Scrubbing the gene pool.

In game we run into a few odd … features. One of them is that if you move troops from a more experienced unit to a less experienced unit, the average experience of both units tends to go up. As an example, if I have a unit of mailed knights with 6 experience and its at its full strength of 40, I can use it to top off a unit of mailed knights with 0 experience and 33 knights. This may raise the experience of either or both units.

Another feature that we run into is that a settlement with a large population needs a large garrison to keep happy and loyal. In game the main use for population is to meet thresholds for improving the settlement, thus allowing us to improve the buildings within. Once you’ve maxed out the city/fortress size, population is more of a detriment than a benefit.

Because of these two facts I’ve found that the best ways to control an empire while staying profitable is plague and riots. They both do the same thing, but riots are easier to arrange and resolve. As such, I’ll give you a little help with how to use them to better manage your empire.

For this example I will use Milan as the faction and Jerusalem as the city in question. In Jerusalem I have 6 units of crossbow militia with 6,3,3,0,0,0 as their respective experience levels and full strengths of 60. The city has a population of 30,000 and 80% loyalty at a low tax level. What I will do is up the tax level to very high, thus both dropping loyalty to about 25% and giving it a population growth of -1.5%. The next turn I start having riots that eat up about 5,000 citizens and cut each unit down to 54 troops.

I then combined the units and notice that the experience levels are 6,3,3,1,1,1 with one unit of crossbow militia that needs to be fixed. That unit, the 6 experience unit, is the one I used to top off the others and it is down to 24 troops. I also move what ever I need to give me 100% loyalty when I drop taxes, thus causing the city to no longer be rioting. I also have several building that are damage.

If I do this properly, I will get the city to riot when a building is just getting finished, thus allowing me to immediately repair all of the damaged buildings. I should also be able to put the tax rate up to normal as I’ve got less than 25,000 citizens.

If I do this a few more times I should be able to get the population down to a manageable 12,000 plus I should be able to get those crossbow units that started with 0 experience up to level 2. If I am lucky, when I move troops out of the level 6 unit I may get it up to level 7.

Plague is similar in how it reduces your population and troop strengths and should be used as a way of improving your troops. It doesn’t have the same damage to structures as a riot, but it lasts longer, doesn’t have a chance of revolt, and can’t be “Turned off” the same way when you need to produce combat troops.

The entire goal of this trick is to take advantage of how the game handles population. The added benefit of how it handles replacements in an experienced unit is an added benefit. If you do this after you’ve maxed out the size of cities you should be able to greatly reduce the number of troops required to maintain order in your empire, thus freeing up cash and troops for expansion.

Just a note: If you put buildings that need repairing in the queue ahead of whatever you're building at the moment, it still progresses normally. You don't need to wait for your current project to finish at all, just move it to the "end" of the queue. Since repairs take "0 turns" they finish on the next turn all at once, but the normal multi-turn construction isn't slowed down in the slightest.

This is a very interesting idea you have here for unit training, and sounds more efficient than repeatedly causing a settlement to rebel for purposes of making a stack to wear down your army and gain experience by killing. You keep tax income at all times.

And you can use it pretty much everywhere...

I might try this myself, actually.

Although, you'd want to make sure whatever city you're doing this with has plenty of spies, so the AI doesn't push your public order down beyond the threshold and you get kicked out of the city.

I've never had problems keeping my population happy or the population of a city, I have had a city of 40k + without any problems, as long as the tax rate is very low they don't complain, and with a normal garrison (all free upkeep units filled) why should they? anyway this has been my experience, but good avice for those that are.

Durallan

Part of my goal is to get Jerulalem up to Very High tax and keep it there with little or no population growth. I've got a couple 30+K cities that are in the 120%+ happiness club even with very high taxes. This tends to make it easier.

Mordon,

How do you move the current construction to the end of the queue? I'm guessing you take it out of the queue, add in the repairs, then put it back in?

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

Durallan

Mordon,

How do you move the current construction to the end of the queue? I'm guessing you take it out of the queue, add in the repairs, then put it back in?

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I too am interested in knowing that...

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Originally Posted by Durallan

I've never had problems keeping my population happy or the population of a city, I have had a city of 40k + without any problems, as long as the tax rate is very low they don't complain, and with a normal garrison (all free upkeep units filled) why should they? anyway this has been my experience, but good avice for those that are.

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I concur with this, the only time i ever actually need to manage population in a city, is when its ridiculously far away from my capitol, and usually that situation is solved by adding some town halls/barracks line and of course, relocating my capitol to a central position. Although i will admit, if i have some extra cheap slots militia (like crossbows that cost 100 each a turn) i alternatively get that extra unit or two to increase overall income from their added PO garrison effect.

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

Mordon,

How do you move the current construction to the end of the queue? I'm guessing you take it out of the queue, add in the repairs, then put it back in?

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The way I do it is fairly simple. First, go to the repair tab and simply add as many damaged buildings as you can fit into the queue without removing whatever your building new.

Then just drag and drop either the brand new structure to the end of the queue, or the last damaged building in the queue to the front, so its like this:

DDDDB
(D=damaged building, B=brand new building)

Since damaged buildings require 0 turns to fix they finish and the new building continues or finishes normally depending on how much time is left.

The only time this doesn't work is if you can't afford all the repairs. The under-construction building has to wait until the stuff in front of it is finished before it can be worked on again, so even though repairs are instant, if they can't be paid for they sit in the queue until they can be.

I find this very useful when acquiring new territories from Crusades and such, so I can repair any damaged buildings and get the small church built, in one turn.

Also, you can do this and start other brand new buildings, and save the progress. As long as the partially completed building remains in the queue, the work is saved and no money or time is lost. When its turn comes in the queue again work picks up where it was left off. Only items removed from the queue entirely are cancelled, remaining work money refunded etc. I've done this a few times when... "political climate change" means ballista towers are more prudent than a coaching house:sweatdrop:

Hope this helps.

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

Part of my goal is to get Jerulalem up to Very High tax and keep it there with little or no population growth. I've got a couple 30+K cities that are in the 120%+ happiness club even with very high taxes. This tends to make it easier.

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It'll be very interesting to see if you can do this, very high tax rate has some significant order penalties. I've had huge cities chocked with a full sized stack of the biggest sized units (I play on huge) I can get with low tax rates, and still had sub-100 order with absolutely everything built. I doubt you'll be able to maintain this goal without making the city your capital and/or moving your capital very close to it. Let us know how it works out.

Edit - I don't use governors at all, this may be a big factory. /shrug

Whacker,

On normal size, I had no problems when I got the population down to about 12K. For some reason the people in Jerusalem like to increase this number regardless of what I do, so I've come to the conclusion that I'll have to keep scrubbing the pool over there from time to time. ~:pimp:

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

Durallan

Part of my goal is to get Jerulalem up to Very High tax and keep it there with little or no population growth. I've got a couple 30+K cities that are in the 120%+ happiness club even with very high taxes. This tends to make it easier.
...

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Don't know about Jerusalem, but I had Constantinople at 68000 and growing all at very high tax rate and with a green face. Granted, it was my capital with a 10 - chiv governor and about a dozen garrison units, and yes, once the governor dies there will be hell to pay, but as of right now the city reaps in tremendous revenue.

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

For this example I will use Milan as the faction and Jerusalem as the city in question. In Jerusalem I have 6 units of crossbow militia with 6,3,3,0,0,0 as their respective experience levels and full strengths of 60. The city has a population of 30,000 and 80% loyalty at a low tax level. What I will do is up the tax level to very high, thus both dropping loyalty to about 25% and giving it a population growth of -1.5%. The next turn I start having riots that eat up about 5,000 citizens and cut each unit down to 54 troops.

I then combined the units and notice that the experience levels are 6,3,3,1,1,1 with one unit of crossbow militia that needs to be fixed. That unit, the 6 experience unit, is the one I used to top off the others and it is down to 24 troops. I also move what ever I need to give me 100% loyalty when I drop taxes, thus causing the city to no longer be rioting. I also have several building that are damage.

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That makes sense, assumming that they haven't changed the way units work since Shogun Totalwar.

Each of the units involved contained 60 men so assuming that all these men began with a uniform level of experience you started with 60x6 120x3 and 180x0. After the riot you had 54x6 108x3 and 162x0. When you combined the units you moved 6x6 expereince troops into the inexpereinced units which now contained 54x0 + 6x6 troops. The average expereince of the unit was therefore 0.6 which rounded to the nearest whole number made them an expereince 1 unit.

Likewise if you now recruit 36 inexpereince troops to replace the men you moved from the experience 6 unit you should find that its experience drops as it now contains 24x6 + 36x0 men. By my reckoning it should drop to about experience 2, or possible 3 depending on whether the routine always rounds up.

Incidently, the same situation applies with Armour and Weapons. If you move men with high quality armour and weapons into unit without them, the unit card will display the average quality of the weapon and armour in use by the men of the unit. However, in combat each individual man performs according the armour weapons and expereince he personally has, thus men lacking the high quality armour will die faster than those wearing the good stuff.

This being the case your expliot should not work, because everytime the city riots you will be losing expereinced men and replacing them with more and more inexperienced ones. It might look like its working due to the rounding up of averages but overall the number of expereinced men in your army is being reduced. That is unless retraining an expereince 6 unit replaces losses with men of the same expereince as the initial cadre. It never used to in STW, if I remember rightly units always lost expereince when they were retrained, but they may have changed it in MTW2.

I usually just do the "roving army of low upkeep units with a priest as a general/pull the garrison out, set taxes to VH, and exterminate the dumb bastards when they rebel) method. It's less time consuming.

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CyanCentaur,

What size units do you use? I'm guessing that how happy the people are is, to an extend, dependant on the number of troops, not the number of units. As such the smaller the unit size, the more troops you need to keep them happy.

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Originally Posted by John_Longarrow

I'm guessing that how happy the people are is, to an extend, dependant on the number of troops, not the number of units. As such the smaller the unit size, the more troops you need to keep them happy.

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If MTW2 follows similiar mechanics to RTW, then the game automatically scales based on what unit size you use. In other words, when using small unit sizes, the game will automatically give your troops a bonus so that their garrison value is larger. Likewise on huge, you won't get the same "bang for the buck", so it pretty much evens out.

Also forgot to mention, I also play using the BigMap map, so my cities tend to develop distance to capital penalties quite early on. I think this finally maxes out out though after a certain range though.

On Experience: I know that at least up to MTW experience is recorded for every single soldier (if you´ve got logs turned on, you can read battle logs which show what happened to each and every single soldier in a battle), but what´s displayed ingame is an average. So whenever you retrain a unit in MTW, its average experience gets diluted, but it keeps its high-experience members. Actually, it can happen that even a few unlucky losses dramatically lower the unit´s experience, if its veterans are killed.
I don´t know whether this still is the case in RTW and M2TW, though.

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Originally Posted by CyanCentaur

In MTW2, replacements are added at the experience level of the unit. For example, suppose a halberd unit is reduced to a single triple gold chevron man. Retrain that one-man "unit" and you get 59 triple gold chevron replacements (woo hoo!)

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In that case you have the makings of a perfect expliot.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't possible in STW. I can certainly recall expereince levels of units falling and having to constantly explain to people on the STW forum why this was happening.

However, from memory I can't even remember if it was possible to retrain units in STW, I think all you could do was combine units until you had a free army slot and them build a new unit.

Which thinking about it was a much better system with hindsight, and probably more realistic for the period depicted.

However, I still stand by my analysis of whats happening. Unless CA have made major changes to their unit database the level 6 expereince troops that John in transferring to his level 0 units are just standing there amongst the nooby soldiers as replacements for the ones killed in the riots.

The real problem is that he is able to replace them with similarly expereince men directly from the barracks.

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Originally Posted by Ciaran

On Experience: I know that at least up to MTW experience is recorded for every single soldier (if you´ve got logs turned on, you can read battle logs which show what happened to each and every single soldier in a battle), but what´s displayed ingame is an average. So whenever you retrain a unit in MTW, its average experience gets diluted, but it keeps its high-experience members. Actually, it can happen that even a few unlucky losses dramatically lower the unit´s experience, if its veterans are killed.
I don´t know whether this still is the case in RTW and M2TW, though.

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From what cyanCentaur has just said above it sounds like that whole concept has been screwed up in MTW2 and you now magically get highly expereinced troops to replace your losses.

John has already discovered one expliot for this and I'm sure now we realise what CA have done there will be a lot more variations to fiddle the books forthcoming.

Another one for the bug list, in my opinion.

It's absolutely true that units train to the experience level of remnants. It's obviously easy to test, just grind a unit down ('Charge' Cavalry seem to work best because you can charge them repeatedly to get kills, and leave them in melee to get them killed) and retrain it. Not really an exploit, just an odd decision on the developer's part IMHO. Don't abuse it and it won't change your game.

Ramses II

Does anyone know the actual effects of higher experience units? In RTW this added extra attack/defence/ranged attack points, and these would display on the unit, along with extra morale, which does not.

Do we still get all these things - do veteran missile units have more accuracy or more armor penetration than vanilla ones - or is it really just a morale bonus?

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Originally Posted by Ramses II CP

Not really an exploit, just an odd decision on the developer's part IMHO. Don't abuse it and it won't change your game.

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But its still wrong. I wonder when they changed it and why.

Possibly an oversight more than a decision. They changed it back in RTW, caused a big outcry back then too.

But in M2TW the effects of XP have been toned down a lot, so it evens out in the end I suppose - MTW ragtag bands of old time experts at not dying were mondo powerfull but superhard to train, M2TW veteran units are easier to wind up with yet are not wargods.
Frankly, I don't think it's that wrong. Using veterans as training instructors, or having grizzled old vets teach the new guys a thing or two before they taste carnage for the first time, sort of thing ? Of course, you could always train new units to mix with the old ones instead of retraining the old ones, then retrain the depleted green unit, if you're OUTRAGED by the way CA DUMBED THE GAME DOWN and all that.

(damn, you're Didz, not Puzz3D. Forget that last part then :sweatdrop: :clown:)

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Originally Posted by Kobal2fr

Frankly, I don't think it's that wrong. Using veterans as training instructors, or having grizzled old vets teach the new guys a thing or two before they taste carnage for the first time, sort of thing ?

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I thought that was the whole point about the building upgrades that increase base expereince levels. This new revelation sort of makes that whole game concept redundant. All you need to do is extract one battle hardened unit from your army and use it as a cadre for all future builds and you can clone infinite super warriors. Move a depleted unit back to base transfer the newly cloned super-warriors into it and then brew a fresh batch.

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Originally Posted by Kobal2fr

Of course, you could always train new units to mix with the old ones instead of retraining the old ones, then retrain the depleted green unit, if you're OUTRAGED by the way CA DUMBED THE GAME DOWN and all that.

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Yep! that would be the correct thing to do, but basically it can work either way.

So you still get the experience dilution effect when you merge a veteran with a rookie unit...
Interesting. You can either move your high-experienced depleted troop back from the frontline to retrain it, and keep its experience, or you can keep training greens to merge with the veterans, who can stay at the frontlines all the time. If you look at it from that angle, it´s not that bad a choice to handle things.
Of course, due to the absence of AoRs this choice is a lot less crucial, since you can retrain your troops in any place which has the required buildings.

For the whole "Gaining Experience" thing, I found out about it from this board. I don't remember the post, but it wan't too long ago that I read it. I'm also playing with Vanilla 1.2

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Originally Posted by Ciaran

You can either move your high-experienced depleted troop back from the frontline to retrain it, and keep its experience, or you can keep training greens to merge with the veterans, who can stay at the frontlines all the time. If you look at it from that angle, it´s not that bad a choice to handle things.

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Not sure about that, in the past it would have made no difference. But now that John has pointed out the changes made in the retraining process it would make more sense to withdraw your elite units to a city for retraining rather than merging them with less experenced units.

In fact the best option would be to use the Elite units as ferries to move highly trained troops to from cities to replace the inexpereinced ones lost at front. That would constantly increase the expereince of your frontline troops, over and above what expereince they had earned in battle.

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