Simulation and analysis by Isitaris, with a lot of help from Loggy for exact mechanics (Dom 5 fear mechanics and discussions about updates in Dominion 6), and help from Negate for a few crucial tests in-game.

The two battle enchantments Wailing Winds and Blood Rain both have very intricate effects on a battle. They both apply some variation of fear effects on opponent's units, but they do so in different ways and with different limitations. To try and understand how effective both of those historically iconic spells are, I decided to try and model them with a Monte Carlo simulation. We will see that Blood Rain on its own is very effective at making commanders run, while Wailing Winds is more suited to having low morale units run, and that their combination will allow Wailing Winds to affect medium morale units.

The mechanical details of the two spells are as follow:

• Wailing Winds and Blood Rain both hit 3% of the battlefield every 320 ticks (for comparison, Dominion 5's version of Wailing Winds was hitting 5% of the battlefield every 320 ticks).
• Blood Rain hits with a frighten effect, without condition.
• A frighten effect reduces the morale of the target by 1, to a maximum of 5. If the target is alone in its squad like a commander, it will rout unless it succeeds on a morale check that we will call standard routing morale check (it is failed if the target fails an opposed DRN check of 5 + morale vs 14 + morale malus; ties are successes). This also affects squads if it is small enough, but this will not be modelled for now as it only affects very small squad with numbers below 5.
• Wailing Winds hits with full fear effects on the condition that the hit unit fails a morale check that we will call moraleNegateMoraleCheck (it is failed if an open-ended 3d6 roll falls strictly below the unit current morale).
• A full fear effect reduces the morale of the target by 1, to a maximum of 5 (this was changed recently in a dom 6 patch, it was previously 10). The full fear target will rout unless it succeeds on a morale check that we will call individual morale check (it is failed if the target fails an opposed DRN check of morale vs 6 + morale malus; ties are successes). If the full fear target did not fail the previous check and is alone in its squad like a commander, it will rout unless it succeeds on an standard routing morale check (as said before, such a check is failed if the target fails an opposed DRN check of 5 + morale vs 14 + morale malus; ties are successes). If the target is in a squad, morale problems are involved (see Dom 5 fear mechanics), and if there are enough of them, the whole squad makes a standard routing morale check as a single entity, with morale equal to the average morale in the squad and a bonus equal to 4 + (squadSize/2 + squadSize*5)/squadSize), where / is a division that rounds down. If the squad fails the check, it routs.
• A single standard routing morale check can be done every round. A single individual routing morale check can be done every round.
• The morale malus decays in the following way: every round, there is a 50% chance that the malus decreases by 1.

The Python code of the simulation can be found here on Github (change names of morale checks to match those on this page)

A lot of plots that have been made can be found in this Github folder

moraleplays_moralecomparison_squad___bloodrain_on_wailingwinds_on.pdf

moraleplays_moralecomparison_squad___bloodrain_on_wailingwinds_on.pdf

this should be made a png

What to show:

commanders

• commanders vs blood rain at various morales
• a few examples for 4 morales of bRain vs bRain+Wwinds vs wwinds, if possible resized to fit in the same size as previous plot

units

• density 3, squad size 50(or 100?), vs wWinds at various morales
• same thing with wWinds+bRain
• a few examples for 4 morales of bRain vs bRain+Wwinds vs wwinds, if possible resized to fit in the same size as previous plot

• effect of size for 4 morales, at density 3, for wWinds, resized to fit in same size as previous
• same thing for wWinds+bRain, showing that there's no effect of squad size there

let people check github for density 1 and 2