Olden Era Morale & Luck Guide: Stop Mixing Factions

If your units randomly freeze up and skip their action at the worst possible moment, your Morale is in the red, and there’s a very good chance it’s because you stuffed three different factions into one army. Morale and Luck are the RNG layer sitting on top of every fight. Played right, they hand you free extra turns and bonus damage. Played wrong, they quietly sabotage you all game. New players almost always get this backwards.

Here’s how both work and the one army-building rule that fixes most of it.

Morale: free turns or wasted ones

Morale is a chance, rolled per unit, that something happens when it would normally act:

Positive Morale gives a unit a chance to act a second time in the round. Each point of positive Morale is roughly a 4% chance to take that extra action.
Negative Morale gives a unit a chance to lose its action entirely. Each point of negative Morale is roughly a 4% chance to just stand there and do nothing.

That swing is bigger than it sounds. A high-Initiative stack with good Morale that rolls a double-action can take a key target out a full beat early. A negative-Morale stack that freezes hands the enemy a free round. Over a long fight, those rolls pile up.

The mixed-faction penalty everyone walks into

This is the single most important thing to understand about army building:

An army made entirely of one faction’s units gets +1 Morale. That’s a flat bonus just for staying loyal.
Every extra faction you add costs you 1 Morale. Two factions in one army and you’ve thrown away the bonus and started sliding negative. Three or four and your stacks are regularly freezing mid-fight.

So that exciting plan to grab a strong unit from another faction’s dwelling and slot it next to your core army? It often costs more than the unit is worth, because it drags every other stack’s Morale down with it. This is the number-one reason beginner armies feel sluggish and unreliable. They’re a salad of factions, sitting at negative Morale, losing actions all over the field.

A clean single-faction army at +1 isn’t just tidy. It’s a real, constant combat advantage that costs you nothing.

The exception: undead and constructs

Two unit types ignore Morale completely. Undead and construct units always sit at neutral Morale. They never roll a double-action, but they never freeze either. That has two consequences worth knowing:

An undead-heavy army doesn’t get the +1 single-faction bonus, but it’s also immune to the mixed-faction penalty. Morale stops being a lever you pull.
If you splash a few constructs or undead into an otherwise living army, they sit there steady while your living stacks suffer whatever Morale you’ve built.

So Necropolis-style armies play by different Morale math entirely. Stacking positive Morale items on them does nothing. Plan around it instead of fighting it.

How to stack positive Morale

When your army can actually use Morale, here’s how to push it up:

Run a single faction. This is the big one. That +1 from a pure army is the easiest Morale you’ll ever get, and it’s free.
Take Morale-boosting skills. Some hero skills lift your whole army’s Morale. If you’re building around aggression, they’re strong.
Equip Morale artifacts. Gear that grants Morale stacks on top of your faction bonus, pushing your double-action chance higher across every stack.

Layer those and a single-faction army can reach a Morale level where double-actions stop feeling lucky and start feeling routine.

Luck: bonus and penalty damage

Luck is the damage-side cousin of Morale, and it’s simpler:

Each point of Luck is roughly a 6% chance that a hit lands as a lucky strike for bonus damage, or as an unlucky strike for reduced damage if your Luck is negative.

Positive Luck means your stacks occasionally crit harder than the numbers suggest. Negative Luck means they sometimes fizzle. You build Luck the same way you build Morale, through skills and artifacts, and on a damage-focused army those bonus hits add up across a long battle. Luck doesn’t carry the harsh faction penalty Morale does, so it’s a cleaner stat to chase, but it’s also usually the secondary priority behind getting your Morale sorted first.

When mixing factions is actually fine

It’s not a forbidden move, just an expensive one. Mixing is acceptable when:

You’re running undead or constructs, which don’t care about Morale anyway.
The off-faction unit is so much stronger that one extra dead-action chance per round is a price worth paying. This is rare, but a single dominant high-tier stack can justify it.
You’re stacking enough Morale from skills and artifacts to absorb the penalty and stay positive overall. If you can eat the -1 and still sit at +2, mixing one faction is fine.

Outside those cases, keep your army pure. The default plan should be one faction, +1 Morale, with Luck layered on through gear.

Bottom line

Build single-faction for the free +1 Morale, only break that rule when you’ve got the Morale headroom or you’re running undead and constructs that don’t care, and chase Luck through skills and artifacts for those bonus hits. Get this right and the random freezes stop, the double-actions start, and a lot of “unfair” losses simply disappear. Exact percentages can shift across the current Early Access build, so check the in-game cards if you want the precise current values.