retrain question and 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.... ;)

[vollorix]

I understand your point, but i only retrain units in the beginning of my campaigns, about 10-20 years into the game. That is a time frame. when the soldiers from older campaigns are still available, though, those battles, wars, whatsoever wheren´t "played" by me. After those first years, i´m simply producing more units of a kind, merging the veterans, and shipping the new units to the locations, sometimes disbanding old really depleted, or outdated due to reforms, units at place, playing a bit "colonization". I hope, you get my point now :)

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

I understand your point, but i only retrain units in the beginning of my campaigns, about 10-20 years into the game. That is a time frame. when the soldiers from older campaigns are still available, though, those battles, wars, whatsoever wheren´t "played" by me.

That's more justifiable, then, although I'd do it only in the first 10 years. Discharging a soldier when he's 20 and re-recruiting him when he's 40, well, he's not going to be a good, fit soldier anymore. A bit like the French reservists from 1918 fighting again in 1940 - they were crap! IMO after more than 10 years in civvy street, a veteran would become a useless civilian no better than a raw recruit.

And of course a soldier discharged at age 30 - well, after 20 years, he'll be 50, and too old to fight.

[IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer]

First, I'm using the regular RTW.exe and the AI retrains units..a lot. I'm frequently going up against brown-chevroned units (the second level), and I have spies in many opposing cities so I can see units actively being retrained, so I know they aren't all civil revolt troops.

Second, I've noticed that retraining units has a very inconsistent effect on what happens to their veterency. I've had a gold-chevroned unit fall down to brown or even bronze when I retrained it. I've noticed that if you merge units and then retrain them, those always lose exp. For example, I have three depleted units of Hastati. I take one unit and drop them into the other two, putting them both at full strength but leaving the third severely understrength. When I retrain the third, it loses almost all exp it had.

Even when I don't merge, sometimes my units lose exp on retrain. For example, one of my Lanceari units was depleted down to 21 men (from 100) after many years on the road. It had 3 brown chevrons (6 experience), and on retrain it fell down to 2 bronze chevrons (2 experience) despite never merging it with anything. I don't really know why this happens, seems to be the game just getting confused. It's not restricted to units what are severely depleted, either. One of my Liby-pheonician cavalry units had 1 gold chevron (7 experience). It had about 80 men in the unit, and on retrain it fell down to two brown chevrons (5 experience). I was pretty peeved since it didn't make any sense - I hadn't merged it with anything - but it wasn't anything that a battle or two against the Romans couldn't restore.

Third, the most important thing I've discovered is this: if you EVER merge a unit into another unit, then the game will remember you have done that and the effects will show on your next retrain. For example...

I have three units of understrength Hastati. I merge the one unit with the other two, putting them both at full strength. I send the third back to retrain and forget about it. The other two Hastati units gain or lose some veterency based on what the veterency of the first unit was. The game, however, seems to remember that many of the members of those two Hastati units are actually members of another Hastati unit, so it keeps treating both units as if they are merged units until all the members of those two units that were originally from the merged unit are dead.

So, let's say those two Hastati units are now at full strength, 161 men. But remember that they were understrength before, so let's say of the 161 men in each unit, 40 from each are actually from that first Hastati unit and therefore are not actually a part of these two units. The game seems to remember this, and until *all* 40 of those men in each unit are dead, the game is going to keep treating both of those Hastati units as having been merged and will punish your veterency on every retrain. Based on each retrain, the veterency of the resulting, retrained unit will be proportional to the amount of men still left in that unit that were from a merge. For example...

We still have both our Hastati units from before, out of 161 men in each unit, 40 in each were merged from another unit. Let's say we go into battle. Both of these Hastati units emerge from the battle with 120 men left. Of the 40 killed in each unit, 20 of them were part of the 40 merged from that first Hastati unit. Thus, on retrain, you will lose about 50% of the veterency on the 40 new men you get into your units. In a unit of 161, 20 is 1/8th of the unit, so if both Hastati units had 2 gold chevrons (8 experience), then they will lose one or possibly more chevrons, since the game likes to round up against you.

Keep in mind that if you have merged one of your units with multiple other units, then the experience gets broken down even more and your unit's experience will be punished even more on retrain. So, merging them will multiple units is bad if you want to keep their veterncy.

Well, these are the results I've worked out from my experience. If there are too many numbers in here to understand, then basically just remember this: if you want to keep your unit's veterency, then never, ever merge it with any other unit, ever.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

Second, I've noticed that retraining units has a very inconsistent effect on what happens to their veterency. I've had a gold-chevroned unit fall down to brown or even bronze when I retrained it. I've noticed that if you merge units and then retrain them, those always lose exp. For example, I have three depleted units of Hastati. I take one unit and drop them into the other two, putting them both at full strength but leaving the third severely understrength. When I retrain the third, it loses almost all exp it had.

Even when I don't merge, sometimes my units lose exp on retrain. For example, one of my Lanceari units was depleted down to 21 men (from 100) after many years on the road. It had 3 brown chevrons (6 experience), and on retrain it fell down to 2 bronze chevrons (2 experience) despite never merging it with anything. I don't really know why this happens, seems to be the game just getting confused. It's not restricted to units what are severely depleted, either. One of my Liby-pheonician cavalry units had 1 gold chevron (7 experience). It had about 80 men in the unit, and on retrain it fell down to two brown chevrons (5 experience). I was pretty peeved since it didn't make any sense - I hadn't merged it with anything - but it wasn't anything that a battle or two against the Romans couldn't restore. I...just wish I understand a bit better why the game decides to subtract experience from non-merged units and why it doesn't....

Well, retraining is working properly in your EB installation, then - you don't have the bug. Depleted units that retrain SHOULD lose experience.

Your Liby-Phonecian cavalry, with 80 men, got 20 new recruits, meaning you should lose one-fifth of the unit's experience. 7 experience divided by 5 times 4 equals 5.6 - so there's your 5 experience for the retrained unit. And as for your severely understrength unit of Hastati, well, if it had say 7 experience but was down to 23 men, then when retrained and back to its full strength of 160 men, only 1/7th of those men will be experienced - so the unit will only have 1 experience after retraining.

[IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer]

Nah, I don't have the, uhh... "bug." I just retrained two units of Gldgmtk that were at half strength and 2 gold chevrons, and they still have 2 gold chevrons.

It's not a bug anyway, it's a feature. The game is meant to keep experience on retrained units. It's one of those changes between Medieval 1 and Rome that they introduced to make the game "easier" to understand for newer players. Medieval 2 has the same veterency system - in fact in that game even merged units retrain with full experience. Seeing as Medieval 2 not only kept this system but expanded on it, this is obviously a feature intended to be in the game.

Also, those Liby Pheonicians lost experience due to the weird system Rome uses, as I described above in excruciating detail after an edit.

[Ludens]

I think it unlikely that the game remembers where the individual soldiers in a unit came from. Where (or why?) should this data be stored? Personally, I wonder if the strange results of retraining are caused because the newly-added soldiers "inherit" the experience of their predecessors. From a programming point of view, it's unlikely that the strategic engine works with individual soldiers. The battle engine does, but on the strategic map the individual values are not important. The experience values of individual soldiers are stored in a table (together with their status: alive or dead) that represents the unit to the strategic engine. When a unit is retrained, soldier-entries are changed from "dead" to "alive" until the unit's original size is restored. My hypothesis is that the programmers forgot to have the "revived" soldiers' experience changed to zero.

This would explain why retrained troops do not have zero experience (they "inherit" the experience of their predecessor), but don't always match the average experience of the unit either (the inexperienced soldiers in a unit are more likely to die, so retrained soldiers are more likely to have slightly lower experience). I have no idea how to test this, though.