A brief commentary on using cheap tactics to win R:TW battles

[NeoSpartan]

Why play strategic games when u cheat??? And why play at all when u cheat???

Priceless...........

I don't quite agree re-trainning expireinced units as a cheat, because when you retrain them the Expirience level Goes DOWN. Thus making up for the rookies in the unit.

[Kralizec]

I don't quite agree re-trainning expireinced units as a cheat, because when you retrain them the Expirience level Goes DOWN. Thus making up for the rookies in the unit.

The underlined part was true for MTW, but not in RTW. That's why it's considered a cheat by many.

CA apparently did consider the issue, because retraining costs more if the remaining men are experienced. This is a rather bad solution IMO, all the more because the increased cost really doesn't weigh up to the benefit of getting a full size experienced unit

[NeoSpartan]

[QUOTE=Kralizec]The underlined part was true for MTW, but not in RTW. That's why it's considered a cheat by many.

....QUOTE]

really????

I'll pay more attention next time. I think the chevrons go down. I have a unit of cavalry with 3 men/horses with 2 gold chevrons. I'll what happens.

[Kull]

"Corner Camping" is pretty bad, and I've only done it a few times when seriously outnumbered. The very last time was two full stacks against my half stack. Somehow I messed up when anticipating the arrival points of the enemy armies, because immediately after hitting the "start" button, a mass of enemy Mada Asabara appeared directly behind me and raced downhill into the rear of my spearmen. Gah. Total annihilation and lots of "running in terror".

Got exactly what I deserved and haven't done it since.

[The_Mark]

Not that the AI would care of the thin red line anyway. I once cornered a horse archer unit with three pantodapoi phalangitai into the corner of the map taking me half an hour. And what do the buggers do? They calmly cross the red line and walk around my encircling spearmen and re-cross the boundary just behind my spears.

Gah.

[iberus_generalis]

it happens to me so many times.... they can cross the red line, but i can't.... even when im outnumbered and cornered against the red line they somehow can cross it and recoross, and atempt a flank.... i notice this happens more often in VH....

[Sdragon]

The chevrons do in fact go down, I'm busy playing the RoP mod. Had a bunch of 3 silver chevron hoplites. Now they are all at 1 silver. They seem to lose one with each retraining, even if they just get a couple of new guys. Although they do lose much more when the unit is near decimation.

Still you can get more experianced troops quicker this way. The whole army gets better rather than the few units that your merging everything into.

[iberus_generalis]

why is retraining units a cheat??? how can it be? it's realistical to retrain unit...or at least feel in the gaps with replacing soldiers....in war this often happens... and economically it's cheaper to retrain units than create new ones...besides that, by retraining a unit you make it also cheaper cuz you only pay upkeep for that unit, whereas you should pay for the upkeep of the new unit plus the one of the older spent unit.... i think that retraining units is realisitical, cuz the roman empire only had a set number of units, and didn't just create new ones out of the blue cuz they needed to fill in the gaps of the old ones... and no matter how veteran a unit is, it will always get casualties...one battle no problem, but after two or three these veteran units may not be battle worthy and thus need to be filled in...to me it's quite realistical, as in the classic era, and pre empire roman, the rookies were trained by their colleges of the unit, and thus these rookies would pretty usually acquire a level almost as high as their veteran colleges.... i think this system is way more realistical than the MTW one...as a veteran unit would loose much of its experience at times... and in reality that shouldn't happen in such an amplitude as in MTW....

BTW if there is something that is unrealistical about the unit retraining is the lack of ability to recycle pre polibian and pre marian units into post polibian and post marian units... because this way gold chevron units are lost really easily... wich is really lame IMHO...

[edyzmedieval]

I loled.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

They are totally different units IG. We can't make them be absorbed by the new type.

[iberus_generalis]

it's said though... i would love to convert the units and not loose the chevrons...

[Kralizec]

It would also be awesome if certain units could be converted into other units, to reflect their better experience.

Think about hastati. After reaching a certain age and after gathering enough spoils of war to afford better equipment, they'd continue their service as principes and later as triarii. The trigger would be the overall amount of experience of the unit.
Or Karthadast's lybian spearmen, after attaining a crushing victory over the Romans, would attain better armour due to loot.

For a game developper that would be tricky to represent, though

[CountArach]

Ahh, can anyone ever get sick of RTW humour? Probably.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

Concerning retraining, I usually train a new unit and then send him alone to the army that is 'damaged', then dump him into all the damaged units and disband the left overs. Doing it this way, the guys will lose experience when they get new guys (average of the two combined groups) and this is nearly a must with AOR implimenting mods.

P.S. I could have sworn that units lost experience when you retrained them, way back when I started playing RTW...