Rapid replenishment could be bad news for a veteran army

One of the best improvements in gameplay of the TW series is the Replenishment mechanism, which allows a damaged unit to automatically come back to full strength with time. Of course, the replenishing men are not as experienced as the veterans. Actually, from time to time we see a reduction of unit experience. This article is about how to avoid it.

I read that the replenishing individuals carry half of the experience of the original unit. Though I have no way to absolutely verify it, experience has not indicated otherwise. I also know that when two units combine, the decimal places of the averaged experience are rounded up if it is 0.5 or higher, or rounded down if it is less than 0.5. There is a huge exploit of that to level up units for free, but we will not discuss it here.

Let's have an example of how we could lose experience during replenishment.

Damage unit: 90/120 Bow Ashigaru, experience 6
Replenish +30, experience 3.

Suppose the replenishment is good and the unit is back to full 120 men in one season, we will get a unit with an experience of:

(90x6 + 30x3)/120 = 5.25

Unfortunately, the .25 is rounded down, and our replenished unit will become experience 5, which is lower than the original.

There are two ways to avoid the loss of experience. One is to figure out exactly how many men you can afford to lose for each unit, and try not to let them get hurt beyond that point in a battle. Even if they do lose too many men, you can do something to fix that post-battle. We will talk about an example of that soon.

Here comes a table of how many men you need to maintain in a damaged unit so they do not lose EXP - IF the replenishment was completed in just one season.

EXP 0: Minimum 0/120 (Damage: 100.0%)
EXP 1: Minimum 0/120 (Damage: 100.0%)
EXP 2: Minimum 60/120 (Damage: 50.0%)
EXP 3: Minimum 60/120 (Damage: 50.0%)
EXP 4: Minimum 90/120 (Damage: 25.0%)
EXP 5: Minimum 90/120 (Damage: 25.0%)
EXP 6: Minimum: 100/120 (Damage 16.7%)
EXP 7: Minimum: 100/120 (Damage 16.7%)
EXP 8: Minimum: 105/120 (Damage 12.5%)
EXP 9: Minimum: 105/120 (Damage 12.5%)

As you can see, the higher the experience, the more men you need to keep alive to keep the EXP level. So what if you accidently go over it?

You can still combine units and sacrifice another unit. Let's have an example.

Your EXP 8 unit now has 90 men. If you don't do anything and allow them to replenish to full, they will become EXP 7 next season. But if we manually replnish this unit with, say, an EXP 6 unit with 110 men left, your EXP 8 unit will be:

(8x90 + 6x30)/120 = 7.5 - rounded up to 8!

But then your EXP 6 unit will only have 80 men left. So you will have to help them or they will become level 5 later.

Keep watching individual units create a lot of trouble. Fortunately, there is one simple alternative: slow down replenishment.

Back to the first example, we have a EXP 6 Bow Ashigaru unit with 90/120 men. If this unit is moved to a province with lower replenishment efficiency, say with +15 per season, we will get:

Season 1: (90x6 + 15x3)/105 = 5.57 -> rounded up to 6
Season 2: (105x6 + 15x3)/120 = 5.63 -> rounded up to 6

No loss of EXP! So how do we slow down replenishment? Two simple ways:

(1) Avoid high-level castle.
(2) Avoid high-level road.

If you want to defend a front-line province and you prefer to fight field battles as an ambusher (in my personal experience, field attack is 10 times easier to avoid losses than castle defence, but that requires a lot of knowledge on how the AI behaves and exploit its predictability), do not build a high-level castle or a high-level road.

But what if we are the invader? We might not have full control over the infrastructure. Fortunately, we have a choice of whether to repair a castle immediately, or later. Normally we want to repair ASAP so we can continue the invasion. But in extraordinary circumstances, such as the loss of EXP of your most elite army, that you might want to delay the repair of the castle by a season or two.

Of course, personally I think the best way is to simply ignore unit experiences. Your army is good enough if they can win every battle easily. EXP 0 or 9 does not matter. So why did I write this up anyway? :sweatdrop: