Hi all, STW1.11 again...

would you believe that after all these years I've only just realised that the honour level of a unit is reflected in the number of banners the unit carries?
Naturally, this includes the bonus from the general. All units have one large flag (the commander?) which doesn't count, so it's only the smaller ones.

I've often wondered why an ememy Ashigaru unit will sometimes face up to a full unit of my Samurai attacking them while others will run at the sight of a cadre of sams but, taking the honour level into account and the flags being there to be seen, it starts to make sense.

Having seen them on my own units I'll now take it into account when deciding what enemy units to point my archers at, what to engage and what to avoid when my forces are no match.

I also wondered why honours gained in battle seemed to bear no relation to numbers of casualties inflicted. You could have one unit (size 60) kill 80-plus and get no honour and another kill just a dozen but get 1, even 2 honour. Initially, I believed it was to do with how many units they had succeeded in routing but even this didn't correlate as you could win a battle but get no honour bonuses at all.

Tying this together with the honour flags, it becomes clear that your units gain honour when they've cut down an enemy unit to its last man (or two or three). Or, if not that, then maybe a lucky kill of one of its flag carriers? (I've seen archer units gain 1 or 2 honour in a single battle, even when they've not engaged in melee).

In the battle logs, you can see records of kills/killed on a man-by-man basis (including friendly kills, if they're archers) and maybe there's an honour score associated with this, with the best of them becoming the flag-carriers? The honour level for the unit seems to be some sort of average, so killing one of their better individual fighters can be enough to bring their average down to the next lower level.

Apologies if this is old news to the rest of you but I thought it might be worth a mention. I've no idea if it's equally applicable to later versions, MTW or RTW.

As usual, your comments are welcome.