Best Way to add National Morale to enemy?

[Klavo Hunter]

My friend is playing this game, I intend on picking it up soon also.

He beats the CSA up very badly and they lose National Morale so fast they lose long before 1865. Is there a good way to edit the savegame and increase CSA National Morale?

[crono900]

In campaignprefs.txt look for this line...

the loss adjustment of AI national morale on higher difficulties, the higher this value, the lower the national morale loss of AI when losing battles
1

Increasing this number may increase the length of your game. Be careful as it will effect all campaigns if you adjust this in the config folder.

Also Playing on hard drops the AI morale loss from battle even more.

Capturing Cities give a hit to the national morale of the side that lost the city and a boost to the side that did the capturing. These boost and losses to national morale from capturing can also be edited in the campaignprefs.txt, if your interested.

As for save games edits not I'm not sure on which lines to change.

Though, I'd also like to recommend checking out the discord for the game to see some different house rules that people have suggested.

[Klavo Hunter]

My friend has already adjusted that value. It's just a bit of a shame, we're still in early 1862 and the Rebels goofed up bad in Virginia, laying bare the path to Richmond, even though our game was going to try and focus on the Western Theater. Now the Rebs are at 45 National Morale... Oops...

[crono900]

Let them recapture their capital and they should regain some of their morale. Capturing the capitals cost a 20 point hit to the loser's morale and winner's get about 5 points back. There are some value lines of code for the capitals themselves, but I don't remember where.

[Ole "Slim Jolo" the Hobo Hero]

I forget what line it is off the top of my head, but I believe in Campaign prefs as well you can change the morale conditions for the war itself

There should be lines like 'permanent morale loss when capital is taken' which is like, a 10 I think, and there should be another line for when morale breaks for campaign and you win, which is when enemy national morale is down to 25, but you can obviously lower that to like, maybe 10 or even lower - I find once you've broken through the bulk of the forces in the East and take something like North / South carolina, have maybe taken Missouri since it tends to be easy to rush early on and slowly punched into Arkansas / Louisiana etc, by that point of the war the CSA is usually hovering around 35ish national morale even if it's still 1861/1862 because so many of their big cities, capital, etc are already taken.

Lowering the campaignprefs morale for nation breaking could otherwise make the war much longer, on top of what the others have also suggested just changing morale changes from battles and such too so it never gets that low so early on in the first place. Lowering morale break to like 10 or 5 also could be kind of interesting because theoretically even after much of the enemies national and soldier morale has broken, even if they're not a great fighting force still or can't raise armies because their credit is smashed as well, could still be interesting basically having to still re-occupy all these states with ever-lowering rebels to combat and maneuver around, sort of more interesting than the game just 'ending' instead when it might hit 25 like normal.

[stgarrettjr]

Originally posted by Ole "Slim Jolo" the Hobo Hero:

I forget what line it is off the top of my head, but I believe in Campaign prefs as well you can change the morale conditions for the war itself

There should be lines like 'permanent morale loss when capital is taken' which is like, a 10 I think, and there should be another line for when morale breaks for campaign and you win, which is when enemy national morale is down to 25, but you can obviously lower that to like, maybe 10 or even lower - I find once you've broken through the bulk of the forces in the East and take something like North / South carolina, have maybe taken Missouri since it tends to be easy to rush early on and slowly punched into Arkansas / Louisiana etc, by that point of the war the CSA is usually hovering around 35ish national morale even if it's still 1861/1862 because so many of their big cities, capital, etc are already taken.

Lowering the campaignprefs morale for nation breaking could otherwise make the war much longer, on top of what the others have also suggested just changing morale changes from battles and such too so it never gets that low so early on in the first place. Lowering morale break to like 10 or 5 also could be kind of interesting because theoretically even after much of the enemies national and soldier morale has broken, even if they're not a great fighting force still or can't raise armies because their credit is smashed as well, could still be interesting basically having to still re-occupy all these states with ever-lowering rebels to combat and maneuver around, sort of more interesting than the game just 'ending' instead when it might hit 25 like normal.

I once set it at 10, but I'd also set the morale/support weighting to have support more strongly influence morale, end result was a war into late 1863 and I had to conquer every single city in the South. Granted, that's because once you overrun a state its support no longer counts to national support, it seems, so it stops pulling the rating down.

Arguably I need to reduce the rate at which casualties/defeats reduce national morale. Or just try to lose more automated battles.

[crono900]

It goes to show that had McClellan not have wasted all that time, the war could have been over within the first 1 years and a half for the Union.