Unit experience

[Dubius Cato]

"Hello people. I have started my first EB campaign as Carthage and fought 3 major battles. Some of my units have managed to get 'experience bars' and others haven't. However, over the course of the 3 battles there is no rhyme or reason to suggest how a unit achieves an experience bar. It just seems so random.

What factors/variables does the game take into account to compute for experience?

Experience is given for kills. Kills in battle gives more than kills of routing enemies. I think it is calculated for each individual soldier, because a battle can cause negative experience, when the highly skilled soldiers are killed. The experience you see is therefore a median. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I can't explain the negative experience in any other way.

The life expectancy of soldiers is often pretty low. The reason why it can still rise is probably that experienced soldiers have a lower probability to die because of their higher defense skill, and in addition will more likely kill their opponents on the field before they get a spear between the ribs due to the higher offense. Plus, by killing more quickly they can "save" their raw recruit comrades from having to engage another enemy soldier, and that heightens their own survival probability and lets them keep their own lower experience they gained. Would be cool if you could follow the career of individual soldiers, if only in the save game.

The best way to train up units is to give them lots of lower level cannonfodder to train under battlefield conditions, for example let your elite heavy infantry kill many of those levy hoplites or something. Low death rate, high kill rate and experience.

That would mean that when you retrain a unit, the new recruits are not all automatically trained to the highest level, but only to a level below the mean value, in order to keep the mean unchanged. On the other hand, maybe the higher skilled soldiers are "brought down" to the mean, and the newcomers brought up.

Also I have merged fresh units to the depleted ones which understandably lowers the experience of the unit depending on the amount of new additions merged. Does this also impact on a units better armour and weapons icons?

Good question. Maybe equipment bonuses are calculated for each individual too? Don't know.

[PersianFire]

"Thank you Dubious Cato. i hope someone else will be able to confirm what you said and would be able to answer teh query in relation to weapon and armour icons."