Retraining "Dilution"

[gollum]

Originally posted by Zild
Well I guess it makes sense in some ways. Existing survivors can impart their experiences upon new recruits, teaching them the little tricks that the official training program might shun.

Imo it makes sense to impart the valor of the survivors to the new recruits as in the old games - the more new recruits you have the more the valor is dilluted. Having more valor than the survivors for a whole unit of new recruits isn't exactly realistic.

Perhaps this was part of the reason for changing the term from "valour" to "experience.

Or maybe they wanted a more universally recognizable term - in the older games "experience" was named in a fashion that was relevant to the perception of experience/battle ability in society; honour in STW, valour in MTW. In Rome and onwards though it gets to be called "experience" and represented by "chevrons" which are irrelevant within the historical context afaik unlike the predecessors.

It seems to me that it has to do with accessibility and marketing.

I do not see it as an exploit in terms of realism, but I do wonder why the AI makes little use of the method. (To be honest, I thought the AI was keen on retraining...)

It is actually a huge exploit that tips the scales significantly towards the player; using massretrain you can conquer significant parts of the map without ever having to spend the recruitment money for units; the AI does not retrain so he always ends up paying them - if you count them in the long run as well as the recruiting times they add up to a very significant advantage for the player in terms of cost and time.