Scrubbing the gene pool.

[Didz]

For this example I will use Milan as the faction and Jerusalem as the city in question. In Jerusalem I have 6 units of crossbow militia with 6,3,3,0,0,0 as their respective experience levels and full strengths of 60. The city has a population of 30,000 and 80% loyalty at a low tax level. What I will do is up the tax level to very high, thus both dropping loyalty to about 25% and giving it a population growth of -1.5%. The next turn I start having riots that eat up about 5,000 citizens and cut each unit down to 54 troops.

I then combined the units and notice that the experience levels are 6,3,3,1,1,1 with one unit of crossbow militia that needs to be fixed. That unit, the 6 experience unit, is the one I used to top off the others and it is down to 24 troops. I also move what ever I need to give me 100% loyalty when I drop taxes, thus causing the city to no longer be rioting. I also have several building that are damage.

That makes sense, assumming that they haven't changed the way units work since Shogun Totalwar.

Each of the units involved contained 60 men so assuming that all these men began with a uniform level of experience you started with 60x6 120x3 and 180x0. After the riot you had 54x6 108x3 and 162x0. When you combined the units you moved 6x6 expereince troops into the inexpereinced units which now contained 54x0 + 6x6 troops. The average expereince of the unit was therefore 0.6 which rounded to the nearest whole number made them an expereince 1 unit.

Likewise if you now recruit 36 inexpereince troops to replace the men you moved from the experience 6 unit you should find that its experience drops as it now contains 24x6 + 36x0 men. By my reckoning it should drop to about experience 2, or possible 3 depending on whether the routine always rounds up.

Incidently, the same situation applies with Armour and Weapons. If you move men with high quality armour and weapons into unit without them, the unit card will display the average quality of the weapon and armour in use by the men of the unit. However, in combat each individual man performs according the armour weapons and expereince he personally has, thus men lacking the high quality armour will die faster than those wearing the good stuff.

This being the case your expliot should not work, because everytime the city riots you will be losing expereinced men and replacing them with more and more inexperienced ones. It might look like its working due to the rounding up of averages but overall the number of expereinced men in your army is being reduced. That is unless retraining an expereince 6 unit replaces losses with men of the same expereince as the initial cadre. It never used to in STW, if I remember rightly units always lost expereince when they were retrained, but they may have changed it in MTW2.

[CMcMahon]

I usually just do the "roving army of low upkeep units with a priest as a general/pull the garrison out, set taxes to VH, and exterminate the dumb bastards when they rebel) method. It's less time consuming.

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[John_Longarrow]

CyanCentaur,

What size units do you use? I'm guessing that how happy the people are is, to an extend, dependant on the number of troops, not the number of units. As such the smaller the unit size, the more troops you need to keep them happy.

[Whacker]

I'm guessing that how happy the people are is, to an extend, dependant on the number of troops, not the number of units. As such the smaller the unit size, the more troops you need to keep them happy.

If MTW2 follows similiar mechanics to RTW, then the game automatically scales based on what unit size you use. In other words, when using small unit sizes, the game will automatically give your troops a bonus so that their garrison value is larger. Likewise on huge, you won't get the same "bang for the buck", so it pretty much evens out.

Also forgot to mention, I also play using the BigMap map, so my cities tend to develop distance to capital penalties quite early on. I think this finally maxes out out though after a certain range though.

[Ciaran]

On Experience: I know that at least up to MTW experience is recorded for every single soldier (if you´ve got logs turned on, you can read battle logs which show what happened to each and every single soldier in a battle), but what´s displayed ingame is an average. So whenever you retrain a unit in MTW, its average experience gets diluted, but it keeps its high-experience members. Actually, it can happen that even a few unlucky losses dramatically lower the unit´s experience, if its veterans are killed.
I don´t know whether this still is the case in RTW and M2TW, though.

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[Didz]

In MTW2, replacements are added at the experience level of the unit. For example, suppose a halberd unit is reduced to a single triple gold chevron man. Retrain that one-man "unit" and you get 59 triple gold chevron replacements (woo hoo!)

In that case you have the makings of a perfect expliot.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't possible in STW. I can certainly recall expereince levels of units falling and having to constantly explain to people on the STW forum why this was happening.

However, from memory I can't even remember if it was possible to retrain units in STW, I think all you could do was combine units until you had a free army slot and them build a new unit.

Which thinking about it was a much better system with hindsight, and probably more realistic for the period depicted.

However, I still stand by my analysis of whats happening. Unless CA have made major changes to their unit database the level 6 expereince troops that John in transferring to his level 0 units are just standing there amongst the nooby soldiers as replacements for the ones killed in the riots.

The real problem is that he is able to replace them with similarly expereince men directly from the barracks.

On Experience: I know that at least up to MTW experience is recorded for every single soldier (if you´ve got logs turned on, you can read battle logs which show what happened to each and every single soldier in a battle), but what´s displayed ingame is an average. So whenever you retrain a unit in MTW, its average experience gets diluted, but it keeps its high-experience members. Actually, it can happen that even a few unlucky losses dramatically lower the unit´s experience, if its veterans are killed.
I don´t know whether this still is the case in RTW and M2TW, though.

From what cyanCentaur has just said above it sounds like that whole concept has been screwed up in MTW2 and you now magically get highly expereinced troops to replace your losses.

John has already discovered one expliot for this and I'm sure now we realise what CA have done there will be a lot more variations to fiddle the books forthcoming.

Another one for the bug list, in my opinion.

[Ramses II CP]

It's absolutely true that units train to the experience level of remnants. It's obviously easy to test, just grind a unit down ('Charge' Cavalry seem to work best because you can charge them repeatedly to get kills, and leave them in melee to get them killed) and retrain it. Not really an exploit, just an odd decision on the developer's part IMHO. Don't abuse it and it won't change your game.

Ramses II

[Scooter]

Does anyone know the actual effects of higher experience units? In RTW this added extra attack/defence/ranged attack points, and these would display on the unit, along with extra morale, which does not.

Do we still get all these things - do veteran missile units have more accuracy or more armor penetration than vanilla ones - or is it really just a morale bonus?

[Didz]

Not really an exploit, just an odd decision on the developer's part IMHO. Don't abuse it and it won't change your game.

But its still wrong. I wonder when they changed it and why.

[Kobal2fr]

Possibly an oversight more than a decision. They changed it back in RTW, caused a big outcry back then too.

But in M2TW the effects of XP have been toned down a lot, so it evens out in the end I suppose - MTW ragtag bands of old time experts at not dying were mondo powerfull but superhard to train, M2TW veteran units are easier to wind up with yet are not wargods.
Frankly, I don't think it's that wrong. Using veterans as training instructors, or having grizzled old vets teach the new guys a thing or two before they taste carnage for the first time, sort of thing ? Of course, you could always train new units to mix with the old ones instead of retraining the old ones, then retrain the depleted green unit, if you're OUTRAGED by the way CA DUMBED THE GAME DOWN and all that.

(damn, you're Didz, not Puzz3D. Forget that last part then )

[Didz]

Frankly, I don't think it's that wrong. Using veterans as training instructors, or having grizzled old vets teach the new guys a thing or two before they taste carnage for the first time, sort of thing ?

I thought that was the whole point about the building upgrades that increase base expereince levels. This new revelation sort of makes that whole game concept redundant. All you need to do is extract one battle hardened unit from your army and use it as a cadre for all future builds and you can clone infinite super warriors. Move a depleted unit back to base transfer the newly cloned super-warriors into it and then brew a fresh batch.

Of course, you could always train new units to mix with the old ones instead of retraining the old ones, then retrain the depleted green unit, if you're OUTRAGED by the way CA DUMBED THE GAME DOWN and all that.

Yep! that would be the correct thing to do, but basically it can work either way.