Quote Originally Posted by miho
Interesting. I didn't know about retooling. How do you do that?
Have you tried to put your king in a province which had an armourer and a metalsmith because when your heir matures he appears in the province where your king is. If he appears there he might get the weapons and armour upgrades as do the units that are trained there.
Yar, by retooling, you take old units and you can put them in a province with, as you put it, an armourer and a metalsmith. Open the unit ordering window, where you would normally select new units, click on your old unit to be retooled, and lift the unit from your center bottom window into one of the order boxes. (I hope that makes sense.) Your old unit will receive any new armor/weapon bonuses, and will be topped up with new 0 valor troops to fill out the compliment of numbers. Thus, after an army has been chopped up in battle, and you have 2 archers left in a unit out of 120, you can do this trick, which will take only 1 year instead of the usual 2 years for a new unit.

It took me a few days to figure out how to do this, as they mention it in the manual but it wasn't clear how it was done to me at first.

So, speed and cost are two factors on retooling.

I have noted that the new heirs come out with the bonuses of the province they're "born" in, that is, whereever the king was the year they turned 16. Gold sword, gold shield, those are some tough units (and slow!).