Newbish question

[MaxWilson]

Jim,

I'm not sure what was going on with your tests. Battle losses don't drop Morale, they affect the bonus that units get for being mostly intact (which doesn't show up on the screen). I don't know why you didn't see a correlation between Fear strength and the morale drop, but it's possible that you don't realize that Fear +X refers to the AREA of fear. The strength of the Fear effect is 1/5 of that, according to KO. Try testing Fear+50 vs. Fear+0 and you'll see it drop quickly, but if you tried Fear+0 vs. Fear+4 you wouldn't see any difference except that 9 squares would be affected instead of 5 (which you probably wouldn't notice).

Multiple overlapping fear effects are indeed fearsome. Frequently troops will rout even against enemies they could easily beat, if the enemies didn't have Fear. That's precisely why Onyx Amazons are so annoying, but it didn't show up in your test because the militia were ALSO getting cut down like wheat (and probably the ones who were within the Fear aura were mostly dead as well as Fear'ed, and thus irrelevant--although you said you did some a morale drop on some of them, and that was from Fear).

-Max