Investigation of Experience Points (chevrons)

[Avicenna]

Different amounts of experience for killing different units and different amounts of experience for different types of units might explain the occurence where a unit that killed 98 got 1 chevron and a unit that killed 100 got none. eg. Peasants gain exp faster than hastasi because generally they are less capable of killing.

[Stoneface]

The exact number of kills to gain a certain amount of experiance does vary a bit. The sizuation Tiberius discribes is a perfectly normal one. I made a quick test of super berserkers against bastarnae and egytian melee chariots. The experiance gain for killing peasants and bastarnae is similar, so neither troop quality nor hitpoints seem to count. Againt chariots the berserkers gained experiance somwhat slower than against peasants probably because the spread is more uneven. One kill is acounted per man, not per chariot.

[symball]

Something you might not see in custom batles which certainly opens up the possibility that there is a 'base' experience for being in a battle is that I saw that after a battle in which my reinforcements did not arrive (huge settings) there were a couple of units in the reinforcements that gained a chevron!

I am at work but I will post screenshots when I get home

[Stoneface]

Unfortunetly there are many things I did not see in my tests and the participation bonus is among them. I also negelected the effect of dying, which might lead to an even slower experience gain for phalanx. Autocalc is also neglected and probably a few other things as well.

[Severous]

A General with 3 chevrons of experience. Lost half his force. Spent several turns stationary in a town and regained his lost bodygaurd. All came in at the 3 experience level.

[Byzantine Mercenary]

this threads pretty long so someone else may have said this already, but im sure i heard CA say somewhere that routing troops have a 1/3 chance of counting as a kill for experience purposes, at least thats what i remember, i read it on this forum a while back...

[macsen rufus]

Those guys gaining experience by doing nothing have caused me great confusion! I haven't looked at it in detail, but I get the feeling that troops gaining experience without fighting have earned it *somehow*.

Cavalry held back from the action in a siege assault *could* have gained experience by not going into an unfavourable battle, and also impetuous troop types have also gained experience where they haven't been used in the battle, so maybe it represents a gaining of discipline.... Also if experience gained is related (somehow) to the starting odds of the battle, maybe this behaviour of staying out of a fight can actually be useful training. "Good decision, men, stay out of that or you'll be mincemeat" is one possible scenario. But how it works in game mechanics terms is a mystery, alas... One thing's for sure, though, it's not purely down to number of kills.

[Vincent Butler]

That might explain why sometimes when a unit is depleted and is retrained, it loses experience, and sometimes it does not. Maybe the less experienced troops were killed, the more experienced survived, and so the overall experience would not have been affected.