Slight random variation of unit morale values per battle

[psyclog]

After playing quite some ETW battles, the outcome of engagements between individual units has become far too predictable for me.

I just know in advance when a positon of mine will withstand the enemy charge and when it might break. And that should never be the case.. as war was pretty random, and generals could never be sure about the performance of individual units, but make no more than an educated guess.

It would greatly add to my immersion if there was some sort of random factor included. So I could only know that my unit of line infantry will *likely* repell that enemy unit of line infantry charging uphill, but never be sure about it.. and sometimes get a nasty surpise.
Or I could be pleasantly surprised by an amazing performance of that little militia unit which just somehow managed to rout a battalion of charging grenadiers..

Even Elite units had bad days, and even greenhorns were sometimes capable of exceptional bravery.

I think this could be achieved by shuffling morale values prior to battle... like adding/substracting a random number between 0 and 3.
If this is even possible. It should be doable on game boot level at least, but then you'd have the same morale values on every battle until you restart the game.


Any thoughts or comments?

[Dionysius the Mighty]

I would love a system like this, in fact I was thinking the other day about future Total Wars and variable unit stats. Maybe even have modifiers so if a unit flees the field its morale goes down, but if you punish (or rest) that unit, its morale goes back up a bit.

[taw]

You can do it with lua, but it's a moderately difficult project. Don't go there unless you're willing to spend at least a whole evening,
or alternatively if you have prior experience with lua/ETW modding (in which case it will take a weekend).

Units have traits, also hidden traits. Generals have traits, also hidden traits.
Now at every end of turn, and before and after every battle lua event is triggered for each character
(and I think every unit) - now's your chance.

Use trait system to randomly add trait increasing or decreasing morale a bit - for greater surprise make it hidden!
Trait/antitrait test can be used to ensure it's always within some reasonable range (let's say -2 to +2).

I'm 90% sure you could get it working for generals, with moderate effort (mostly learning lua and lua-ETW bindings).
Unit trait system is fully implemented as far as I know, but not used for anything, I'd say there's 66% chance of it
being able to achieve what you want.

Due to some anti-cheating shenanigans, you might or might not get identical results when you reload the same battle,
and I'm not sure what you'll see in pre-battle screen, but these are secondary issues.

As far as I can tell, the best person to ask about it is probably Alpaca, he's done more lua/ETW modding than anyone.
I'd help you if I had more time - this is not trivial, but neither is it overly complicated, and it sounds like a pretty neat idea.