemies send armies from time to time, so this situation makes no sense to me.

Fighting those would raise morale but you also need to take enemy forts, it's one of the victory banners

[Shahadem]

Originally posted by reidj062:

Were they too busy engaging in sex, murder and drama to work together for 5 minutes?

Yes.

[forkofspite]

Originally posted by Agrajag's Torment:

I had to edit the save file to make it playable.

In Chapter 5 I had done everything in the crusade so efficiently that I had nothing to keep my banners up while waiting for the designated date to arrive to enter the final lair.

Another option to make it playable - just keep playing.

It doesn't matter if morale tanks after clearing all of the static armies and special quest armies. Don't know if "defending Drezen" matters at that point, but even if it does, it seems likely that the armies you have can still defend. Mobile demon armies still flee if strength rating is two lower than the crusader army. Plus, even if you can't get an army strong enough to make them flee, you still might be able to act during combat and thus defend. Taking options that help individual army morale helps with that.