retrain question and exe?

I've searched around I am seeing information both ways.

When I retrain a unit I understand that it keeps the veteran troops and adds new green troops and then averages out the overall unit experience. Individual soldiers within in the unit are modeled and keep their current expereince. The chevrons you see are the average of all the individual soldiers. Is this correct?

If this is correct what is the problem with retraining being unhistorical/realistic? This seems right to me no? New troops come in green and mix in with the experienced veterans.

Also, I understand that only Alex.exe retrains it's troops, correct? I am current using rtw.exe but trying to decided if I should be using bi.exe or alex.exe instead.

Thanks for the help.

When you retrain a unit, the new recruits are magically granted all the experience and fighting skill of the veterans. So an 18 year old recruit instantly becomes the fighting equal of a soldier with experience gained from 20 battles.

This is a bug in the RTW engine that was never fixed. But it really helps the AI in the Alex engine which uses retraining a lot, soon the AI will have units with 3 gold chevrons. Celtic Levy Spearmen with those can wipe the floor with Roman Principes.

To avoid exploiting this bug and gaining an advantage over the AI in the RTW and BI engines, which don't retrain very often, the player should MERGE units rather than retrain. Take a depleted veteran unit out of your army stack, raise a new unit of the same type, then merge them. The remaining men of the newly-recruited unit are the next draft of reinforcements and remain in reserve, and the veteran unit, back up to full strength, goes back to rejoin the main army.

That way, the new recruits merging into the veteran unit don't magically gain experience, and the overall experience of the entire unit goes down - accurately reflecting the fact that a proportion of the men are now new recruits. But a full strength unit with new recruits is better than a depleted unit with all veteran soldiers.

You can of course maintain your units' experience levels by merging two depleted veteran units together to make one full strength veteran unit. That's OK too, because now your army has one fewer unit overall. And when you raise a new unit of rookies, they won't be merging with the vets, and thus won't have any experience - leaving you with a kick-ass unit of experienced veterans, and a bog-standard unit of rookies. In a battle, the rookie unit might get into trouble against a tough enemy, forcing the veterans to go and help them out.

Imagine it this way. You've got three units, and you've earned enough experience to gain 9 chevrons between them. You can either have i) one unit with 3 gold chevons and two units with no experience at all, or ii) 3 units with three bronze chevrons. Which would be better? If you have option i) then you have a kick-ass 'god' unit of 'Arnold Schwarzeneggers', but what happens if the two rookie units break and run? Will your single 'god' unit be able to win the battle on its own, outflanked and surrounded by the whole enemy army? Probably not - even 'Arnold Schwarzegger' will die if he's stabbed in the back. But if you choose option ii), then all three of your units might be able to stand their ground - meaning you win the battle! Plus you won't take losses from your rookies routing and getting cut down while fleeing.

Overall, I find merging veteran units with rookie replacements better. The army as a whole gains chevrons more slowly, but at least they all have some experience, instead of having several rookie units that can't always hack it supported with a small and ever-diminishing hard core of veterans.

See, that's what I thought but I also read that the new green units are mixed in with the veteran units and the experience chevron adjusted to the average. That is how it "should" work but your saying that the new green units get bumped up to whatever the level of the original unit is? Thus "cheating" to give you a full unit with no xp loss? Because the AI uses this, it seems like a reason not to play with alex.exe, but many people seem to recommend alex.exe as the best on to use, very confusing...

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Originally Posted by AstroCat

When I retrain a unit I understand that it keeps the veteran troops and adds new green troops and then averages out the overall unit experience. Individual soldiers within in the unit are modeled and keep their current expereince. The chevrons you see are the average of all the individual soldiers.

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Originally Posted by Titus Marcellus Scato

When you retrain a unit, the new recruits are magically granted all the experience and fighting skill of the veterans. So an 18 year old recruit instantly becomes the fighting equal of a soldier with experience gained from 20 battles.

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I think both happens. I've seen units' experience be reduced as it should be by the lower average, but I've also seen a handful of battle hardened warriors becoming a full formation of golden chevroned elite killers. I have no idea what conditions lead to which result, though.

Edit: Now that I thinkt about it, is it possible this is something that has been fixed in Alex or in M2TW? I'm not sure anymore if both experiences happened with RTW.

I think because it maintains them on a individual solider level and then averages the overall experience against the new 0 level recruits. So in this way retraing would be realistic, but I am not 100% sure this is happening.

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Originally Posted by AstroCat

See, that's what I thought but I also read that the new green units are mixed in with the veteran units and the experience chevron adjusted to the average.

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No, this is what happens when you merge units. I'm fairly certain I've seen a unit depleted to under 10 men be restored to full, with no loss of experience, if you retrain.

With rtw.exe, the AI never retrains, so it's effectively an exploit in favour of the human player.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

I'm fairly certain I've seen a unit depleted to under 10 men be restored to full, with no loss of experience, if you retrain.

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Yes, me too.

I've read about this retraining bug several times, but I can't rember it ever happening to me. When i retrain a unit, it always loses chevrons.

Just curious what .exe you are using?

I've seen both happen - a small and badly mauled but very veteran unit gets retrained and suddenly becomes a super-cohort of 200-some gold-chevron'd soldiers while at other times I've seen that small and badly mauled veteran unit get retrained and pretend that those grizzled soldiers just disappeared, and not a single chevron of experience is left.

As with many mechanics in R:TW the exact nature of them is foggy and not precisely understood, and never will be. For a more challenging game you should just merge units rather than retraining them, but at the same time I don't think anyone will glare at you and call you a cheater for retraining. I tend to do both - send a small army of replacements to the front to act as replenishing forces, but if the army is close to home I tend to just retrain.

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Originally Posted by AstroCat

Just curious what .exe you are using?

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rtw.exe

Why is everybody considering retrained units with high experienced a bug? What about all those veterans who can be called upon to join the army? Since there is no ability to disband experienced units and regain them later, with the same grade of experience of course, and it makes actually no sense at all to disband units, because one can´t recruit a full, or at least a half army, within short period of time ( at least not from once settlement, a capital perhaps, that in case of Romans, for example, is the only historical way till the granted citizenship to other italic towns, i see no bug in this at all. Old veterans from the previous campaigns are, of course, joining other veterans, while fresh recruits are mustered in new units.

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Originally Posted by vollorix

Why is everybody considering retrained units with high experienced a bug?

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Not a bug, an exploit. Because with any executable other than alex.exe, the AI doesn't do it.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

With rtw.exe, the AI never retrains, so it's effectively an exploit in favour of the human player.

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I have often seen armies with several silver or gold chevron units with full manpower and no small units remaining from merging. Since the AI can't disband I'm sure they were retrained units, what else could they be?

@Vollorix
If you don't disband where do you get your veterans to fill up the ranks?

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Originally Posted by Rahl

what else could they be?

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Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

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Originally Posted by Paltmull

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

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Indeed, if it has anything more than bronze upgrades on weaponry/armour, it's a rebelled unit (subject to vanilla RTW mechanics).

What about former battles the faction armies fought? Do i have to disband veterans from the campaigns i fought, are there not enough from previous battles, campaigns and wars? ;)

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Originally Posted by vollorix

What about all those veterans who can be called upon to join the army?

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Veterans in the cities available to rejoin the army? Good idea. We can roleplay that in EB, and use the retraining bug in an historically accurate way in EB.

Now, did you put those discharged veterans into your city to begin with? By disbanding a veteran unit in the city first, before doing any retraining?

No? You didn't? Well in that case, there won't be any veterans in the city to be recruited, will there?

See, if you want to roleplay properly, you can't legitimately have the advantage of retraining veteran units back to full strength and keeping all their experience, without having the disadvantage of disbanding other veteran units first....veterans don't grow on trees and they aren't born veterans out of their mother's wombs either.... ;)

I understand your point, but i only retrain units in the beginning of my campaigns, about 10-20 years into the game. That is a time frame. when the soldiers from older campaigns are still available, though, those battles, wars, whatsoever wheren´t "played" by me. After those first years, i´m simply producing more units of a kind, merging the veterans, and shipping the new units to the locations, sometimes disbanding old really depleted, or outdated due to reforms, units at place, playing a bit "colonization". I hope, you get my point now :)

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Originally Posted by vollorix

I understand your point, but i only retrain units in the beginning of my campaigns, about 10-20 years into the game. That is a time frame. when the soldiers from older campaigns are still available, though, those battles, wars, whatsoever wheren´t "played" by me.

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That's more justifiable, then, although I'd do it only in the first 10 years. Discharging a soldier when he's 20 and re-recruiting him when he's 40, well, he's not going to be a good, fit soldier anymore. A bit like the French reservists from 1918 fighting again in 1940 - they were crap! IMO after more than 10 years in civvy street, a veteran would become a useless civilian no better than a raw recruit.

And of course a soldier discharged at age 30 - well, after 20 years, he'll be 50, and too old to fight.

First, I'm using the regular RTW.exe and the AI retrains units..a lot. I'm frequently going up against brown-chevroned units (the second level), and I have spies in many opposing cities so I can see units actively being retrained, so I know they aren't all civil revolt troops.

Second, I've noticed that retraining units has a very inconsistent effect on what happens to their veterency. I've had a gold-chevroned unit fall down to brown or even bronze when I retrained it. I've noticed that if you merge units and then retrain them, those always lose exp. For example, I have three depleted units of Hastati. I take one unit and drop them into the other two, putting them both at full strength but leaving the third severely understrength. When I retrain the third, it loses almost all exp it had.

Even when I don't merge, sometimes my units lose exp on retrain. For example, one of my Lanceari units was depleted down to 21 men (from 100) after many years on the road. It had 3 brown chevrons (6 experience), and on retrain it fell down to 2 bronze chevrons (2 experience) despite never merging it with anything. I don't really know why this happens, seems to be the game just getting confused. It's not restricted to units what are severely depleted, either. One of my Liby-pheonician cavalry units had 1 gold chevron (7 experience). It had about 80 men in the unit, and on retrain it fell down to two brown chevrons (5 experience). I was pretty peeved since it didn't make any sense - I hadn't merged it with anything - but it wasn't anything that a battle or two against the Romans couldn't restore.

Third, the most important thing I've discovered is this: if you EVER merge a unit into another unit, then the game will remember you have done that and the effects will show on your next retrain. For example...

I have three units of understrength Hastati. I merge the one unit with the other two, putting them both at full strength. I send the third back to retrain and forget about it. The other two Hastati units gain or lose some veterency based on what the veterency of the first unit was. The game, however, seems to remember that many of the members of those two Hastati units are actually members of another Hastati unit, so it keeps treating both units as if they are merged units until all the members of those two units that were originally from the merged unit are dead.

So, let's say those two Hastati units are now at full strength, 161 men. But remember that they were understrength before, so let's say of the 161 men in each unit, 40 from each are actually from that first Hastati unit and therefore are not actually a part of these two units. The game seems to remember this, and until *all* 40 of those men in each unit are dead, the game is going to keep treating both of those Hastati units as having been merged and will punish your veterency on every retrain. Based on each retrain, the veterency of the resulting, retrained unit will be proportional to the amount of men still left in that unit that were from a merge. For example...

We still have both our Hastati units from before, out of 161 men in each unit, 40 in each were merged from another unit. Let's say we go into battle. Both of these Hastati units emerge from the battle with 120 men left. Of the 40 killed in each unit, 20 of them were part of the 40 merged from that first Hastati unit. Thus, on retrain, you will lose about 50% of the veterency on the 40 new men you get into your units. In a unit of 161, 20 is 1/8th of the unit, so if both Hastati units had 2 gold chevrons (8 experience), then they will lose one or possibly more chevrons, since the game likes to round up against you.

Keep in mind that if you have merged one of your units with multiple other units, then the experience gets broken down even more and your unit's experience will be punished even more on retrain. So, merging them will multiple units is bad if you want to keep their veterncy.

Well, these are the results I've worked out from my experience. If there are too many numbers in here to understand, then basically just remember this: if you want to keep your unit's veterency, then never, ever merge it with any other unit, ever.

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Originally Posted by IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer

Second, I've noticed that retraining units has a very inconsistent effect on what happens to their veterency. I've had a gold-chevroned unit fall down to brown or even bronze when I retrained it. I've noticed that if you merge units and then retrain them, those always lose exp. For example, I have three depleted units of Hastati. I take one unit and drop them into the other two, putting them both at full strength but leaving the third severely understrength. When I retrain the third, it loses almost all exp it had.

Even when I don't merge, sometimes my units lose exp on retrain. For example, one of my Lanceari units was depleted down to 21 men (from 100) after many years on the road. It had 3 brown chevrons (6 experience), and on retrain it fell down to 2 bronze chevrons (2 experience) despite never merging it with anything. I don't really know why this happens, seems to be the game just getting confused. It's not restricted to units what are severely depleted, either. One of my Liby-pheonician cavalry units had 1 gold chevron (7 experience). It had about 80 men in the unit, and on retrain it fell down to two brown chevrons (5 experience). I was pretty peeved since it didn't make any sense - I hadn't merged it with anything - but it wasn't anything that a battle or two against the Romans couldn't restore. I...just wish I understand a bit better why the game decides to subtract experience from non-merged units and why it doesn't....

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Well, retraining is working properly in your EB installation, then - you don't have the bug. Depleted units that retrain SHOULD lose experience.

Your Liby-Phonecian cavalry, with 80 men, got 20 new recruits, meaning you should lose one-fifth of the unit's experience. 7 experience divided by 5 times 4 equals 5.6 - so there's your 5 experience for the retrained unit. And as for your severely understrength unit of Hastati, well, if it had say 7 experience but was down to 23 men, then when retrained and back to its full strength of 160 men, only 1/7th of those men will be experienced - so the unit will only have 1 experience after retraining.

Nah, I don't have the, uhh... "bug." I just retrained two units of Gldgmtk that were at half strength and 2 gold chevrons, and they still have 2 gold chevrons.

It's not a bug anyway, it's a feature. The game is meant to keep experience on retrained units. It's one of those changes between Medieval 1 and Rome that they introduced to make the game "easier" to understand for newer players. Medieval 2 has the same veterency system - in fact in that game even merged units retrain with full experience. Seeing as Medieval 2 not only kept this system but expanded on it, this is obviously a feature intended to be in the game.

Also, those Liby Pheonicians lost experience due to the weird system Rome uses, as I described above in excruciating detail after an edit.

I think it unlikely that the game remembers where the individual soldiers in a unit came from. Where (or why?) should this data be stored? Personally, I wonder if the strange results of retraining are caused because the newly-added soldiers "inherit" the experience of their predecessors. From a programming point of view, it's unlikely that the strategic engine works with individual soldiers. The battle engine does, but on the strategic map the individual values are not important. The experience values of individual soldiers are stored in a table (together with their status: alive or dead) that represents the unit to the strategic engine. When a unit is retrained, soldier-entries are changed from "dead" to "alive" until the unit's original size is restored. My hypothesis is that the programmers forgot to have the "revived" soldiers' experience changed to zero.

This would explain why retrained troops do not have zero experience (they "inherit" the experience of their predecessor), but don't always match the average experience of the unit either (the inexperienced soldiers in a unit are more likely to die, so retrained soldiers are more likely to have slightly lower experience). I have no idea how to test this, though.

You're right Ludens, though you basically said what I wanted to say except much better. I simplified a bit too much, I suppose.

Still, I'm quite sure nobody forgot to have the value changed to zero. The game is supposed to do this.

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Originally Posted by Paltmull

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

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I played EB a lot and I know how units from rebelling cities look like.
Units from rebelling have, at least in my game, most of the time level 2 weapon and level 3 armor upgrade, the same or nearly the same experience and slaves are often part of this armies. I'm quite sure that the unis I meant where no rebells.

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

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Originally Posted by IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer

Still, I'm quite sure nobody forgot to have the value changed to zero. The game is supposed to do this.

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It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

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Originally Posted by Ca Putt

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

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That would be a way of putting, but it's more accurate to say that the individual soldiers do not exist on the campaign map. On the map, a unit is a table of, say, 300 by 3, with every row representing a soldier. The first column would be an ID number for the battle engine; the second a binary value indicating whether he's dead or alive; and the third his experience. (Obviously, a unit would contain other parameters besides the table to indicate unit type, upgrades, etc.) This table is used by the battle-engine to construct the unit on the battlefield; once the battle is over the battle-engine will pass information to the campaign-engine so that it can update the values in the unit-table. The rows of the unit-table that now belong to dead soldiers do not get deleted: they take up very little space, and constantly changing the memory allocation of a table is a waste of CPU time. Instead, the second value is simply set to "dead". When the unit is retrained, this value is changed to "alive" again. Merging most likely occurs through a different programming routine that also copies the experience values from the table of the donor unit.

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It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

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True enough, but it does have an affect on game difficulty insofar as new players to the series might get mad if their beloved companions are punished for being restored to full, as was the case in Medieval 1 and valor.

Remember that this same system exists in Medieval 2, and it is far more consistent and polished in that game. I'm guessing the veterency system in Rome was just one of those "unfinished" parts of a rushed product, since it seems every CA game since Medieval 1 has been a rushed product with several incomplete features. I can definitely say that it is supposed to be this way in these games, and it is not a bug or a programming mistake. Incomplete programming, maybe.

As for your explanation of how retraining works, sounds sensible to me. It mostly matches what I've seen from the game, however inconsistent it may be,

So basically to sum up, in most situations if you want to be more "realistic" you'd merge in order to reduce experience but there is a case to be made for being able to retrain to some extent perhaps in major cities since retraining does not mix units but simple turns dead ones in to live ones at the exp. level they had when they died?