Historically accurate retrain

[Cambyses]

Retraining may be ahistorical in some ways, but then so are many other aspects of the engine. To me it all fits together quite neatly in the bigger picture.

Leaving Rome aside, how many armies really had a fixed value for the number of troops in a unit for example. A German war band wouldnt have a limit of troops that it could start with, but would probably be very flexible, sometimes having far more or far less of a particlular type of warrior - depending on who was available. In EB you cant for example merge Germanic spearmen into a large body of 600 warriors to hold a deeper / more resilient line, or split it into multiple smaller units in order to create a more effective ambush. Instead you must have 2 or 3 units of 240 men standing next to each other.

Moreover in "real" warfare soldiers often moved from one category of troops to another during a campaign. look at the way Hannibal's troops rearmed during his Italian War for example.

I could also mention that aside from some rare examples it was unusual to have such crushing losses as are usually experience in EB.

All in all, personally, I see retraining as being part of the way different aspects of the engine relate to each other. A good commander would bring in reinforcements from all sort of different ways in order to keep an army at decent strength. Whether he did this by effectively promoting existing troops to better equipment, hiring large numbers of mercenaries, bribing other tribes to join him, pressganging locals into a militia - or by a combination of the abobe is all in the details. The way I represent this in EB is by retraining a unit when it becomes too weak to be effective on the battlefield any longer.

The argument re the AI is quite a convincing one. However without force diplomacy and on VH/H difficulty, things tend to balance out anyway, in my experience.