Automatic battles = faster XP gain?

[Maestro Ugo]

Hello everybody!

I have been lurking for some time, and finally decided to post in this well-behaved forum. Anyway, I play EB 1.2 on ALX.exe with MINImod and the City mod installed on VH/M. Now, I rarely automate land battles and only do it in rear occasions when my "guardian" army is fighting an obviously weaker Eleutheroi band inside my lands, or when I assault a city with only a FM guarding it, and just don't want to bother with it. Anyway, it seems to me that in these occasions units gain experience (chevrons) quicker than in the battles "on" manual. Is it just me, or is there something in this observation? I started sending a fresh, newly assembled army on automatic Eleutheroi chase for a few years before I send them to real battle.

Anyway, am I going crazy, or have you also noticed this?

[Chris1959]

Yes the experience gained in an auto-calc battle is spread amongst all troops invoved. The main way to gain experience is to actually kill the enemy, hence in manual battles missle troops and cavalry experience often rises a lot faster than melee infantry as they actually kill more enemy.
Some experience is gained by all troops by simply being in the battle but I believe it is only a small amount.

[Macilrille]

Congrats on the post, we are glad to meet you. Only by active participation can we keep The Guild alive. Well-behaved? Yes, most of the time, there has been the occasional straying from the path of politeness and respect, but it is rare and these days Ludens keeps it well in check. I like to believe that just as EB is better than other mods, so are the players, but that may be delusion ;-)

Anyway, for your question; the answer is yes. It is a well known effect that most of us here know. I even admit to sometimes exploit it when AS/Ptol/SPQR is spamming me with fullstacks or the XXX-tieth small Eleutheroi stack pops up in Germany (I prefer to play Rome or Sweboz) that I can easily and boringly defeat on Manual but that the Autoresolve will loose for me, I use Auto_win to get some chevrons. Call it a cheat if you want, you take greater losses...

Anyway, you are not alone.

[satalexton]

always a dilema, that. Auto_win or not, the attrition's always far more than a manual battle. =/

[seienchin]

I never use autowin, but autocalc battles tend to give me more chevrons

[Maestro Ugo]

I never use autowin, but autocalc battles tend to give me more chevrons

Me to. What does autowin actually do? And how ethical is to use something called "autowin"? Is that considered cheating?

[Macilrille]

It is a cheat using the Console to tell the engine to win an autoresolved battle for you. You take more losses and get more chevrons.

My game runs slowly though, so rather than spending 30+ minutes on my 50th+ identical battle against one of those three or Eleutheroi... sometimes I cannot be bothered and Auto_win them. You only do it if you knew for certain that you will win manually. But it is essentially a cheat.

[Brave Brave Sir Robin]

I use it often for late game sieges because my game tends to crash any year past 230 involving a siege and unless its a huge garrison, I use auto_win knowing that I will win.

[satalexton]

siege are fun IMO, the idea is to garrison with archers and slingers. You either whittle them down enough to retreat, or they breach your walls and slaughter your men. Helps if you can set their towers on fire.

[antisocialmunky]

Your FMS tend to not die in hilarious and stupid ways also.

[vartan]

Your FMS tend to not die in hilarious and stupid ways also.

Warm Welcome OP. Agreed anti. FM won't die as much, I notice. I notice too experience equally distributed, not only to specific units.

[Aram]

Units do indeed seem to gain more experience when battles are resolved automatically, in my limited experience. I am probably in the minority in strongly preferring the gameplay in the campaign map over manually fighting battles (only in part because of loading time). I resolve battles automatically unless I am under the impression that it will be a truly epic and challenging battle, or one that will turn the tide of a conflict with an enemy.

[Olaf The Great]

It's fun to see heavy Kataphraktoi kill half of an army, going from 1 chervon to 9.


Mmm! Sparkles!

[Ibrahim]

to me it doesn't matter; all my units are silver in an army by the time I finish my 3rd campaign.

that's mostly because all my soldiers are used in battle, I use Alex.exe, whose AI trains bigger armies, and I'm a masochist who plays on very hard campaign difficulty (moderate battle of course).

Automatic though normally adds XP more evenlym and numerously than the manual performance of the battle by the average human. that's because humans tend to usually focus on one or two of the three arms in an army, leaving the rest with few kills. and the human usually has enough of his/her leaning arms to spread the kills out, slowing their XP gain somewhat (but its still quite quick).


@ Maestro Ugo: the autowin isn't really "unethical" ifyou use it on a battle you'd win if you played manually.

[Macilrille]

Ibrahim, my Roman campaign on VH/M saw me fight 3-5 battles against fullstack Luso and Pontos+AS armies with two main armies. Often with 1-3 Heroic each turn, yet in most of these only 1-3 units would gain XP, and often not the ones who did the hardest fighting. Sometimes the logic of it puzzles me.

Toxotai Kretakoi with 1-3 gold chevrons kick proverbial though...

[Cambyses]

Experience seems to accrue fastest on units that take the most damage in my experience. Partly I imagine because they are involved more in the fighting, but my suspicion is that the experience is spread accross the survivors of a unit after the battle, so the fewer the survivors, the greater the exp gain :)

As autocalc makes greater casualties than a human would suffer, the exp is likely higher for that reason in addition to the others mentioned above. Also, its worth knowing that the casualties are taken first from the units at the front of the stack in autocalc. So if you have a particularly valuable unit thats a nightmare to retrain, its worth organising it into the back end of the stack before doing the autocalc. Although I guess that could be seen as an exploit.

With autowin, the autocalc formula does not take into account the human's superior ability to the AI and thus on standard autocalc loses you battles that you would win easily on manual, sometimes even when you have odds of 4-1 if you are taking mainly levies against a very experienced general and maybe one elite unit. In addition the formula weights certain units (such as elephants) very heavily and others much less than their true effetiveness is. For those of us who value our time, autowin has a very real purpose.

[woirble]

I also use auto_win for small battles that I would certainly have won if I had played them. Given that you actually suffer significantly heavier losses when you use autocalc, including losses from units you would have protected if you had played the battle, I don't consider it an exploit. Quite the opposite. You have to pay a price if you want to avoid battles that would be tedious to load and fight.

woirble

[Ibrahim]

Ibrahim, my Roman campaign on VH/M saw me fight 3-5 battles against fullstack Luso and Pontos+AS armies with two main armies. Often with 1-3 Heroic each turn, yet in most of these only 1-3 units would gain XP, and often not the ones who did the hardest fighting. Sometimes the logic of it puzzles me.

Toxotai Kretakoi with 1-3 gold chevrons kick proverbial though...

now that I just noticed; I must say that that makes no sense.

[Rahwana]

And I set my descr_strat files, on the pirate and brigand spawn value to 999 (and using BI), and I only had extremely rare eleutheroi random spawning..... (but once a really big stack of Polybian troops appear just near Roma in 172 BC)