4th Edition Rules - comment now or forever shut yer trap!

[enrique]

Plenty of commander's have sent unit after unit to destruction. If you do, you lose. But, we don't currently have a mechanism that directly affects morale of an army. Sure, you lose initiative after losing xx number of steps, and that gives the opponent the chance to mop you up, but that's not the same as everyone getting jittery because their division commander keeps sending battalions forward in dribs and drabs to destruction on a battlefield littered with corpses.

Does anyone use a house rule for this? Say every two initiative steps lost = 1 morale step loss? What would the implications be on games? Would this make players more sensitive (too sensitive?) to losses, much as if in a campaign where every step lost hurts you for the rest of the campaign?
John

Maybe you could apply the special rule 14 ("Formation Morale") of Beyond Normandy:
"The morale of the units belonging to a formation is affected by losses. Each step loss or leader lost counts as a step. All units of the formation have their morale reduced as follows when the losses equal the noted number:

Lost Steps 8 Morale Reduction -1/0
Lost Steps 15 Morale Reduction -1/-1
Lost Steps 23 Morale Reduction -2/-1

Thus a Regiment that began a scenario with a morale of 8/7 would be reduced to a morale of 7/7 when step and leader losses totaled 8, to 7/6 when step and leader losses totaled 15 and 6/6 when step and leader losses totaled 23".

This rule would be easily applicable in scenarios where in the same side are various formations (eg German SS and Heer, Heer and Luftwaffe...), or in large scenarios (eg units in sector A begin the battle with 5 losses and units in sector B without losses).