Retraining Troops ??

[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.