Experience effects

[SMZ]

wordems... i can understand why they'd wanna tone down the huge +9 bonus to attack an defense, but cutting it all the way to only 3 seemed a bit severe to me too - maybe alternating between raising attack an defense, so that 1 bronze would give +1 att; 2 bronze would give +1 att, +1 def; 3 bronze would give +2 att, +1 def... etc - you'd end up with +5 att, +4 def with a 3 gold chevron unit

cause yeah, if a peasant somehow manages to survive enough battles and slay enough enemies to become 3 gold chevron status.... that's a pretty tough peasant, i'd take the grizzled pitchfork veterean over the wet behind the ears spearman or swordsman anyday...

pitchfork kungfu - don't knock it

[Alcorr]

wordems... i can understand why they'd wanna tone down the huge +9 bonus to attack an defense, but cutting it all the way to only 3 seemed a bit severe to me too - maybe alternating between raising attack an defense, so that 1 bronze would give +1 att; 2 bronze would give +1 att, +1 def; 3 bronze would give +2 att, +1 def... etc - you'd end up with +5 att, +4 def with a 3 gold chevron unit

cause yeah, if a peasant somehow manages to survive enough battles and slay enough enemies to become 3 gold chevron status.... that's a pretty tough peasant, i'd take the grizzled pitchfork veterean over the wet behind the ears spearman or swordsman anyday...

pitchfork kungfu - don't knock it

Exactly what I was thinking.

[Lorenzo_H]

Does experience come by killing people?

[crpcarrot]

wordems... i can understand why they'd wanna tone down the huge +9 bonus to attack an defense, but cutting it all the way to only 3 seemed a bit severe to me too - maybe alternating between raising attack an defense, so that 1 bronze would give +1 att; 2 bronze would give +1 att, +1 def; 3 bronze would give +2 att, +1 def... etc - you'd end up with +5 att, +4 def with a 3 gold chevron unit

cause yeah, if a peasant somehow manages to survive enough battles and slay enough enemies to become 3 gold chevron status.... that's a pretty tough peasant, i'd take the grizzled pitchfork veterean over the wet behind the ears spearman or swordsman anyday...

pitchfork kungfu - don't knock it

the porblem is not in the gainng of experience. its in the retraining of units. if u have a 1 man 3 gold chev unit and retrin it all the new men get 3 gold chevrons each. this is why many of the posters assume the experience affects have been modified. and i agree IF it is the reason behind it.

personally i would prefer the replacements being green and experience having more affect that one bump per chevron. in MTW preserving your vetrans meant much more than it does now cos if they died thats was it you lost all the ecperience. also it was harder to build a full stack with all vetran soldieres. that took many wars to accomplish. (unless you exploit revolts). it took away another aspect i loved in MTW. having that elite vetran unit that is held in reserve and sent it where it can do the most damage. *sigh*

[SMZ]

the porblem is not in the gainng of experience. its in the retraining of units. if u have a 1 man 3 gold chev unit and retrin it all the new men get 3 gold chevrons each. this is why many of the posters assume the experience affects have been modified. and i agree IF it is the reason behind it.

well that makes sense... but if that's how they're doing it, I wish they'd go back to the individual stats and the green recruits - seems a hamfisted solution

maybe even a thing where the new recruits start at 1/3rd of the xp of the veteran troops in the unit, to represent the old farts passing on tricks of the trade an such... but yeah, ok - i understand the dampening effect much better now

[Moah]

the porblem is not in the gainng of experience. its in the retraining of units. if u have a 1 man 3 gold chev unit and retrin it all the new men get 3 gold chevrons each. this is why many of the posters assume the experience affects have been modified. and i agree IF it is the reason behind it.

That's not true. While the experience of retrained veteran units doesn't diminish as much as it should, it's not non-existent. My 3 living 1 Gold chevron highland pikemen became a full 1 silver chevron unit. So A loss of 3 xp (but with 3 veterans vs 57 FNGs). Likewise I've seen a couple of units lose 1 or 2 chevrons if under half strength when re-trained. Admittedly it appears that if your veterans are at 2/3 strength the recruits do not dilute experience.

Although there may be more degrees at work. I've seen (when merging NOT re-training) units drop a chevron or two when mixed, but also not. It's as if a 1 silver chevron half unit can be "almost 2 silver chevrons" or "just barely 1 silver chevron". When merged with a half strength 3 bronze chevron unit you can get the result of either full 3 bronze, or full 1 silver - suggesting degrees beyond the visible chevron.

[Matty]

To be honest, the casualty rates in battle are such that I have never had a unit with more than 2 silver chevrons. Is there a table or something somewhere summarising what a unit needs to do to get to each level of experience?

[Foz]

That's not true. While the experience of retrained veteran units doesn't diminish as much as it should, it's not non-existent. My 3 living 1 Gold chevron highland pikemen became a full 1 silver chevron unit. So A loss of 3 xp (but with 3 veterans vs 57 FNGs). Likewise I've seen a couple of units lose 1 or 2 chevrons if under half strength when re-trained. Admittedly it appears that if your veterans are at 2/3 strength the recruits do not dilute experience.

Although there may be more degrees at work. I've seen (when merging NOT re-training) units drop a chevron or two when mixed, but also not. It's as if a 1 silver chevron half unit can be "almost 2 silver chevrons" or "just barely 1 silver chevron". When merged with a half strength 3 bronze chevron unit you can get the result of either full 3 bronze, or full 1 silver - suggesting degrees beyond the visible chevron.

The degrees you refer to are almost certainly either "total unit kills" or an individual record of each soldier's kills - I believe the latter case. It's just that for the purposes of conferring benefits and displaying chevrons, a thresholded system is used. I'm guessing this is based on either average kills per man across the entire unit or else total unit kills. Each chevron of rank then corresponds to a given number of total unit kills or a number of kills per man, in a graduated system like the traits use.

The reason I feel strongly that individual kill stats are still tracked for each soldier is twofold:

1. Merging units produces varied results, but in some cases if a small number of men are left in one unit after the merge, you end up with a 10 or less man unit that has MORE experience than either of the units you merged. The only way I can think of that would cause this is if the remaining few men have a higher experience, and that could only change for that unit if the game tracks it per man. I also believe the game merges with preference toward moving inexperienced men first, as the unit that ends up bigger never goes up in XP and sometimes goes down, but the one that dwindles often goes up and never goes down.
2. I've noticed a profound impact on unit XP sometimes from a single man dying in a battle. With 5 men left in a unit of Dismounted English Knights, one fell, and they lost 3 or 4 chevrons of XP immediately. This is entirely inexplicable behavior unless that man had his own high XP that he was contributing to the unit of otherwise weak soldiers.

So... everything I've seen points to experience still being tracked per man, and this likely takes the form of individual kill stats.

[TevashSzat]

I believe Foz is right as there was something like this being discussed on the rtw forum some while back

[Foz]

I just ran a few tests using a Sherwood Archer unit modified to have uber missile stat (I set 100 but 63 is what took) but only 8 men (my unit setting is 1.25x which made 10 + 1 for the general = 11). The results for gaining XP worked out to the following:

1 bronze chevron: 22 kills
2nd bronze chevron: 28 more kills
3rd bronze chevron: 33 more kills

I did this by letting the archers auto-fire at an incoming group of scottish pikemen. The "2nd bronze chevron" result is from a unit I started at 1 chevron and stopped the fight as soon as it gained 2nd. Likewise with the 3rd chevron result, it represents a unit only gaining 3rd chevron from 2nd - it took 33 kills to do so. I wasn't able to go any higher, as the enemy unit gets to the archers before they kill enough to gain a silver chevron from the 3 bronze level. I'm trying to figure out some way to keep it going...

So looking at those numbers, it appears that 1st chevron requires kills equal to 2x the unit's size, 2nd requires an additional 2.5x unit size, and the 3rd requires an extra 3x unit's size to be gained. To determine kills to get to a given XP, you'd just add up the levels along the way. 1 to 3 would be 2.5+3=5.5x unit size needed in kills. In practicality, though, this probably means that the total unit kills from surviving members must be at least a given multiple of their number. So 10 remaining members of any given unit would need 2+2.5+3=7.5 average kills per man (total) to be 3 bronze level. 7.5 x 10 = 75 total kills between them as a unit. 20 total kills would've been 1 bronze, while 45 would make those 10 men 2 bronze.

If we extrapolate the results I just saw, we could guess that a full chart showing additional kills needed to gain each subsequent level would look like the following:

1 bronze = 2.0x unit size in kills
2 bronze = 2.5x unit size in kills
3 bronze = 3.0x unit size in kills
1 silver = 3.5x unit size in kills
2 silver = 4.0x unit size in kills
3 silver = 4.5x unit size in kills
1 gold = 5.0x unit size in kills
2 gold = 5.5x unit size in kills
3 gold = 6.0x unit size in kills

Total kills needed for each level would then be:

1 bronze = 2.0x unit size in total kills
2 bronze = 4.5x unit size in total kills
3 bronze = 7.5x unit size in total kills
1 silver = 11.0x unit size in total kills
2 silver = 15.0x unit size in total kills
3 silver = 19.5x unit size in total kills
1 gold = 24.5x unit size in total kills
2 gold = 30.0x unit size in total kills
3 gold = 36.0x unit size in total kills

Those numbers also represent the average kills per man. If the extrapolation turns out to be correct, then no wonder it's so difficult to have gold chevron units, as they'd require an average of no less than 24.5 kills per man to hold that status.

Also note that this should all be taken with a grain of salt. I've not as yet confirmed anything for other units or for higher experience levels than 3 bronze, so my speculation may differ substantially from the fact of the matter - I just wanted to post it once I hit a roadblock and noticed how nicely the pattern was shaping up.