Unit retraining - a little too good?

[motorhead]

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.