couple of noobish questions!

[macsen rufus]

What Caravel just said during the time it took me to hit "Reply"!

[gunslinger]

RE: Valor

Remember that valor is calculated for each individual man in a unit. The number you see on the unit card is actually an average of the individual men. Keep this in mind when you're reforming units after a battle. I always turn off the "tidy up units" option (you get to it by clicking the arrow to the right of your minimap in the campaign screen) because the a.i. will always screw you when it reorganizes your army. If you have units that survived a battle, but took a lot of casualties, then chances are they gained a lot of valor too. If you combine these high valor units with each other instead of with green troops, then you concentrate your experienced troops which creates elite units. Just remember that if a unit is sitting in a stack led by a good general, it will show higher valor than a unit that's in a stack without a good general. Until you get used to compensating for this, try taking the generals out of the stacks while you re-organize the armies after a battle.

[naut]

Good point gunslinger.

[caravel]

RE: Valor

Remember that valor is calculated for each individual man in a unit. The number you see on the unit card is actually an average of the individual men. Keep this in mind when you're reforming units after a battle. I always turn off the "tidy up units" option (you get to it by clicking the arrow to the right of your minimap in the campaign screen) because the a.i. will always screw you when it reorganizes your army. If you have units that survived a battle, but took a lot of casualties, then chances are they gained a lot of valor too. If you combine these high valor units with each other instead of with green troops, then you concentrate your experienced troops which creates elite units. Just remember that if a unit is sitting in a stack led by a good general, it will show higher valor than a unit that's in a stack without a good general. Until you get used to compensating for this, try taking the generals out of the stacks while you re-organize the armies after a battle.

I have often picked through an army of about 7000 using those methods. It's very tedious but does ensure that the high valour units go together. I usually start by pulling all of the generals out then work from there. You can't then drop stacks into each other as they may still merge, which is annoying, so you have to pull out the same type of unit from all the stacks first. If you're working in a small province, this isn't funny. I find myself doing a lot of this during my Turk campaigns. Especially in Georgia or Khazar vs the Mongols or in Constantinople vs Crusades or i.e. the Hungarians. Another option in the same place as the "tidy up units after battles" is the "display non critical messages" option, the one that shows all of the building construction, assassination/spy missions and generals death parchments. I tend to turn this off and instead get a nice summary list of my agents actions and buildings that were constructed ( abit like the vice/virtues summary). Leaving this checked means that you have to click through all of those building parchments at the end of the year, listening to the annoying sound affect, and then go through all the "your assassin was caught and killed" etc "whip whip, singe argghhhhhh" messages.

The other ones I disable are the autosave and the tooltips. The tooltips are also a sort of an exploit, because if you pick up one of your agents and drag it over a remote province that you have no intelligence on, a tooltip appears informing you of which faction controls it.

[Ripken]

I didn't know you could do all that, but I do know, thank you!

[Ripken]

I didn't know you could do all that, but I do know, thank you!

Of course, I meant 'now' not 'know' the second time!

[gunslinger]

I like the tooltips because they allow me to find out what faction a boat, army or castle belong to if I'm not familiar with the colors.

On the subject of sorting out the armies, once my standing armies start getting bigger than one stack, I generally separate them into four groups: spears, swords, cavalry, and archers. This allows me to reorganize fairly quickly after a battle. It also makes it easier to figure out the composition of an army in each province. If I need to shift some troops to a province that just got hammered in a defensive battle, I can easily see if the surrounding provinces have a couple extra spear units or whatever. If you use this trick, just remember that the individual stacks will probably have 0 star generals, which is fine as long as there is a good general in the province in case of attack. You just have to make sure that whoever is the "general" for each stack has decent loyalty or you'll end up with a rebellion on your hands.

[Martok]

I always disable everything except for autosave (although I'll occasionally enable "see computer moves"). Everything else is a hamper for me and unnecessary besides. I don't need 7 messages telling me I've just finished building a Swordsmith's Guild, nor do I need to see where everyone's emissaries are travelling to.

Like gunslinger, I also organize my soldiers by unit type when I have multiple stacks in a province. It definitely helps with keeping them organized after battles, and also allows me to make sure I have the proper troop composition for the province in which the army is stationed.