Upgrades are per man basis

[Oaty]

I've noticed not only does each man have there own experience points but they have there own armour/weapon too.

I noticed some oddities in the game at first, A full unit of hastati only costing 3 denari to retrain whereas and another with the same appearant upgrades (at least in the picture window) costing 40 denari. Did'nt know what was going on there for a while until I got that nice silver armour on a few troops from Rome.

I had some silver armoured and bronze armoured hastati's. As I used them in battle they would lose a few. So I'd always throw those bronze guys in the silver guys stack. Well one battle I took significant losses and when I merged those guys they suddenly lost there silver armour icon and went to bronze. I played around with them a bit and sometimes merging 2 bronze units would produce silver armoured guys. So the icon showing there armour and weapon must be representing what half or more of the unit contains.

And that also explains why some units have different prices for retraining. Even though they have the same icons for wepon upgrades

[Bob the Insane]

I think that is so cool, but was it not like that in MTW also??

[Oaty]

No in MTW if you merged a unit fully upgraded with armour into 1 with no armour it would lose all its upgrades. But if you merged a vanilla unit in with an armoured unit they would get the upgrade automatocally.

[andrewt]

All my urban cohorts in my Julii game have silver upgrades. For some reason though, after merging depleted ones, some of them would become bronze upgrades.