Quote Originally Posted by Kraxis
Agreed, it is indeed rather hard to find places for certain elites to be retrained. But does that mean we should be 'compensated'? Personally I think not.
First of all, experience is experience. You need to have a reason for it other than that one man you formed the unit around was very experienced. It is a wellknown fact that experienced units that get green replacements in the real world suffer heavily for it. And yes green units suffer even more, but that is where the evening out comes into play. The experienced troops don't vanish, they are still very good, they just have a lot of lousy troops around them to soak up the arrows and the like.
Also, it removes the specialness of high experience units. You don't really want to take care of them, you don't wait for the perfect opening to use them ect. They are just that much better cannonfodder.
Besides, The AI factions never use this. Which in turn creates unbeatable player armies (as if we aren't good enough already). Why the AI factions don't do I can guess at, but the fact remains that their armies have extremely seldomly silver units. I have it all the time without doing this contiously.
My humble opinion gentlemen is the middle ground of your discussion. I think that retraining a unit at the same level chevrons is probably excessive, but putting in fresh newbies is not a good idea either. The middle ground would (to me at least) be giving the new men half the chevrons that already exist for the unit, probably rounding up for odd #'s. Full 3 gold would give you 2 silver chevron replacements. They aren't so new that they'll get slaughtered and be useless, but they aren't gods either. To me this makes sense, in that the new recruits aren't going to be vets right off the bad, but their more experienced counterparts should rub off on them.

Cheers!