Unit retraining - a little too good?

[Bhruic]

"This completely destroys the concept of "attrition"."

That's not true. First of all, if the town is a low level frontier town, you can't replace all your losses because you can't retrain your good units.

Actually, it is true. If an army is in a city that can make the units it has, you can never defeat that army through attrition unless you can cause the enemy to run out of funds.

So, suppose it is a major city with all the highest level buildings. In that case, as long as you have the money to buy weapons for the men, and the men in the city to form units, you *could* keep cranking out your troops. It's silly to think that a vast city like rome would only manage to produce one century of legionares every sixth months.

Which is part of my point. Why can you fill up 9 units that have 1 man left in 6 months, but only recruit one? Or, none, if you've got a unit that takes 2 turns to train (but still 0 to retrain from 1 unit).

Moreover, it makes the AI armies tougher, because you actually see full strength units with many chevrons, instead of how it was in MTW.

Granted, it makes the AI tougher. But what you seem to forget is that it makes the player proportionally tougher. That is, the player is able to exploit the retraining system much better than the AI can. That means that instead of giving the AI a benefit, like you imply, it actually penalizes them.

It just feels more accurate the way it is now: I'll fight several battles, maybe take a barbarian town, then fall back to a town I've had long enough to build it up so that I can retrain my men, rest etc.

I think this better mirrors the way campaigns were actually carried out, rather than the uber army marching across the land and then a steady stream of brand spankin' new legions hurrying to catch up.

Enemy cities are almost always better built up for military than my own. I can count on one hand the number of times I've taken a city and not been able to retrain most (if not all) of my units. Frankly, I'd be happy with the system you're talking about. If, for example, I could only retrain Roman units in Roman cities (ie, the cities the Roman factions start with), that'd be fine. But being able to take over a British city and immediately retrain all of my Roman legions just doesn't seem "more accurate" to me.

If you think being able to retrain right after you capture an enemy city is a problem, only allow you to recruit soldiers from a town where the culture penalty is (less than) 25%. Or maybe reduce all the level of all troop training facilities by one.

Something like that could work. I've never really been sure why you can recruit/retrain units from a city you just took over in any case - wouldn't they sort of not like you? I guess you could conscript soldiers, but they wouldn't be terribly effective in battle.

Bh