Unit retraining - a little too good?

**HopAlongBunny** · 10-16-2004, 03:41

Originally Posted by Blodrast

hmm, if I think of a more realistic way of limiting the retraining of units, it would be the size of the population of the city (or, at least, the settlement's).
e.g. you can only train/retrain 1 man per 100 population in your city.
or you can only train x men for small town, 1.5x for large town, 2x for ... etc.
You get my point.

Actually it is. Present campaign, after burning Athens down...I can never train or re-train more than one unit; after placing one unit in the que, all selections grey-out. The part that is a little less than believable...with a pop of 400 it has the largest trade income

**Spino** · 10-16-2004, 07:05

I like the unit retraining as it is. Sure, it's somewhat unrealistic but it's a much better alternative for the AI which now replenishes depleted units with alarming regularity. In Medieval the AI would rarely replenish its depleted units, especially the high value ones, and its campaign armies would wither away into nothing. The current system makes for a better AI opponent so I say leave it alone.

**Samurai Waki** · 10-16-2004, 07:27

not to mention realistically it shouldn't take more than 6 months to train a legionnaire in the 1st place, and the population of town also suffers when a unit is re-queued there

**motorhead** · 10-16-2004, 08:42

Originally Posted by Wazikashi

not to mention realistically it shouldn't take more than 6 months to train a legionnaire in the 1st place, and the population of town also suffers when a unit is re-queued there

but in reality, roman legions rarely brought in new recruits to fill out its ranks. A few times depleted legions were combined and formed Gemina (twins) units, but i recall reading about a Caesarian campaign in north africa, where soldiers were defecting to Caesar because Scipio was filling in their ranks with raw recruits.
Part of the adhesion of a roman legion was the fact they all came from the same region, roughly the same age group, spoke the same dialect and followed the same customs. Fellow legionaries were family, friends, neighbors or someone who lived in a nearby town. When a legion's recruitment retired, some re-signed and formed the 1st (and sometimes the 2nd) cohorts of a legion, as well as taking on all the NCO slots.

Aaaanyway, back on topic. I agree with Spino. Overall, the AI does benefit from this scheme and i like that. But it could use a slight tweaking perhaps. According to a dev post (posted in the Unit Experience thread ) retrained units are supposed to "replenish the unit with new soldiers *at the units average experience level*". That I don't agree with overall. My 3-chevron gold unit down to 1 man can retrain back up to a full unit of 3-gold???

**Bhruic** · 10-16-2004, 16:49

Originally Posted by Spino

I like the unit retraining as it is. Sure, it's somewhat unrealistic but it's a much better alternative for the AI which now replenishes depleted units with alarming regularity. In Medieval the AI would rarely replenish its depleted units, especially the high value ones, and its campaign armies would wither away into nothing. The current system makes for a better AI opponent so I say leave it alone.

Wait, you are trying to tell me that you think the AI gets more of an advantage from this than the player does? Are you serious?

The player can abuse the system to a much greater degree than the AI can. Imagine that you are attacking a city, and the enemy has a huge stack 3 spaces away. The city is somewhat well defended. You attack, and it takes everything you've got to take over the city. Now, in a realistic game (and by that I mean "realistically fun"), there'd be no way you'd be able to hold on to that city. The enemy stack would walk in and wipe out the few pitiful troops you've got remaining.

But in RTW, thanks to this bogus retraining system, the full stack walks up and, oh, look, you've got a completely retrained army.

The same is true while defending. Who cares how many casualties you take in fighting off an invader? As long as you beat them, your army will be back to 100% full strength next turn.

You guys are forgetting that it costs money.

If the amount of money it costs were relevant, than no, I wouldn't "forget" it. But, sadly, money is rarely a limiting factor when it comes to unit retraining. Neither is population growth, unless you play on huge unit sizes. Forgoing building a single 3000+ Denarii building is generally enough to pay for all of the retraining you need.

Bh

**GFX707** · 10-16-2004, 16:53

Originally Posted by Bhruic

The same is true while defending. Who cares how many casualties you take in fighting off an invader? As long as you beat them, your army will be back to 100% full strength next turn.

A turn is 6 months. In 6 months in real life you could recruit and train an entire army.

6 months to train one unit of 80 men is stupid in the first place. Why just one unit? Why can't you train more than one unit at a time in a city of 24,000? Of course because if you could the game would be too easy....but that would be realistic. You could easily raise an army of 5000 in 6 months in real life....

also think how far you could walk in 6 months....even with an army. I mean at 3mph which is a comfortable walk you could cover 5000 miles. Yet in the game you can barely cover a quarter of France.

**Bhruic** · 10-16-2004, 23:34

Originally Posted by GFX707

A turn is 6 months. In 6 months in real life you could recruit and train an entire army.

6 months to train one unit of 80 men is stupid in the first place. Why just one unit? Why can't you train more than one unit at a time in a city of 24,000? Of course because if you could the game would be too easy....but that would be realistic. You could easily raise an army of 5000 in 6 months in real life....

also think how far you could walk in 6 months....even with an army. I mean at 3mph which is a comfortable walk you could cover 5000 miles. Yet in the game you can barely cover a quarter of France.

While what you say may be true, I don't see how it has any impact on the point at hand. I mean, if you are advocating being able to train/retrain as many units as the queue will hold in general, ok, that's a position. I don't think it would be something that would improve things, but you're right, it would probably be a little more realistic. But barring training as many units as you want per turn, I think having the ability to retrain as many units as you want per turn is unbalanced.

As for the movement issue, suffice it to say that the TW games have never focused on realistic movement rates.

Bh

**motorhead** · 10-17-2004, 08:13

Originally Posted by Bhruic

The player can abuse the system to a much greater degree than the AI can. Imagine that you are attacking a city, and the enemy has a huge stack 3 spaces away. The city is somewhat well defended. You attack, and it takes everything you've got to take over the city. Now, in a realistic game (and by that I mean "realistically fun"), there'd be no way you'd be able to hold on to that city. The enemy stack would walk in and wipe out the few pitiful troops you've got remaining.

But in RTW, thanks to this bogus retraining system, the full stack walks up and, oh, look, you've got a completely retrained army.

- agreed. this can be easily abused by the player, giving the poor AI even less chance. I'd call it the "sea monkey" effect. Player carefully preserves small, good valor units and moves them into a city that is either near the front lines or facing some possible, future threat. Pump city garrison up with some cheapo peasants to improve happiness. When danger appears imminent, add water to your "sea monkey" units (retrain) and suddenly you've got 9 fully equipped, +valor units to fight with. Why pay those legionary cohorts 210/turn, just preserve a few depleted seed units and retrain only when needed.

edit: just thought of another abusable feature of sea monkeys. use those units to pump up valor of damaged units, since merging units does take into account the xp level of the troops being added. ex: keep a depleted unit of gold chevron legionaries in a city, bring in other damaged legionary units to said city. retrain the gold chevron unit, then dump their 8xp men into damaged unit to pump up their valor. rinse, wash, repeat, abuse.

**Red Harvest** · 10-17-2004, 19:37

I agree that retraining is a bit too good. The problem is on the "replacement recruiting" side of the equation. It encourages retraining of many small scrap units in a single turn. I always retrain the most depleted units first. Seems a bit unrealistic to train so many green troops in a single province in a turn.

I believe retraining/training should be capped at some much smaller maximum (for the recruits, not the retrained vet survivors.) It should probably vary with population. At present this is not an issue unless population would fall to 400 or below.

**Blodrast** · 10-16-2004, 21:37

Originally Posted by HopAlongBunny

Actually it is. Present campaign, after burning Athens down...I can never train or re-train more than one unit; after placing one unit in the que, all selections grey-out. The part that is a little less than believable...with a pop of 400 it has the largest trade income

If I understand what you're saying correctly, then I have to contradict you ;)
Right now it's not limited in the way I was suggesting in my post above; the _only_ limitation right now is what you're seeing, that you have to have over 400 (or some similar number) men in order to be able to train _at all_. But whether you have 800, 8000 or 32000 makes no difference whatsoever in the number of units you are allowed to train (as long as the population doesn't go below 400, of course, but it's practically impossible to do that in a city with a few thousand population). _That_ is what I was talking about.

I believe that gives you a bit of an advantage over the AI, since it will never be able to exploit this to the extent a human can - hell, it doesn't use full stacks as often as it should to begin with ! (remember all those 2-3- unit stacks that you meet all over the map, and the continuous trickle of crappy armies that come to attack your city every turn ?).

I also believe that because of the faulty way the AI is managing its armies, i.e. not merging them when it could easily do that, that the retraining of a unit and preserving entirely its experience gives you yet another extra edge against the poor AI.
Why ? Well, because it's trivial for you as a human to get very experienced units, very fast - precisely because the AI keeps offering you an infinite amount of 3-unit stacks for you to clobber at your convenience, gaining experience without any significant losses.
So in that light I believe this is slightly overpowered. It would be more balanced if the AI were able to use full stacks properly - in that case I reckon we could leave the retraining in 0 turns and the preservation of the unit's exp as they are...