How Morale, Luck And Mixed Armies Work In HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC OLDEN ERA

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello there, and welcome. In this video, I want to talk about the luck and morale system of Heroes of Might and Magic the Olden Era.

[00:00:09]I'm going to cover everything you need to know to understand how the system works, how to interact with it, and I hope that there's something in this video that'll help you. Now, let's get started with the basics because this wouldn't be a guide without the fundamentals.

[00:00:27]Luck gives everyone of your deal extra damage when attacking, namely 6% per point of luck. Morale, on the other hand, gives your units a chance to act yet another time when they have acted with a 4% chance per point. The interesting caveat here being that every unit type has a different interactivity with these stats. The really interesting point is that strong positive interactivity also comes with a high vulnerability. You can stack those negatives higher than on a low interactivity creature. There's lots of faction differences here that we are going to not cover in this video. The whole verdict here being that it really depends a lot on the faction you're applying what kind of morale or luck play you're going to take.

[00:01:22]What luck and morale really do for your army is creating reliability in terms of damage spikes and / or action spikes. So, morale is action economy bonus, whereas luck is damage bonus. The really interesting thing here being that these two can interact together, which means nobody hinders you from lucky striking twice in your actions. This is where this system becomes very snowbally and can become very powerful.

[00:01:54]Altogether, this is pretty much the basics. There's also skills like the uh luck and uh morale skill, which gives you give you an really interesting tools to interact with that and create even more reliability of these procs and artifacts, but more about that in a hot minute.

[00:02:15]Morale is also being influenced by the faction purity inside your army, meaning that if all the units of your army are consisting of the same faction, you receive a plus one morale bonus inherently. Mixing one faction into the whole mix doesn't only destroy that unity bonus, it also imposes a negative minus one per included faction in the army. So, at the worst, we could really drain our morale into heavily into the negatives by just having too many factions in our army. This means mixing factions is something that we shouldn't do lightly, but it has really options and we're going to talk about that now.

[00:03:05]All in all, I just wanted to work out that mixing different factions into your army always comes at a price because going negative in morale, luck isn't influenced by that. It's actually only morale being influenced by faction purity, is negative morale is really dangerous because while positive gives you an extra turn, negative lets you skip a turn, and this is quite devastating. Therefore, you want to avoid that at any cost. So, mixing other factions into your build is pretty much always a question of having artifacts and or skills to enable you in that.

[00:03:44]The interesting point here to though being that mixing factions can be extremely potent, especially when we take into uh consideration that in an ideal situation like this hero here is pretty stacked in these departments, it doesn't come at a pretty doesn't come at any price anymore if you are potent enough at spend spreading morale.

[00:04:10]So, you can mix freely. Why would you want to mix? This is the interesting question. So, for example, if you rely on just bombarding your enemy from the back line with strong archers, then it might be interesting to just dive into a city of a second faction that provides even stronger or even more archer units to go wild into a ranged army. Or you can get yourself that one specific unit that will interact with your game plan positively.

[00:04:44]It's really hard to generalize that, but I hope you get my idea. Overall, you should always ask yourself, is the unit that I'm putting into my um army from the other faction something that I can get reliably? Do I have a city of that? Can I even upgrade them?

[00:05:04]This is the best scenario. Or do I only have access to these units by conquering some outside world building which produces these? This is only intermediate because we are only having access to the basic troop type and we have to do some um actions to get them upgraded without a city? Or is it even worse, a one-time joiner out of a reward out of a dungeon or something like that? The latter being quite opportunistic choices.

[00:05:37]Overall, you should only mix into your army when you can digest the morale penalty. This is really important to note out.

[00:05:46]If that's not given, I would always say is it really worth it? Is it a tier six or tier tier seven unit that um justifies that problem? Or are you necromancer and your units won't be suffering from a negative morale at all?

[00:06:02]So, there are fringe cases where it's pretty cool to mix even with a low morale stat, but generally speaking, that one unit will almost never make it worth having the risk that the rest of your army has a chance to just not act not act at all.

[00:06:19]Now, there are options to um go for an opportunistic match, for example, when you get a very strong unit out of a dungeon in the early game that you can just toss into the fray, or you get a big stack of something that doesn't really fit your faction. It's sometimes also worth picking it up if it is really strong to just grind it up in the uh map battles as a sacrifice stack. This can also work. So, when you're going for an opportunistic hire and not a regular one out of a city, you you can always go for it if you can answer yourself the question what I'm going to use it for and how I'm going to handle downside. If you don't have good answers for that, it's most likely better to just say no to the joiner. Now, the interesting point here now being that artifacts and skills yield us these points.

[00:07:20]Skills have the problem that not always do they fit into the archetype that you want to build. Sometimes, you want that subclass and you don't have the freedom to choose luck and or leadership.

[00:07:34]Sometimes, on the other hand, you don't know what uh if you're going to receive the artifacts for luck and morale that would be um ironing out the deficiencies in the build. You always have to choose here from a base to from a case-to-case basis because at the end of the day, if you are getting a lot of cool morale slash luck items, you can totally forego skilling the branch deer. Or on the other hand, if you find good items, you might consider getting there and going even deeper into the whole enhancement.

[00:08:11]Different angles to approach the system, but my general verdict here being good artifact drops can pretty much replace skills, whereas skills are pretty much enhancing the artifacts if present or replacing them if not present. Here again, it's a very similar thing like the synergy between luck and morale.

[00:08:31]There is a synergy between artifact and skill that you can facilitate, but you don't have to.

[00:08:37]And this goes on both cases. So, it's really something you can and choose for yourself how you want to play it.

[00:08:46]There is one thing that I really want to talk about next and that is the risk of zero morale.

[00:08:53]While on paper, it is safe to have your army on a balanced edge that you have exactly zero morale, that will yield you at no benefit and no and no problem at the same time. But, when you are starting to fight against other heroes from other factions, it might be very much the case that the enemy hero has some skill and some sub skill equipped that lowers your morale or your luck. And this is where things can easily crash apart when you have planned them too much on a narrow margin. With the um total verdict of mine being that a positive morale is unless you're undead, always very very desirable and beneficial because nobody hates an extra action when it happens.

[00:09:45]If you are not relying on it, it's it's always still cool and it still also protects you a bit from debuff morale issues, which is really destructive when you're not prepared for it.

[00:09:58]The bottom line here being, don't rely too much on the safety of the zero value from the um penalties from two heavy faction mixing mixing because it might be crashing down on you in a battle against the enemy. But, the interesting part here being that it that we can also facilitate this ourselves because we're there are sub skills that we can use ourselves as well to reduce the enemy stats in this regard.

[00:10:28]Debuffing enemies luck and morale is massively powerful because everything you would hate to happen to yourself is obviously creating a really strong benefit on your side and that gap becomes even wider when your army at the same time is benefiting from positive luck and morale. This is where things can really get extremely potent and when this is combined with a high end attack uh with high attack and defense values, yeah, my heroes can really go bonkers.

[00:11:01]Extremely so, while being extremely hard to kill.

[00:11:06]This is basically the enhancement engine for every unit based um or one big enhancement engine for every unit based uh strategy that can definitely also be stro- um strengthened by the facilitation of daylight magic. Daylight magic is very interesting for the builds that go strong around luck and morale because a lucky strike can still be influenced by these bonuses because luck is just offering you bonus damage. This doesn't change the base damages of your units. So, when you are combining luck with buffs, things go places. And at the same time, the same amplification goes also for morale. A buff that acts twice as obviously stronger than a buff that only acts one time.

[00:12:03]Bottom line here being, this is a very, very strong thing to be played around buff strategies. So, if you end up on a hero that is strong on luck and morale, try to implement some daylight magic and go even stronger out of that.

[00:12:17]Overall, this is a very, very important mechanic with the least of all interactions should be to avoid going into the negatives, which is fairly said quite easy, but you have a real chance when you draw a second city out of a different faction to consider which units out of the second faction fit your game plan. And if you are then lucky enough to get some bonuses to tinker out the penalties that this imposes on your army, this can be really, really strong. But, all together, should be always handled with care and always have a plan behind it. A mono faction army is never a bad idea.

[00:13:02]Uh badly tinkered mixed army can be quite a fail. That's just the bottom line here.

[00:13:09]But, if you have a good idea that you want to pull through, try it out by all means.

[00:13:13]The worst thing that can happen is that you have to reload the save file and try it again without the new unit.

[00:13:20]Now, I hope that this helped you out in understanding the system. Let me know if you have anything to add or any questions in the comment section, leave a like, leave a subscribe, consider donating to the channel.

[00:13:32]I'd be very delighted if you'd be helping out. Your donations help me to keep this channel as low on advertisement as humanly possible and I'm very grateful for that. So, thanks for watching yet again and have a great day.