Very Green unis and morale modifiers

[Nevill]

Very Green units always appear to have at least one (+) sign near their morale rating, regardless of whether there are riots in their home base, MORALE SE settings, or any other factors. This bonus confers them a 12.5% bonus on defense regardless of where they are on the map. Any Very Green unit always defends at a -12.5% penalty, unless also paired with Children's Creche and their bugs.

More than that, any unit that is supposed to be reduced to a Very Green status via, say, Soporific Pods special ability, can not fight at a penalty greater than -12.5%.

So, if a unit with Soporific Pods attacks a Hardened unit, it gets the same result it would if it attacked a Disciplined, a Green, or a Very Green one.

This seems wrong to me. Even if the defense penalty is supposed to be capped at -25%, there is nothing in the game files or the manual that would indicate that a Very Green unit should behave that way.

Another peculiarity concerns promotions for Very Green units.

The probability of such a battle upgrade seems to differ depending on the current morale of the unit.
An educated guess as to the odds of an upgrade are listed as follows:
^
100% for very green* and green units (CONFIRMED)
^50% for disciplined units
^1/3 for hardened units
^25% for veteran units
^20% for commando units
^
*Special situation for very green units. Under -3 & -4 $LINK<SE MORALE=130004> newly built units in bases without any morale enhancing facilities will at first not receive any morale upgrades from battle. This is probably because the game takes into account virtual morale levels under Very Green.
For example under –3 SE Morale units receive minus 2 morale levels, which basically makes new trained units Very VERY Green. Therefore they first need to win two battles to become green.

It appears that not all of them have been created equal, and their promotions are delayed under low MORALE settings. That might or might not work as intended.

[Yitzi]

My guess would be that it's intentional, and morale is supposed to have a minimum of Green on defense.

[Nevill]

Is there anything in the code or in the manual that suggests different modifiers for attack and defense? I know positive MORALE SE has this deature in its description, but AFAIK there is nothing for negative one (which is the only way to produce Very Green units).

[Yitzi]

Is there anything in the code or in the manual that suggests different modifiers for attack and defense?

The code for morale-and-base-value is a different function for weapons (which is then dependent on whether it's attacking or defending) than for defenses.

There's no question that the code explicitly says "if defending, morale has a minimum of Green and maximum of Elite"; the only question is whether that was meant to say "minimum of Very Green and maximum of Elite", i.e. to avoid the +defense from +2 or +3 MORALE bringing it over +50%.