June 6, 2019

History XIII: Every Manly Heart is Bounding

Not every war is a total war. More often than not, the loser realizes they're fighting a futile war and they surrender. I'll implement a morale score to keep track of this, as suggested by Lance.

Morale goes down when a successful attack is launched against you or a random natural disaster occurs. It goes up when a successful attack is launched by your forces, or you repel an invader. In addition, morale will creep up every year by a small amount.

Because the potential for disaster is very high (0.1% across all cities), and morale is a hegemonic property, morale will tend to drop much quicker than it can rise (absent success in war). This also implies that larger hegemonies will collapse (speaking in morale terms) much sooner than small ones.

If a hegemony's morale (measured from 0-100%) drops below a critical level (10%), it will unconditionally surrender. This is a bit brute force; these surrenders could be very complicated, with vassal states being formed, or a simple exchange of cities, or a total assumption into the conquering kingdom. This latter situation will be enforced, at least until I tackle the vassal state code.

An interesting situation arose where the city of Pawsapa rebelled against the Khare hegemony (a dwarven kingdom of appreciable size) and then destroyed several cities and conquered others, eventually forcing the outlying settlements to declare fealty to Pawsapa instead of Khare. Vieskhare (the founding city) had been established nearly 2600 years before, but a series of natural disasters left her vulnerable to rebellion. A sad story (if you're a Kharen nationalist).

There's also a bug where a large city which surrenders will immediately trigger the secession code and rebel again, forming a new hegemony with a full morale (albeit usually giving up a few cities). It might be a feature instead...

I'm sure I'll continue to tweak the exact values, but the mechanism is at least in place.



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