I'm a long time Total War veteran, and given a coupla weeks i can whoop the hell out of the AI, but man, on VH battle difficulty i feel like i'm fighting Spartans straight out of 300, even lowly firelock citizens are taking it to my grenadiers. Every victory is phyrric with horrific losses on my side. Hell ideally to play VH/VH campaign i'm vastly better off just autoresolveing every battle cuz its sad, but the AI does better than me in teh loss department when it was ALWAYS the opposite in earlier titles. Spam troops like crazy with my crazy economy and auto resolve to victory

Cant outshoot them (plain jane militia outshooting my fire by rank line infantry), melee they just straight up own me (i can outnumber their light cav with my heavies and hitting them from all sides but they still inflict equivalent casualties), and their cav just ROLLS right over my troops even when i'm in square proceeding to sabre down everyone in sight (my cav even when charging them from behind stalls after impact and start dropping like flies in the melee). So if anyone has any fool proof tips to consistently win on VH battles plz feel free to educate me. And yes, i tried using mass artillery tactics, but the comp just straight up charges and weathers the canister shots without batting an eye. Hell and even with a single arty unit they tag my ass with higher frequency even when i have 4 or 6 units shooting back.

So in interests of having fun, rather than using every single gamey tactic i know to win, i just play on hard where i can fight them using standard tactics. Sure they're still juiced up pretty good, but at least i can beat em without gruesome casualties.

Now comes my topic question. How does one XP up their units in a reasonable manner? Without the retrain bug, raw recruit replacements will destroy whatever collected experience you have in a unit, so now i never replenish except by merging battered same xp units. Also i notice the AI has the tendency to gun after my "elites" or higher xp units, so while i savage them with my newbs, my veterans get torn to shreds destroying whatever hope i have in fielding a battle hardened army. I roleplay since blitz games are boring, i like fighting big battles, however these big fights tend to kill alot of the guys i'm trying to xp up. Small fights are good where i can overwhelm a coupla units with little loss, but the AI is acting too chicken to raid my territories anymore.

I hear folks having 5 xp units and frankly i'm jealous as hell. Highest i've ever gotten so far is 3 xp, and in EVERY battle the AI starts gunning after em even to the detriment of winning the battle forcing me to howl in anger even as i win while losing half of those precious high xp soldiers. They raelly need to patch it where it isn't too hard to get 1-2 xp and after that making it a helluva lot harder. I mean whats teh point of having 9 xp levels if its damn near impossible to get to 6 xp without anal retentive gameplay.

Geeze i miss being able to recruit 7 chevron Knight Hospitallers