Unit Experience

**frogbeastegg** · 10-13-2004, 11:35

I don't think experience is lost; I think it works in the same way as MTW, i.e. experience is tracked on a per man basis and the result shown on the unit card is only an average for that entire unit. Without logfiles it is hard to tell if this feature is in RTW. MTW and STW had individual experience tracking; I don't see why it would be taken out of RTW.

**econ21** · 10-13-2004, 12:47

Remember that in Total War upgraded weapons and armour are not tracked at the individual level. Suppose you drag a unit A onto a unit B to merge them into a unit C. The weapon and armour of the merged unit C will be the same as that of unit B, not A. Hence always drag non-upgraded units onto upgraded ones (rather than vice versa) where possible.

Dragging an upgraded unit onto an non-upgraded one will make your men lose their upgrades.

PS: This is less important in RTW given that you can now queue up and upgrade multiple units in a turn. A nice new feature!

**MadKow** · 10-13-2004, 13:28

I concur that merging units dilutes the experience as in previous TW. The major diference now seems to be in retraining, where that dilution doesnt appear (or appear as evident).

**Paul Peru** · 10-13-2004, 13:46

1. I saw this once.

2. Absolutely! When I do the fighting by hand, usually 0, 1 or 2 units gain experience. In my Julii campaign, Gauls and Iberians constantly besiege Narbo Martius, which I had to garrison with town watch due to supply lines etc.
I couldn't be buggered to sally with such a bland army once or twice a year, so I started auto-resolving. This led to evenly distributed losses among the units, and massive gains in experience. Now all my units have several of the white

**Paul Peru** · 10-14-2004, 07:51

Hmm... My edit didn't work. I'll try upping my post count instead.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the

**Paul Peru** · 10-14-2004, 07:52

Yup, that's it.
Will I get the same effect if I use >>>>>>>>?

**Paul Peru** · 10-14-2004, 08:03

All righty, then!
Sorry for spamming.
I tried to denote the experience level of my units, and didn't think of the havoc starting som many html-tags in a row would wreak. ;-)

Anyway... where was I? Ah! Narbo Martius!
Played some more yesterday, and noticed

1. again. pre-battle I had 3 units of TW, each with one gold >. During the battle, 2 of them went down to 4 silver >. After the battle, all were back up to 1 gold.

2. Once more, experience was gained from auto resolving, not from the battles I commanded myself.

3. (Which went missing from my original post) In my experience merging works like in MTW, while retraining seems to recruit new blokes with the same experience as the battle-hardened veterans you have left.

Since I found out how to exploit the powerful combination of auto-resolving and retraining, my fleet has been fighting a lot of unnecessary battles against feeble enemies ;-)

**metatron** · 10-16-2004, 05:37

Originally Posted by frogbeastegg

I don't think experience is lost; I think it works in the same way as MTW, i.e. experience is tracked on a per man basis and the result shown on the unit card is only an average for that entire unit. Without logfiles it is hard to tell if this feature is in RTW. MTW and STW had individual experience tracking; I don't see why it would be taken out of RTW.

Correct. My own experiments have shown this to be true.

Meaning, sometimes, that you can merge the elite men of two units to get one good and one bad, or spread good men between two units.

It doesn't always work right away, and might require shifting men back and forth.

**Belenus** · 10-17-2004, 23:50

I've noticed experience seems to be a little random.

In one battle my roman archer unit only killed THREE men and only got 1 cheveron(putting them at one silver, they already had three bronze by then) while my other units who killed ten to twenty men got nothing.

**motorhead** · 10-18-2004, 00:15

Originally Posted by Belenus

I've noticed experience seems to be a little random.

In one battle my roman archer unit only killed THREE men and only got 1 cheveron(putting them at one silver, they already had three bronze by then) while my other units who killed ten to twenty men got nothing.

keep in mind kills are tracked per man, over every battle. those three kills may have been enough to push the unit average valor up one point. worked the same way in MTW.

**Sethik** · 10-18-2004, 01:26

I have had a velites kill one man in a battle and go up a chevron, so it is probably man-based. I've also merged two units and had them gain a chevron instead of losing it. They were both vanilla that have only been through a battle or two.

On a somewhat related note: I find that generals gain much more experience in R:TW than in M:TW. In Rome it doesn't take much to get a 10 star general, but I remember working for decades to get a 9 star one in M:TW. This probably has more to do with all the new VnV and retianers more than the actual battles fought.

**afrit** · 10-18-2004, 03:39

But remember that generals in RTW die of old age and are not replaced (the green_generals option in MTW, which was off by default). That is if the AI doesn;t kill them for you in multi-general battle (which I avoid like the plague).

I like the RTW mechanism better, although it is a bit too easy. Also, the AI somehow never gets high stars (unlike in MTW where the Byz had awesome generals).

**Lichgod** · 10-18-2004, 15:48

You do get exper for just being in a battle. Had a Principles unit that just sat out a battle (one of many he had been in) get an exper level with zero kills to his credit. So, being on site and watching the archers/cav do all the work will improve your infantry.