Retraining Troops ??

[Hollerbach]

In some other threads I have seen people talking about moving units back from the front to be retrained.I think this is a hangover strat from RTW that isn't the best now. The way the recruit pool and multiple unit training a turn works now, moving troops back to base to retrain dosn't make any sense! Just make new units to send out and merge will the understrength.

I always have a reinforcement stack trail behind my attacking stacks. These contain the leftovers of merged units, so at most 1 of each unit type. After each battle I merge understrength units in the damaged army, then move the leftovers from the reinforcement stack in to merge with the leftovers from the main stack.

I keep training new units from my bases to add to or merge with my attacking armies in this way.

In RTW you didn't merge since you could retrain a ridiculous amount of troops (10 units a turn I think) quickly. The total number of men trained that turn could then be many times the number you would train with new units, particularly true for the 2 turns to train elite units. This made moving back to base to train worthwhile. Say you had 10 understrength units, that's essentially 5 units a turn being trained!

However, in M2TW a retraining unit takes up one training slot in the same way as a new unit would. So presuming you can afford it, training new units will always get you troops at a faster rate? I can't see any reason to get troops at the front to make the round trip to home and back instead of making new units to make the single journey to the front.

Am I missing something? What do you guys do for your damaged units?

[vonsch]

In some other threads I have seen people talking about moving units back from the front to be retrained.I think this is a hangover strat from RTW that isn't the best now. The way the recruit pool and multiple unit training a turn works now, moving troops back to base to retrain dosn't make any sense! Just make new units to send out and merge will the understrength.

I always have a reinforcement stack trail behind my attacking stacks. These contain the leftovers of merged units, so at most 1 of each unit type. After each battle I merge understrength units in the damaged army, then move the leftovers from the reinforcement stack in to merge with the leftovers from the main stack.

I keep training new units from my bases to add to or merge with my attacking armies in this way.

In RTW you didn't merge since you could retrain a ridiculous amount of troops (10 units a turn I think) quickly. The total number of men trained that turn could then be many times the number you would train with new units, particularly true for the 2 turns to train elite units. This made moving back to base to train worthwhile. Say you had 10 understrength units, that's essentially 5 units a turn being trained!

However, in M2TW a retraining unit takes up one training slot in the same way as a new unit would. So presuming you can afford it, training new units will always get you troops at a faster rate? I can't see any reason to get troops at the front to make the round trip to home and back instead of making new units to make the single journey to the front.

Am I missing something? What do you guys do for your damaged units?

When you have units with high experience, you don't want to combine them and end up with fewer units with high experience. If you get them replacements by retaining them, they keep that experience. New units start with whatever experience your buildings provide, usually a lot less than your core units that have been fighting a while.

For example, I'm early in a campaign and my main forces have 2-3 chevies. I can't train units with ANY chevrons yet. So if I combine my experienced units in such a way that I end up with fewer units, my average experience across my army drops because I have to add in newly recruited, zero-experience units. But if I carefully combine my remnants so I have some at full strength, and a few with just leftovers, but don't drop my total unit count, I can send off those remnant units, get them trained back to full strength, and they come back with full strength of experienced men.

It makes a very significant difference in battle.

I think the experience system is bugged, but I play with what's there.

It also means I fight not to let units get routed off the battle map. I lose those with their experience. If I can keep even one, that cadre can be fed replacements and come back with that full experience.

[TevashSzat]

The unit pool however makes it so that retraining and training troops are about equal. Many times when you are not allowed to train more troops due to the pool, you could actually retrain a unit a half strength. I would rather use a 3 unit pool to retrain 6 half strength units to retain their experience then to train 3 new fresh troops with little to no experience

[Arcturion]

I keep training new units from my bases to add to or merge with my attacking armies in this way.

Am I missing something? What do you guys do for your damaged units?

But you miss out on one of the advantages of retraining troops - maximising unit experience! Let me explain.

Say you have 2 units of pikemen like so:

90/90 3 bronze chevrons
90/90 2 bronze chevrons

After a battle, the remnants are like so:

45/90 1 gold chevron (got mauled, but went up in experience)
67/90 2 bronze chevrons

---------------------------

If you drop the gold chevron unit on top of the bronze, you might get this:

22/90 2 gold chevrons
90/90 2 bronze chevrons

Retrain the gold, and now you have a 90/90 2 chevron gold unit and a 90/90 2 bronze chevron unit.

--------------------------

If you drop the bronze chevron unit on the gold, you might get this:

90/90 3 bronze chevron
22/90 2 bronze chevron

Retrain the bronze, and now you have a 90/90 3 bronze chevron unit a 90/90 2 bronze chevron unit.

------------------------

This happens because theres a bug in the way experience is calculated: the chevrons show an average of the experience of the men in your unit. So if you consistently merge the more experienced unit to a less experienced unit, the tendency is that you will move out the less experienced men, leaving the more experienced men behind (thus raising the unit average)

Retraining a unit preserves its experience, so its the same as adding a bunch of recruits with the same experience level to the under-strength unit.

Using this method you can build a bunch of highly elite troops in a (relatively) short time.

[Razor1952]

In fact retraining IMHO is an important strategic concern, sometimes better to retrain high experience troops, sometimes not worth the effort or sending them for retraining will undermine your strategic concerns for that area/province.

for example, you trash someones city but your cavalry now are down to half strength but now high experience, You see a few enemy stacks moving towards you, do you send those guys home for retraining back to full high experience or do you have an urgent need for their strength(albeit only half size)/

High experience troops = more efficient use of maintenance $'s = strategic advantage.

At present I think the system is well balanced and allows players to choose competing strategies.

[vonsch]

I agree, Razor. I doubt it was the designers intent, but it works in that it poses a problem for the player. And the more you use beat up units before retraining them, the faster they get experience too. But you risk one routing and being loss when the numbers get really low, or flat getting eliminated.

And swapping out a fresh stack for the vets, sending them back for replacements, can result in nasty surprises if you've gotten used to what those vets can do!

[sapi]

I'd like to jump in here with just this - I have never retrained my troops in m2tw.

Okay, maybe i have once, but that's just when a city has nothing else to do or when i'm training up some particular units for the rp value.

I still haven't been able to replicate my 2 general + 2 elite unit + 17 merc army that i used in rtr, but that's another story

[Arcturion]

For that reason, I like to use a balance of vets and replacement units. Say I bring along 3 vets, after battle I merge them into 2 full units + 1 weak unit. The weak one I send back for retraining, the 2 vets I reinforce with a green unit. That way you will gradually build up your army's experience across the board while keeping your momentum.

Besides, having short pauses in your campaign while you retrain is by no means a bad thing - it allows the enemy a chance to regroup and to build up more cannon fodder for you to kill. More experience and chances to train your troops and general. Not to mention being more fun and challenging to play.

[econ21]

Given that armour upgrades often provide more than the +1 armour that is reported, retraining to take advantage of armouries etc could be worth it.

From RTR/EB, I've got into the habit of using a "no retraining" houserule[1] and also never exterminating cities. It makes for a slower, more deliberate form of play and logistics start to play a large role in your campaigns.




[1]I would still retrain a full strength unit to take advantage of an armour upgrade though.

[icanus]

I tend to rotate whole armies through active service. Not the most efficient, since it means I'm paying upkeep for an army that's not fighting for 3-4 turns at a time, but it does mean I've always got a reserve stack between the front line and my production cities in case things go pear shaped.

At the moment in my english campaign (2tpy, turn 120ish) the king is in eastern france with an almost full stack, while my other (replenished) army is waiting for ships at dover, having fought a few battles in france, been relieved by the king and taken a trip back to blighty to be spread between London and Nottingham to stock up on recruits/the latest armour.

[Foz]

The unit pool however makes it so that retraining and training troops are about equal. Many times when you are not allowed to train more troops due to the pool, you could actually retrain a unit a half strength. I would rather use a 3 unit pool to retrain 6 half strength units to retain their experience then to train 3 new fresh troops with little to no experience

I think this is one of the better points I've seen so far in this thread. The M2TW unit pool is tracked at least in tenth points (probably finer than that) as opposed to full units, so retraining part of a unit will in fact deduct the correct percent of a full unit from the correct unit pool - i.e. if you have 1.5 mailed knights and retrain a 1/2 strength mailed knight unit, you are left with 1.0 mailed knights in the recruitment pool. So the retraining is not less efficient inherently, it uses up a percent of a point equal to the percent of the retrained unit that was missing, just as a full new recruitment uses a full 1.0 point of the pool.

There is some concern, though, about having to ship troops back to the place they were produced - there's no question that it takes a long time to get this done. Is it worth it? I'm not sure yet, but perhaps. One thing I would put forward, though, is this: it's quite beneficial to avoid higher level troops than you will typically find enemy cities/castles able to produce. The reason is that using such troops essentially requires they be sent home for retraining or swapped out/merged. In my experience it's usually better to stick with troops you'll find commonly available, and then retrain them in the border settlements you capture. This can be accomplished far more quickly than sending them home for retraining, and simultaneously gives all the experience benefits of doing so, just without the long wait. The best part is that the high experience units you'll soon have will quickly equal and exceed their higher tech counterparts in most cases, especially since you can take the time you would've needed to build to those high tech units and instead invest it in blacksmith buildings to upgrade the lower-tech units you intend to use consistently. So it seems to make sense logistically to use more widely available units and be able to retrain them at the front than to employ any of the various other methods discussed here so far. Of course there are limits, but in a lot of cases it seems prudent to sacrifice some stats in the name of wider retraining availability and thus less logistical issues overall.

[vonsch]

But you can often capture cities or castles with something close to what you need for training those troops. Especially if you avoid going TOO high up the tree. And in a given "line" of units, often the maintenance cost is static. So for the same ongoing cost you can have significantly better units.

But your point is valid. It's best to plan for replaceability. Where a high tech army makes more sense is as a mobile reaction force near its base. But if the AI isn't smart about deep raids... (which it appears not to be).

[gardibolt]

I think this is one of the better points I've seen so far in this thread. The M2TW unit pool is tracked at least in tenth points (probably finer than that) as opposed to full units, so retraining part of a unit will in fact deduct the correct percent of a full unit from the correct unit pool - i.e. if you have 1.5 mailed knights and retrain a 1/2 strength mailed knight unit, you are left with 1.0 mailed knights in the recruitment pool. So the retraining is not less efficient inherently, it uses up a percent of a point equal to the percent of the retrained unit that was missing, just as a full new recruitment uses a full 1.0 point of the pool.

There is some concern, though, about having to ship troops back to the place they were produced - there's no question that it takes a long time to get this done. Is it worth it? I'm not sure yet, but perhaps. One thing I would put forward, though, is this: it's quite beneficial to avoid higher level troops than you will typically find enemy cities/castles able to produce. The reason is that using such troops essentially requires they be sent home for retraining or swapped out/merged. In my experience it's usually better to stick with troops you'll find commonly available, and then retrain them in the border settlements you capture. This can be accomplished far more quickly than sending them home for retraining, and simultaneously gives all the experience benefits of doing so, just without the long wait. The best part is that the high experience units you'll soon have will quickly equal and exceed their higher tech counterparts in most cases, especially since you can take the time you would've needed to build to those high tech units and instead invest it in blacksmith buildings to upgrade the lower-tech units you intend to use consistently. So it seems to make sense logistically to use more widely available units and be able to retrain them at the front than to employ any of the various other methods discussed here so far. Of course there are limits, but in a lot of cases it seems prudent to sacrifice some stats in the name of wider retraining availability and thus less logistical issues overall.

The best example of this is in the New World. If you're using higher level troops, you need to take massive stacks with you, because you're not going to be able to retrain anything better than the very least of troops. And the travel times (what, 20 years?) make it utterly absurd to try to go home to retrain. Now, whether the spear militia and peasant archers can stand up to the Aztecs is another question.....

[TevashSzat]

That is why you try to bring as many stacks to the New World as possible so you don't have to stary in a recently conquered Aztec city hoping you can survive the sieges until reinforcements arrive 10 years later

[Whacker]

@ the original topic

My tactics and thoughts:

The topic's main point is exactly why in RTW I would always run around with stacks of almost nothing but Hastatii when I played as the Romans. Peasants and Town Watch were miserable on offensive work (obviously), but Hastatii in a pinch and in good numbers with some good tactics could take the field with confidence against almost anything. Of course I'd still lose from time to time depending on what or how much I took on, but all in all Hastatii swarms worked well. The reason I went with them is because they only required the 2nd level barracks to train/retrain, so odds are when I captured a town I would be able to retrain my troops, given enough population count of course. This was an issue for me often because I played with huge unit sizes, but all in all it was still an effective method. Sure I could have and honestly would liked to have diversified more, but even with a relatively fast pace for me (I turtle) trying to outstrip my Roman peers, most of the time I'd end up capturing cities that wouldn't be able to retrain half of what I had available. Of course the Marian Reforms proved a mixed blessing, as the 2nd level unit then became the crappy Spear Auxilia, which didn't have near quite the effective fighting value and punch as the Hastatii. The 3rd level troops though, the early cohorts, more than made up for this and by the time this even rolled around, even the barbarian-based factions would usually have sufficient tech to be able to retrain cohort based armies. Of course by this time I usually had all of Greece conquered and pumping out troops, which is hands down the best troop producing area in the game.


In M2TW the whole city/castle thing tends to throw a wrench into the works, at least for me and my tactics. Most of my stacks are based mainly on Levy Spearmen and some Mailed Knights (as the English), and invariably there's a castle nearby that can provide for retraining as needed. Later on in the game I tend to go with all DFK based stacks (@#*^&$ no dismounting ). These I have found tend to be harder to find a good retraining spot, so it makes it that much more important to scout ahead in your routes and plan them around capturing provinces that can support your retraining requirements. This coupled with the fact that the heavy cav/knight units have been noticably nerfed since RTW in terms of lame new charging mechanics as well as the fact that they can't dismount for siege assaults and are dead meat inside the cities means that infantry is far more useful in this game. One just has to plan better and account for troops that can easily whip cav.

As for the no-retraining house rule, I can definitely see and understand where and why folks would want to self-impose that to add a challenge. As I'm still not exactly sure what happens when you retrain experienced troops in M2TW, I'll just say that I'm in favor of either 1. RTW style retraining, where the missing men are trained at the current chevron/avg. exp. level of the unit, or 2. where all missing men are retrained at half the current chevron/avg. exp. level. I am NOT remotely in favor of all replacements being 0 experience, history has proven time and time again that sticking the "newbies" with vets will cause some experience rubbing off, hence they will be better than and have a leg up on raw recruits with nothing to guide them. Yes yes yes I understand the arguments that this benefits the human more than the computer, but I don't always agree with this. There are some of us who need all the help we can get, and/or just don't want to see more arbitrary limitations placed on the gameplay so that the AI "has a chance." It does just fine against me on normal.

My $0.02.