Limit on experience gained in one battle?

[napoleon526]

I was fighting against a stack consisting of all rebel spearmen and one Desert cavalry. I had a unit of Nattafun with my army and decided to see how much damage it could do. It killed 169 enemy troops and worked its way up to three gold chevrons. After the battle though, I noticed that it was down to 3 bronze chevons. How is that fair? It won those promotions, it should get to keep them.

[Foz]

I was fighting against a stack consisting of all rebel spearmen and one Desert cavalry. I had a unit of Nattafun with my army and decided to see how much damage it could do. It killed 169 enemy troops and worked its way up to three gold chevrons. After the battle though, I noticed that it was down to 3 bronze chevons. How is that fair? It won those promotions, it should get to keep them.

It's possible there is a cap on XP gained in a given battle... but another scenario is possible too: you may have had casualties that were healed. Usually when that happens the guys that are healed are considerably lower XP than the unit members who survived the battle, which means that having those men healed can completely kill the XP of the unit.

To explain a bit further, XP seems to be a thing that's averaged across the unit to get the displayed amount. This means seemingly quirky things can happen, but are actually correct. For instance, if one man in the unit has half of its kills, and he dies, the unit's XP will immediately be cut in half. I've actually seen it happen in a battle, wasn't pretty. Similarly, men with lower XP (usually from having died too soon in the battle to gain much) being healed at the end could be completely destroying your unit XP by dragging the average down. This would be especially noticeable if only a small portion of the unit had survived in the first place, as the healed guys would have a lot of pull on the average due to the low number of men being considered.

[napoleon526]

Ah, that makes sense. The unit took javelin fire until it was down to 2 men, and those 2 guys killed most of the 169. 5 casualties were healed.

[John_Longarrow]

I've had a simiar experience with a Turkish General. In one battle he took 15 casualties but killed 62 Byzantines and captured 123. He was up 6 levels by the end of the fight but as he started regenerating his warband the average experience started going down quickly.

[FactionHeir]

The game actually seems to save the experience on every single soldier across battles and turns too btw.
I.e. I had a fairly highly experience unit I've been using for a while and then parked them for a few turns before using them again. In that next battle, they lost 2 or 3 men and their experience went down a chevron for example. Quite annoying feature that is.

[Foz]

The game actually seems to save the experience on every single soldier across battles and turns too btw.
I.e. I had a fairly highly experience unit I've been using for a while and then parked them for a few turns before using them again. In that next battle, they lost 2 or 3 men and their experience went down a chevron for example. Quite annoying feature that is.

I would've said it's a very interesting feature, and realistic to boot. The chevrons are supposed to represent the combat experience of the group... so it makes perfect sense that if the most experienced soldier of the group dies, the unit's chevrons should go down some, because it clearly will be less effective without that veteran member. I actually wouldn't be surprised if the unit experience is only for summary purposes, and the individual experience of each man is used to determine his combat stats - it seems a natural extension of the individual kill stats we know the game keeps. I guess that would be the most realistic method too, since each soldier would actually fight at the level of experience he had personally attained in combat.

[Shahed]

That's what I loved about TW since STW. The indvidual stats.

FH, what I do is I have the highest chevron unit for a unit class e.g Levy Spearmen, sitting in a closeby settlement from the front line. When a unit gets depleted and loses valor (it's rare for me), then I send that unit back to the highest chevron unit of that class.

Then I transfer veterans from the more experienced unit to the less experienced one. I often gain experience across the board like this.

In fact if anyone wanted to exploit this you could have a gold chevron army in no time at all. Just work a couple of units per battle, make sure they get all the kills, and then go retrain them and from then on only use those units to replenish losses.