Am I seeing things or has the patch ...

given units an incredible morale boost? I'm not necessarily talking about units' morale stats, I'm not sure if they have changed at all, but from what I've observed I now have to decimate enemy units to something like 25% of their original strength before they finally break and leave the field. And I'm not talking about elite units either ... even freaking militia and armed citizenry keep marching into my cannon fire and only turn tail after they've lost 3/4 of their men! And it's not like it ends there either because most units eventually reform and come back for another charge!

Before the patch, even the Old Guard would break and run when they'd take massive casualties in a very short amount of time.

Last night in my Prussian campaign, a unit of French chassiers a cheval of 60 men (I probably spelled that horribly wrong ) began charging the artillery position in the center of my line. While charging across the battle field, they lost 56 men ... 56 out of 60, but they did not break! They really did not break and continued to charge into a battery of my 12 pounders, killing a few of them in hand to hand combat before I could rush up a company of musketeers and destroy the French cavalry unit.

If this was a deliberate change (and I'm not seeing things), then it's a step in the wrong direction. I expect that someone will now quote me a piece of history where some unit of heroes sustained 90% casualties in a single combat and went on to accomplish an incredible military feat anyway, and I'm actually willing to believe that, on occasion, that actually happened. But when even militia and armed citizenry units pull this off on a regular basis then something is fishy. I'm playing on normal difficulty by the way.

Hmmm I haven't noticed this

What difficulty are you playing on? Because on my Russian VH/VH I have noticed similar behavior, although it wasn't much different pre-patch. I mean, it is VH for a reason

As I said, I'm playing on normal difficulty. It's a campaign I started before the patch and then just kept playing it after the patch was applied. Maybe save games aren't compatible and the game now thinks I'm actually playing on hard or very hard? Guess I'll start a new campaign and see if that changes anything.

Maybe they increased the hard coded bonuses the AI gets according to difficulty levels. That's called BAI improvements...

H/H, and I noticed this. I tried to hammer Mecklenburg as Prussia, I took some serious hits before I could crush them.