Automatic battles = faster XP gain?

[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)