Going to be harsh here. Get rid of Morale Attrition. period.

[Lucian was right]

The concept of an army not being at full morale on enemy territory is fine. That makes sense they are in unfamiliar territory that is unfriendly. The idea that it should suffer constant attrition by being there effectively has made the game unplayable. I just had a situation where I controlled all of western Tennessee and I had built up Supply Depots but when I had my corp of 35000 men constantly losing morale because it was merely on "enemy Territory". Either fix this. Or get rid of it. Period it makes the game unplayable.

[bulldog]

I second that - Attrition is awful... A penalty is fine!

[Tiesto 77]

I agree!

[Virginia Stonedwall]

Thank you. But I think this would be easily fixed if once the area was under union (or confederate) control then this penalty should be greatly reduced or negligible, outside of random insurgency.

[G Willikers]

Originally posted by landmanlandis41:

Thank you. But I think this would be easily fixed if once the area was under union (or confederate) control then this penalty should be greatly reduced or negligible, outside of random insurgency.

It's representing the population's attitude towards the army, so having an area under control but disloyal wouldn't necessarily help that. I agree with the above poster that a flat penalty makes more sense than constant attrition.

[Lucian was right]

Of my three ancestors who were involved in the civil war. (All from the Union.) Two were primarily used in garrison duties in Tennessee and Mississippi and the closest either ever got to action was marching out to create a show of force against cavalry raiders that never lead to combat. I mention this because despite being garrison troops for two years both never deserted, and their units didn't either or flee because of the fact they were in areas that did not like the Federal cause this needs to remedied and I hope along with getting rid of the orange level of readiness is a top priority of fixing in the next patch.

[oldfox]

Was better before...I stopped playing until this is fixed.

[Duncan]

I ended up starting over from scratch as I had a bad update from Microsoft (literally, after several weeks concluded my PC was a lost cause and bought a new system, got the old system running again, but only after a complete wipe!).

So, coming back to the game after a 4-6 week break, playing on hardest difficulty, and about middle for enemy bonus. ~50 won battles, versus 18 lost (which were not options to play, so sieges apparently). Enemy morale was less than 45, however, I've had one army lost 90% of its men (total now is just under 450 total troops across 4 divisions!).

Some armies seem to do fine on enemy territory, others do not. IF you're going to have the penalty so high, maybe take the "cut confederacy in half" goal removed as the south doesn't need to even fight you to destroy your armies as they build forts down the Mississippi.

Also, I understand the logic of Generals being defamed due to 'poor performance', but I can never figure out which army/division/brigade is the one with the defamed commander after the battle is over. There needs to be a filter for 'defamed'. There also needs to be a filter for "Administration" as the Admin skill seems to trump everything else (low admin leads to low readiness, low readiness, leads to an unusable unit). I'm in favor of the readiness penalty in general (no pun intended), but we need to be able to put the right commanders into the right slots and it's a painfully slow process to find commanders with good admin skills. Also would really help if it were easier to promote officers (now its' replace the officer, then replace the target officer with the officer that was just removed).

Finally, even when the army is in attack mode, it makes no sense for units to march right into the enemies lines when they show up in an unexpected, or move into an unanticipated location. Typically, trying to literally just walk through the enemies position is what has lead to nearly all my defamed generals, whom I can't figure out how to locate to remove, which I believe is causing my desertion problem.

My desertion status...I had the enemy army down to less than 50,000 total troops and low 40s for morale. In the last few months, they are almost level with me, and I've lost 10s of thousands of troops due to desertion.

Keep the desertion and make it easier to remedy the situation, or reduce the penalty and leave things as they are, but at the moment, its just frustrating.

[Zipuli]

Noted

[Captain Müller (KGF)]

Q: could low supply be the reason for these high attrition levels in your game(s)?

I am asking because imo this can (at least conceptually) be the only reason for such high attrition levels.

The other 2 influences:

a) sickness is determined by a target sickness rate, depending on weather and encampment, so should not be a reason for "never ending" attrition

b) desertions are taking into account morale, state support and commander attributes, but even with support & morale zero the effect from desertions should only be approx 20-25% of strength per year. It is exponentially lower if morale is at non-broken levels ~40 or higher. so probably also not an issue

[HB]

Originally posted by Captain Müller (KGF):

b) desertions are taking into account morale, state support and commander attributes, but even with support & morale zero the effect from desertions should only be approx 20-25% of strength per year. It is exponentially lower if morale is at non-broken levels ~40 or higher. so probably also not an issue

Desertion for both sides was c10%* for the entire period of the war, not twice that each year of the war.

Desertion was not linked to the metrics your using, the USA had twice the desertion in 64 than it had in 63. CSA had more desertion in 62 than any other year, and had most of its desertions before end of63, And CSA had c30% of deserters returned to service and US even higher.

* US 9-12% for war depending on state, CS 12-15% for war depending on State, example GA worst desertion was the months fighting around Atlanta, and least during shermans march to the Sea.

CSA 104k total desertions, Army strength mid year 350/450/480/440/330 an average strength each year of 410k, of which on average 20800 deserted, which is 5% a year, but with deserters returning its more like 15k a year and 3.5%

[Fail_Knight]

Originally posted by hannibalbarca120002001:

Originally posted by Captain Müller (KGF):

b) desertions are taking into account morale, state support and commander attributes, but even with support & morale zero the effect from desertions should only be approx 20-25% of strength per year. It is exponentially lower if morale is at non-broken levels ~40 or higher. so probably also not an issue

Desertion for both sides was c10% for the entire period of the war, not twice that each year of the war.

The 20-25% number given is the worst case scenario possible in the game, for those units that have literally no morale nor state support. Once you start factoring in actual morale and state support, plus commander leadership and fame influence on desertion the % drops a lot lower, especially since a lot of the calculations for this mechanic are based on exponential growth.
Roughly speaking the formula looks as follows:
# of desertions = 0.15 * (( 1 - unit_morale - commander_leadership * 0.2 - commander_fame * 0.2 )^7) * 0.4 * (unit_strength - 0.01*group_guard_score * ((4 - 1)/(1 + 0.5 + 1)) * time_since_last_update * 365)
NOTE: this is with any values from unitprefs and campaignprefs filled in.

Filling this in for 0.5 morale (50% of max) and 0.5 state support (50 when displayed in-game) with a commander that has 10 leadership and 10 fame (1 star each) will net you something close to a 10% desertion rate per year. Still high, but for most units in your army the state support and unit morale will be higher than the example numbers, further lowering the desertion rate. There are also only a handfull of officers that will have such a low leadership and/or fame score, even taking into account experience penalties, especially when factoring in superior officer bonuses (I count 20 historical officers total who can have one of these stats be 10 or lower, and only one of them can has it for both).

I am also not entirely sure how often desertions are calculated, since several of the relevant pref lines are marked with eod (end of day), which might mean they only trigger during battles. This seems supported by the fact that the desertion tallies only seem to increase noticable for states that have had units involved in battles.

[Nox]

Originally posted by Lucian was right:

The concept of an army not being at full morale on enemy territory is fine. That makes sense they are in unfamiliar territory that is unfriendly. The idea that it should suffer constant attrition by being there effectively has made the game unplayable. I just had a situation where I controlled all of western Tennessee and I had built up Supply Depots but when I had my corp of 35000 men constantly losing morale because it was merely on "enemy Territory". Either fix this. Or get rid of it. Period it makes the game unplayable.

At the very least make it toggleable.

[Brygun]

Maybe it is a bit steep but I would have thought that attrition forward would also include the dreaded enemy:

Disease

Illness and sickness took mores lives than combat. So a large amount of people, your troops, in an area new to them is a great way to expose them to sickness. Just being in camps can spread sickness if someone in that large number takes a short cut to poop near the water gathering places.

There is also accidents among large numbers of people though that is a small number. Twisted ankles from marching. Broken arms from falling off a horse. Cuts from drunken bar fights with bottles.

I think the poster having had ancestors on garrison is a useful indication of "morale" (aka Im sad) losses.

I just think there are other reasons for losses than "morale".

As to what that rate should be Im not sure.

Certainly the political favoring should come in mind. If your side is winning people fell much more willing to tough it out than is they are losing and might one day soon get killed for no change.

[Duncan]

Agreed so far as making it toggle-able. I think this may be an idea that will work out in the end. ATM, I'm not a fan of it, but I felt the same way about the readiness factor when it first was introduced. I feel they are both to heavy in their application, but readiness is something I have learned how to deal with, and even though it can be toggled, I'm leaving it active.

I would suggest making the desertion issue a lower penalty and fine tune it up later. I think working on the AI and the behavior of the human controlled units would be time better spent.

For example:
Units should not continue to march dumbly into formed up enemy units and get routed. That's just not realistic behavior. Being surprised, having to form up under fire, or running away to form up from a safe distance, or other such actions would be more believable. Even so, the units just walking into a hail of bullets wouldn't be so hard to take, but the commanding officers always seem to be literally up to a mile or two away, either at the rear of the entire column, or even on a different road. I could believe a division HQ marching to the rear of the division, but at the rear of the entire corps/army is hard to take. However, that's not a detail I studied when studying the civil war, so if that's historically accurate, then that's a detail that needs to be in the tutorials/rulebook for the game. I just kind of doubt that's the way it worked (working around it by giving army/corps command, then toggling each division commander and giving a seperate command to go to where they were going to go to seems to help).

Enemy AI has come a long way, however, it's still pretty easy to find and surround a flank, routing that portion of the enemy line and then rolling it up. Not that it's not historical, but that the AI doesn't respond to it until its too late makes it too easy.

I had the Army of the West (replaced Harney with Buell), drop from around 11-12 thousand men down to a few hundred just from being in 'enemy territory, never mind that it was all Union controlled as part of the process of splitting the CSA in half. One other army had something similar, but not as drastic. I had some Brigade Commanders in that army defamed, and 1 division commander defamed as well as Buell. Ended up replacing ALL the commanders in that entire army and retreated them back to Illinois. Took almost a year for them to recover. Poor admin skills is my guess as the other units didn't experience the same thing.

Is there ALWAYS a defamed commander after every battle? The news paper seems to make it seem that way, however, not that I'm paying closer attention to this, the officer doesn't always end up with a broken badge. Even if it's working as intended, it's eating up a lot of time to track down and replace defamed officers, and as time goes on, there are fewer "good" ones to choose from.

[Captain Müller (KGF)]

Ok guys, thanks for your inputs! I will adjust attrition + add further infos for 0.91!