Slight change of subject but thought I'd post it here rather than start a new thread.

What happens if I retrain a unit in a province which is not as teched up as where they originated from? Does it totally strip their starting armour/morale bonuses or do the post-battle logs show that the unit is actually a blend of armoured and unarmoured types?

For instance, 100 man unit, Armour +1, loses 55 men. It is then retrained at a centre with no armourer (*). On average the unit is now armour 0.45 but its icon will portray it as completely unarmoured as it expects an integer value and rounds the fraction down. The logfile for the next battle it participates in should display the armour/weapon bonuses for each individual in the unit and I'm wondering if it correctly retains the armour level for the 45 previous survivors?

There's a trick whereby dropping an un-upgraded unit onto an upgraded one, to merge them, results in a unit shown as possessing the upgrade in full. I suspect that, internally, it's still a blend and the unupgraded individuals will likely be the ones to fall as casualties in a subsequent action. I'm speculating though, this is just a point about the averageing of acquired valour and upgrades in mergers of broken units.

* Footnote:- You may find yourself in this situation where all the battles are happening some distance from your 'main base' training centre. Ports are getting destroyed where provinces are being taken, so the round trip to base and back to the front may be several years, overland, to get to the nearest port. To cut down the travelling time, you build the relevant training centre closer to the action but it will be an additional 4 years just to get the most basic level armourer ready and it maybe silver/gold armoured troops which you want to avoid reverting to zero or level-1 armour. Yes it's quicker to build a port at the frontline province and ship them back properly instead but, in the case of the Byzantines, the 'home base' is typically preoccupied with training more advanced unit types but I want to replenish losses of the more basic varieties at the same time, since they do the bulk of the work.

Having seen the recent 'armour in the desert' thread, they may even be times where one might want a unit, headed for that environment, to be stripped of armour to minimise the fatigue penalty. So, if this feature works the way I think it does, it may even be of some benefit.