Aging units

[The Stranger]

who wants units that age. young units will get a power bonus while old units usually have more experience. this will require that you have to keep up with your units and that veterans wont live for ever

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Could be cool, but annoying at the same time. Considering they die at different times, I'd be constantly dealing with units losing men outside of battle. Not fun.

[The Stranger]

i thought about that. the game will automaticly replace those retiring men. and you will get a warning that one of your generals is dying, so you could replace any ancilleries if theyre present in the game.

[Ibn Munqidh]

Wouldnt be fun at all. This is realistic, though it cannot be realisticly implied in the game, as it goes in turns, 2 turns per year. You will not get your full potential from the armies you build, you will be having loads of troops dying each turn, like a plague. Not fun at all....

[kataphraktoi]

Only solution is to have degraded stats. Eg. Maybe slower, weaker in attack or defence, tire easy as they get really old. The units will have some kind of colour scheme to indicate their age group. INstead of units just dying, they'll be replaced by younger troops who will have basic stats and will have to accumulate experience like their predecessors.

[Mikeus Caesar]

This feature would add way too much micromanagement. No thanks!

[Barbarossa82]

I think the only way this could be implemented without being really annoying would be to use the experience system, rather than manipulating troop numbers. So a unit might start losing experience chevrons after a decade or so to represent new raw recruits joining and diluting the unit's veterancy, much as already happens with retraining. Anything else would just be aggravating, especially if units were losing men to retirement without them being replaced.

[Furious Mental]

Meh. I'm happy for units to remain the same. As far as I'm concerned there are no young units and old units. The fact that experience does not change is, for me, simply an abstract representation of the average quality of the unit remaining the same as old warriors leave and rookies are recruited. Possibly units which gain experience through battle could have it diminish over time.

[x-dANGEr]

I thought about it sooner, it maybe cool, but it adds a lot of micro-management :(

[A.Saturnus]

Remember that there isn't a timeline in the game, only a turnline.

[Ibn Munqidh]

This feature would add way too much micromanagement. No thanks!

Exactly

[screwtype]

I think the only way this could be implemented without being really annoying would be to use the experience system, rather than manipulating troop numbers. So a unit might start losing experience chevrons after a decade or so to represent new raw recruits joining and diluting the unit's veterancy, much as already happens with retraining. Anything else would just be aggravating, especially if units were losing men to retirement without them being replaced.

Sounds good to me.

I don't think veteran units should ever go back to being raw recruits, but yes I do think units should gradually start losing chevrons after being away from combat for a number of years, to represent the older more experienced veterans gradually retiring and being replaced by new recruits.

I think it could work well, you'd just have to be sure to get the balance right.

[Kralizec]

A good idea would be if units slowly would lose valour points (one per 5 years?) to represent the retiring of old veterans and the influx of young recruits to replace them.

That also prevents a TW problem that really ticks me off- it's easy to dominate any battlefield wiht a few 6+ valour units. Particulary with missile and phalanx units, who are easy to use without risk of them getting mauled (and thus, high experience men getting kiled)
In EB, I just disband slingers when they reach valour 5, because units that good lead to incredibly unrealistic (and unfun) battle tactics.

[screwtype]

That's a problem with balance. I didn't play RTW that much, but I got the impression promotions were too easy and too numerous. I think the earlier games were better balanced in that respect.

The promotion system in the earlier games was also more logical, units got valour for knocking off lots of soldiers and other heroic feats. In RTW, valour seems to be assigned more or less randomly, which I found really disappointing.

[Kralizec]

In RTW, units definitely got experience by killing others. The only random allocations I've noticed are at the start of the game- you click on "start battle" and immediately one of your units jumps a point. I think that may actually have something to do with experiencing different kinds of batles- ie, because the unit has already fought in a siege and an open battle and is now fighting in a sally, he gets extra experience.

And to be fair, MTW had that horrorible concept of your general's stars adding to units valour (minus the morale)
If you had 6 stars while the enemy has none, you could win the battle with only peasants!

[Mooks]

I liked the rtw system, and thought it should easier to gain valour. I also found that auto battles boosted your valour much much more then personally fought battles, iv had units hold a line against 4x their number and not gain a single chevron.

Some things need a tweaking.

[Ironside]

And to be fair, MTW had that horrorible concept of your general's stars adding to units valour (minus the morale)
If you had 6 stars while the enemy has none, you could win the battle with only peasants!

Not peasants. Maybe UM though (yes the combat value of peasants is that bad, at valour 3 they're still worse than UM, not counting size).

I prefer the MTW system when it comes to troops re-training, even if it's a sad day when a high valoured unit get badly mauled. I mean, for RTW it hardly matter as the replacements are as good as the guys who died.
And that is enough to keep the valour low enough in the game.

Degrading units has the potential of getting really annoying. Old veterans from earlier campaigns aren't better than raw recruits, due to age. Thus veterans are only useful for the current frontlines, meaning that the border is guarded with recruits.

[Watchman]

You'd think prestigious veteran formations would tend to attract the better calibre new recruits though, and to boot those newbies would be learning the tricks of the trade from the best...

[Ironside]

You'd think prestigious veteran formations would tend to attract the better calibre new recruits though, and to boot those newbies would be learning the tricks of the trade from the best...

Probably, but 1 man with 3 gold chevrons wouldn't be able to train a full unit to his level. Maybe retraining with the recruits getting half the experience or something like that would work.

[Watchman]

...or some sort of minimum level it won't drop under, or something like that. Or, conversely, some sort of virtual "max exp level" over which new reiforcements don't count regardless of how hard cases the veterans remaining in the mangled unit are.

[The Stranger]

In RTW, units definitely got experience by killing others. The only random allocations I've noticed are at the start of the game- you click on "start battle" and immediately one of your units jumps a point. I think that may actually have something to do with experiencing different kinds of batles- ie, because the unit has already fought in a siege and an open battle and is now fighting in a sally, he gets extra experience.

And to be fair, MTW had that horrorible concept of your general's stars adding to units valour (minus the morale)
If you had 6 stars while the enemy has none, you could win the battle with only peasants!

or looses one or two points.

you wont really loose soldiers. the computer will add a new recruit for every old veteran that retires. youll notice only in the chevron drop and the average age of the unit.

[Ciaran]

In MTW, valor and experience are tracked on a per-soldier basis, turn the log option on and you can read the logs for every battle. The stats shown are only the unit average - if you´re unlucky and your single high-valour soldier gets killed by a stray arrow the whole unit seems to lose valor, even though it doesn´t. I don´t know how RTW handles it, to the best of my knowledge there´s no log option, but I strongly suppose it works in a similar fashion, since small units tend to go up in valor way faster than large ones and retraining dilutes valor.

[kataphraktoi]

Real-time strategy is about micromanagement, love it or hate it.

SOme people complain about not enough controls, others, too many controls. Can't make everyone happy can we?