Poll: morale and routing

[The Panther]

Arryn said:

Sure it does. It's *common* sense. How many officers would stick around to face an enemy, alone, after their troops have fled? Answer: none that are sane.

Actually, this is precisely the point. What sane commander would go ALONE into a battle anyway? The game simply should not reward a lone commander like it does now and heavily penalize the commander with a few troops or PD. It seems so very wrong to me. If anything, the game OUGHT to penalize the lone commander quite severly. Sending in a commander without an army is a somewhat warped and totally non-intuitive strategy that works only because of the current routing algorithm.

So, when the commander's troops are gone, no matter whether he brought any along or not at the start of the battle, he should rout fairly easily. But he should rout on his own, not because one measly point of PD has disapeared. The absence of troops should be nothing more than another strong factor in whether or not he will rout. Have him subtract 5-10 morale points or something like that because he has no army, regardless of whether it was killed in battle or he had none to begin with.

The current routing algortihm seems busted to me, despite the fact that people have figured a way to take advantage of it. Of course people want the status quo so they can continue to use the cheap flying SC strategy and not have to bother with the mundane and expensive thing like having an actual army.

This is just another of the reasons the AI plays poorly. It tries to build a real army, which does not work overly well against the lone SC attack, especially the SC pretender strategy.