retrain question and exe?

[QuintusSertorius]

See, that's what I thought but I also read that the new green units are mixed in with the veteran units and the experience chevron adjusted to the average.

No, this is what happens when you merge units. I'm fairly certain I've seen a unit depleted to under 10 men be restored to full, with no loss of experience, if you retrain.

With rtw.exe, the AI never retrains, so it's effectively an exploit in favour of the human player.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

I'm fairly certain I've seen a unit depleted to under 10 men be restored to full, with no loss of experience, if you retrain.

Yes, me too.

[Paltmull]

I've read about this retraining bug several times, but I can't rember it ever happening to me. When i retrain a unit, it always loses chevrons.

[AstroCat]

Just curious what .exe you are using?

[Ravenic]

I've seen both happen - a small and badly mauled but very veteran unit gets retrained and suddenly becomes a super-cohort of 200-some gold-chevron'd soldiers while at other times I've seen that small and badly mauled veteran unit get retrained and pretend that those grizzled soldiers just disappeared, and not a single chevron of experience is left.

As with many mechanics in R:TW the exact nature of them is foggy and not precisely understood, and never will be. For a more challenging game you should just merge units rather than retraining them, but at the same time I don't think anyone will glare at you and call you a cheater for retraining. I tend to do both - send a small army of replacements to the front to act as replenishing forces, but if the army is close to home I tend to just retrain.

[Paltmull]

Just curious what .exe you are using?

rtw.exe

[vollorix]

Why is everybody considering retrained units with high experienced a bug? What about all those veterans who can be called upon to join the army? Since there is no ability to disband experienced units and regain them later, with the same grade of experience of course, and it makes actually no sense at all to disband units, because one can´t recruit a full, or at least a half army, within short period of time ( at least not from once settlement, a capital perhaps, that in case of Romans, for example, is the only historical way till the granted citizenship to other italic towns, i see no bug in this at all. Old veterans from the previous campaigns are, of course, joining other veterans, while fresh recruits are mustered in new units.

[QuintusSertorius]

Why is everybody considering retrained units with high experienced a bug?

Not a bug, an exploit. Because with any executable other than alex.exe, the AI doesn't do it.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

What about all those veterans who can be called upon to join the army?

Veterans in the cities available to rejoin the army? Good idea. We can roleplay that in EB, and use the retraining bug in an historically accurate way in EB.

Now, did you put those discharged veterans into your city to begin with? By disbanding a veteran unit in the city first, before doing any retraining?

No? You didn't? Well in that case, there won't be any veterans in the city to be recruited, will there?

See, if you want to roleplay properly, you can't legitimately have the advantage of retraining veteran units back to full strength and keeping all their experience, without having the disadvantage of disbanding other veteran units first....veterans don't grow on trees and they aren't born veterans out of their mother's wombs either.... ;)

[Rahl]

With rtw.exe, the AI never retrains, so it's effectively an exploit in favour of the human player.

I have often seen armies with several silver or gold chevron units with full manpower and no small units remaining from merging. Since the AI can't disband I'm sure they were retrained units, what else could they be?

@Vollorix
If you don't disband where do you get your veterans to fill up the ranks?

[Paltmull]

what else could they be?

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

[QuintusSertorius]

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

Indeed, if it has anything more than bronze upgrades on weaponry/armour, it's a rebelled unit (subject to vanilla RTW mechanics).

[vollorix]

What about former battles the faction armies fought? Do i have to disband veterans from the campaigns i fought, are there not enough from previous battles, campaigns and wars? ;)

[Rahl]

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

I played EB a lot and I know how units from rebelling cities look like.
Units from rebelling have, at least in my game, most of the time level 2 weapon and level 3 armor upgrade, the same or nearly the same experience and slaves are often part of this armies. I'm quite sure that the unis I meant where no rebells.

[Ca Putt]

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

[Ludens]

Still, I'm quite sure nobody forgot to have the value changed to zero. The game is supposed to do this.

It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

That would be a way of putting, but it's more accurate to say that the individual soldiers do not exist on the campaign map. On the map, a unit is a table of, say, 300 by 3, with every row representing a soldier. The first column would be an ID number for the battle engine; the second a binary value indicating whether he's dead or alive; and the third his experience. (Obviously, a unit would contain other parameters besides the table to indicate unit type, upgrades, etc.) This table is used by the battle-engine to construct the unit on the battlefield; once the battle is over the battle-engine will pass information to the campaign-engine so that it can update the values in the unit-table. The rows of the unit-table that now belong to dead soldiers do not get deleted: they take up very little space, and constantly changing the memory allocation of a table is a waste of CPU time. Instead, the second value is simply set to "dead". When the unit is retrained, this value is changed to "alive" again. Merging most likely occurs through a different programming routine that also copies the experience values from the table of the donor unit.

[IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer]

It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

True enough, but it does have an affect on game difficulty insofar as new players to the series might get mad if their beloved companions are punished for being restored to full, as was the case in Medieval 1 and valor.

Remember that this same system exists in Medieval 2, and it is far more consistent and polished in that game. I'm guessing the veterency system in Rome was just one of those "unfinished" parts of a rushed product, since it seems every CA game since Medieval 1 has been a rushed product with several incomplete features. I can definitely say that it is supposed to be this way in these games, and it is not a bug or a programming mistake. Incomplete programming, maybe.

As for your explanation of how retraining works, sounds sensible to me. It mostly matches what I've seen from the game, however inconsistent it may be,