Quick question regarding unit experience

[Beefy187]

I normally play on normal unit size. Im just wondering if you play on huge unit size, is it easier to gain experience compared to smaller unit sizes?

Cheers

[Arminius Germanicus]

an interesting question.

i just experience that building up elite units is quite hard in EB overall. it takes a damn long time for a unit to gain a chevron. and it seems, the more chevrons, the harder the next one is to get. it´s no big deal to train up a unit to two or even three silver chevrons, but the first golden chevron seems to take a very long time and a lot of kills to get to.

one thing that surely plays a role here would be, that for every loss on the battlefield, your XP will go down if you refill the unit from another one that is lower in rank. don´t know how big the difference is when you train it up instead.
overall unit size shoudn´t play a role here, since the distribution of XP should be relatively equal in small and large units.
allthough, in larger units you tend to loose more units per battle as casualties, so maybe there´s a difference in aquisition of XP.

how many kills does a unit have to score to gain a rank anyways? is it always the same number for each rank or do you need incrementally more kills for higher levels?

[QuintusSertorius]

Don't think it makes any difference, kills required simply scales with unit size.

[Beefy187]

Don't think it makes any difference, kills required simply scales with unit size.

True that.

It just made me curious how all the AAR games seems to have nice silver chevron army where im still stuck with bronze army in 237 BC.

Thanks for the answers

As for killing required per level im not sure. But as Pontus once I managed to bribe about 10 units of full gold chevron horse archer which was very cool until I met full stack of AS army full of archers

[Fondor_Yards]

Don't think so, I normally play on huge, and the times I've played on large here and normal at friend's I can't say I noticed a different in the time/kills it would take to get more experience. It probably is scaled like QuintusSertorius said. I know it takes longer for gain gold chevrons then bronze because a unit's experience should be the averaged experience of each man in the unit, so most of the kills normally go to the first and second rows. So they get all those kills, they hit gold chevrons to raise the overall. But to get a unit gold chevrons, all those freeloaders in the back rows need to get kills too. That's why in my experiences missile troops and cavalry gain experience faster, their kills get spread throughout the whole unit.

[Arminius Germanicus]

That's why in my experiences missile troops and cavalry gain experience faster, their kills get spread throughout the whole unit.

well, regarding missile units, i cannot agree. it takes a damn long time to get my archers up in experience actually. foremost because they kill quite little, thats why i am using them to chase down routing enemy units as often ans i can.

cavalry on the other hand does gain experience quite fast, especially if you use your units to regularly chase down whole routing enemy armies, slaughtering hundreds of soldiers before they can reach the rim of the map.

but even there it´s very hard to get them past 3 silver chevrons. up to that no problem - but past that VERY hard!

biggest problem here is of course, that only units that see lots of combat action will gain XP. but that usually means, they will suffer quite some losses. and those have then to be refilled with less experienced units, which will lower the overall XP of the unit, so you´ll be constantly struggling to get your XP up versus minimizing losses.
it´s really hard to try to become the best!

[Che Roriniho]

I've currently got a few silver chevron things, only to realise that, as I am Romani, and they are Bastarnisku, I cannot retrain them. ah well.
So, how do you 'refill' units, as opposed to just retraining them at a barracks.

[Swordmaster]

I've currently got a few silver chevron things, only to realise that, as I am Romani, and they are Bastarnisku, I cannot retrain them. ah well.
So, how do you 'refill' units, as opposed to just retraining them at a barracks.

You drop one unit on top of a depleted unit, or alternatively, you put them in the same stack and hit "," to merge them (and all other units in that stack).

[Fondor_Yards]

Arminius what archers are you using? If your using european archers, that would be why. Except for about 4 types of them, all western archers are giant steaming piles of shit. Eastern style archers are incredibly better. In my Getai campaign, my Komatai Agrianai just destroy everything in their way, and have the highest exp of all units in my army except for my HA.

The only way to 'refill' mercenary units is to merge them with another damaged unit of the same type, you can't retrain them. *Except for the mercs that some factions can normally train/retrain, but that's a different thing.*

[QuintusSertorius]

You drop one unit on top of a depleted unit, or alternatively, you put them in the same stack and hit "," to merge them (and all other units in that stack).

Didn't know you could do that. Maybe one of these days I should actually read the manual that came with RTW...

[||Lz3||]

actually I once read somewhere (I bealive something regarding vanilla rtw) that playing with huge unit size actually makes easier to gain chevrons , however they will deplete your cities faster

[Swordmaster]

Didn't know you could do that. Maybe one of these days I should actually read the manual that came with RTW...

All hotkeys are in the list that appears when you hit F1. I don't have a manual, actually.