Morale

**Morale** is a crucial game mechanic, as this game revolves around it. Similar to **health**, **HP** or **Life** in other games, if your morale reaches 0, you lose the game. The starting amount of morale is equal to the total value of your army, determined by your rating earned from Ranked combat. In most cases, when a unit is captured, or removed from the board, an amount of morale equal to the value of the piece is lost. In the case where a piece is converted into an ally piece, the previous owner loses morale equal to the piece's original value, and the new owner gains morale equal to the appropriate value. If no other penalties or bonuses are applied, one loses when all of their non-zero-value pieces are captured.

## Abilities

### [Pay X]

In most cases, abilities that cost morale are simply denoted as [Pay X], X being the amount of morale lost by from using this ability.

### Value and Summons

However, some abilities change morale in a different way, usually involving Value.

 Split
 Revive
 Spawn Slimes

## Passives

Some units have passive abilities that affect morale. These tend to be very specific, but can be as simple as extra morale loss on death. Losing units with morale loss on death creates a morale deficit, which means you lost more morale than the unit's value. Since you lost more than it added to your army, you now have less morale than the total value of all your units on the board and may lose without losing all of your non-zero-valued pieces. The most notorious example of this is losing your King.

### King

* Lose 25 morale on death.
* You lose 3 morale per turn without a King.

**Note:** The loss of 3 per turn starts after your king has been lost a full turn, not the turn immediately following your King being captured.

### Militia

* Lose 2 morale on death and 1 additional morale per upgrade.

### Prince

* While without a King, capturing a unit with Prince will transform him into King and you gain 20 morale. This also stops the morale loss per turn from being king-less.

### Princess

* Lose 5 morale on death and 5 additional morale per upgrade. Losing a Princess++ costs you 15 morale for example.

### Vampire

* Vampire causes your opponent to lose morale when it kills a piece. Additionally, your King's value is increased. This gives you additional morale, but makes losing your King take more morale. The morale drain starts at 2 morale drain per kill for Vampire and goes up by 1 morale drain per upgrade. Vampire+++ drains 5 morale per kill, for example.

**Note:** If you have no King, then the drained morale is added to the Vampire.

### FireElemental

* This piece, instead of losing morale, loses value over time. After 40/30/20/10 turns it will start losing 1 value per turn until it reaches 0 and dies. This decay can be offset with kills, which cause the FireElemental to gain Value.

### AirElemental

* This piece, instead of losing morale, loses value on attack. It loses 5/6/7/4 value if it directly kills a piece, until it reaches 0 value and dies.
* However, this piece can gain value by using Wind magic. On all tiers except AirElemental+++, it will promote one tier higher, and for AirElemental+++, it gains 8 value per magic usage, allowing it to attack 2 more times before dying.

## Promotion

You gain morale when a unit promotes, equal to the gain in value of the unit. An Axeman promoting to Berserker will net you a gain of 6 morale.

This is true for special promotions too (transformation), such as Slime transform to GiantSlime on kill.

The only exception to this is Necromancer, which in all tiers, promotes to Lich, which has 2 less value than the Necromancer. This is the only case where promotion will result in a net morale loss.

## Move Decay

Starting from turn 50, both players lose 1 morale at the start of their turns. White, having gone first, is the first to lose morale from move decay. Watch your morale during move decay, as even though you might be defending all of your units well, you morale could fall low enough that losing any unit will end up as a loss.