Saving During Campaign Battles & Retrain as Different Unit Type

[RexMundi412]

I don't much like timed battles, so I turned the time limit off. I haven't seen a way to save during battles. So I was wondering if someone could confirm this and if correct is there a mod that would allow you to?

Can you retrain units as different types or put a general in command of a different unit type?

[drone]

I don't much like timed battles, so I turned the time limit off. I haven't seen a way to save during battles. So I was wondering if someone could confirm this and if correct is there a mod that would allow you to?
You cannot save during battles, the engine does not support battlefield saves. The game does pretty well with paused battles, I usually don't have any problems stretching a battle out over several hours with interruptions. The VI expansion added the pre-battle campaign save, which is sometimes unreliable.

Can you retrain units as different types or put a general in command of a different unit type?
Generals are tied to their units, and units cannot be retrained to another type. The only changes that can occur are battle/siege unmounting of some units and royal bodyguard upgrades at the era changes.

[scowie]

You can't save during battles but if you want to continue a long battle another day you can alt-tab out, suspend the executable, and hibernate your pc. To suspend the running executable (Medieval_TW.exe) you can use a tool called Process Explorer from Microsoft's SysInternals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) tool set.

I used this technique when I had over 20 battles to fight in one year (http://forums.totalwar.com/showthread.php/65259-how-s-your-campaign-going?p=479455&viewfull=1#post479455) (when my empire nearing total domination suffered empire-wide rebellions due to my king getting cut off by a naval blockade). I found that the game would crash whenever I tried loading a game I saved between battles. It would also crash if I tried to alt-tab out from the pre-battle screen, so I made sure I only alt-tabbed out during a battle, which worked fine.

Make sure you resume the process before alt-tabbing back to the game when you continue. When you alt-tab back in you will probably find that the pictures on the unit buttons have vanished. You can make these reappear by grouping/ungrouping some units (this shifts the position of the buttons forcing them to be redrawn by the game).