The Orekeepers actually have some decent armor slots and weapon for early game if you can find them in time otherwise they're pointless for mid to late game.

I too would like robust minor factions long-term.

I always thought morale was a cheap and dirty way to enforce a kind of supply line on players. At current, the player can send super powerful waves of units around the map for years without really resting.

Yeah, agreed. I personally wouldn't mind seeing a small, cumulative penalty to starting morale for ending a turn in foreign territory.

Actually I just thought of something, you add some nice info when setting up a game like what each spell book gives you. Now when picking a Faction to play as under their given tech for example like Gilden you get Civics but in the description it just states "Faction starts with Civics technology" what exactly is the tech giving me in the description would be nice ie "Palace, Town Hall and Pub are unlocked".

Also In the Heirgamenon some of the techs have a description and unlocks. But some are missing their unlocks, (yes very tiny detail but just letting ya know).

While you have point about adding some mechanic to penalize an attacker for waiting for the defender to engage, I am unsure how morale would be this mechanic. In most tactical battle games, this mechanic is usually some kind of fatigue statistic or turn timer, which would both be pleasant additions to WoM and FE in general. However, in my mind, morale is the abstraction of a unit's will to fight, and thus would be effected both on the tactical map and the strategic map. For instance, on the strategic map a unit might have a base morale statistic which slowly lowers the long he is outside his own territory, while in a tactical battle the unit might have an instanced morale statistic which is determined by his base statistics as well as effects from particular enemy forces. This would keep a player from having one party on an infinite war path, as this party would be unable to keep up the momentum forever.

As for your point about morale helping the AI in tactical battles, this makes absolutely zero sense to me. In most game featuring morale, it is used in tactical battles to aid the flow of combat. For instance, in the TW series, morale serves a method of determining when a unit decides to run away, which in turn effects the morale of units around them. In those titles, the player and the AI are given this as an incentive to engaging units with lower morale in order to make fighting the rest of the army easier. Since WoM has no rout mechanic, It would seem more interesting have unit death hurt the instanced morale, but this would not make the AI "better".

It's a poor way of overcoming that problem. Morale in the early versions of WoM never made sense. It was really just a timer that eventually forced one side to do something. But it worked badly, because you'd see stuff like on turn 1 you use magic to kill half the army on the other side, and in turn 2 your side's morale goes down.

Wait, what? With the battle going that way morale should soar. And since it really had no bearing on what was going on anywhere else it was something of a half-baked mechanic that really wasn't needed.

If defenders have a terrain advantage, they should sit and wait for the attackers (and the attackers should lose the fight if they can't take the position within a time limit). The only reason for defenders ever to go charging at attackers is if the attackers have ranged weapons and the defenders don't. Morale doesn't factor into this.

without going through all 7 pages, why not make minor factions a setup option, let players choose for themselves, like notable locations and random events...?

I want to automatic battle option at every battle

1. chaneler allow to melee fight [y/n]
2. allow to cast spell [y/n]
3. allow to cast max spell level [1-5]

I agree these would be nice. Though hypothetically, I would also add a slider for some kind of total mana usage, so i can specify how much mana the AI can use to cast spells.

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Yeah, that does sound more reasonable.

Best regards,
Steven.

I think, and I might be wrong, that changing the world difficulty will change the "DEFAULT" difficulty of the AI factions.  I think this means that if I set the world to "Normal" all the AIs will be default to normal, and then when I get to the Faction page, I can then change the individual AIs.