Are you experienced?

[FactionHeir]

Pretty much.
You also get +1 morale for each chevron.

[Long lost Caesar]

ah well cool, thanks for the responses.

[Rhyfelwyr]

ahh never knew about the extra morale, explains why its worth getting 3 gold chevrons rather than just 1.

[Alpedar]

Does it affect accuracy?
Somewhere i read that yes, somewhere that no.
I did not found it mentioned anywhere in game files, but it can be hardcoded.

My in gane experience is that it improves accy, but I'm not sure (Either it do, or I see what I want to see).

[Guru]

Does it affect accuracy?

I'd say yes. Especially artillery units seem to benefit from experience. Could be my imagination though, but a gold chevron cannon seems to hit much more than a recently recruited novice gun.

[Galain_Ironhide]

from what I have seen, I would have to say that artillery is more accurate with the more experience it has. Well, at least the AI's anyway.

When the 2nd mongol wave came through in my Turkish campaign, two of the Mongolian stacks had 2 trebs and 2 rocket launchers each (3 silver chevrons as is standard for our Mongolian friends),and man did they pack a punch! They couldn't miss me. When I was returning fire with my unexperienced units (until they picked each one off), my guys were nowhere near as brutal as they were.

It would be interesting to see what factors are involved, for a unit of any description, to acquire experience chevrons. Some times you think a particular unit has had an excellent battle, with many kills,but somehow does not end up with any additional experience.

[TinCow]

A full army of triple gold units is damn well deadly. If you want to see just how much of a difference the experience makes, fight a custom battle against the AI with a normal, non-experienced army and then fight it again with the exact same army, but promoted to triple gold chevrons. Not only do high experience units kill faster and die slower, but they break slower too. Triple golds will essentially fight to the death, no matter what you do to them.

We have been using triple gold and triple silver AI stacks in KOTR to increase the challenge and it makes a massive difference. Players are actually afraid to face the triple golds, something that I have never seen before in a PBM.

[ataribaby]

Does it affect accuracy?
Somewhere i read that yes, somewhere that no.
I did not found it mentioned anywhere in game files, but it can be hardcoded.

My in gane experience is that it improves accy, but I'm not sure (Either it do, or I see what I want to see).

I was intrigued to find this out once and for all because I've had a tendency to hold on to costly-upkeep, experienced arty because of a superstitious belief that the hard-earned chevrons make them indispensible sniper units.

The test: England vs Mongols in a castle siege battle.

England are attacking with 4 units of ballistae - 2 triple-gold and the other 2 raw recruits; and a unit of town millitia as a general's unit.

Mongolia is defending with a unit of elephants. Because they are defending with one unit the AI will not move from the castle square unless physically provoked, leaving my arty to their dirty business.

Each arty unit is set the same distance away from a tower and given the order to fire. As ballistae only cause a couple of percent damage per hit to buildings it is easy to see the hit rate for each unit.

The result: each unit destroyed its target tower at very much the same rate as the others. Sometimes one unit would be in the lead by a couple of percent but there really was no difference in hit rate between experienced and non-experienced units.

The corollary: arty units don't gain accuracy with experience and can be disbanded when not needed without worrying. After all, they are expensive to maintain.


Postscript: The above battle ended when I had the ballistae fire their remaining bolts at the elephants, and when the elephants stampeded I sent the ballista crews chasing them with their butter knives in a bizarre, Benny-Hill style chase. Needless to say, the greenhorns would rout after one stomp, but the triple-gold guys were very persistent indeed.

[PBI]

I was intrigued to find this out once and for all because I've had a tendency to hold on to costly-upkeep, experienced arty because of a superstitious belief that the hard-earned chevrons make them indispensible sniper units.

The test: England vs Mongols in a castle siege battle.

England are attacking with 4 units of ballistae - 2 triple-gold and the other 2 raw recruits; and a unit of town millitia as a general's unit.

You do realise that the accuracy vs. towers is different to the accuracy vs. units? Don't know if that would make a difference.

Also, ballistas are pretty accurate to start with, so a small increase might not be very noticeable.

It is depressing if that really is the case, though. Like you I hang onto high-experience artillery as long as possible, especially as it's so hard to get them promoted in the first place.

Postscript: The above battle ended when I had the ballistae fire their remaining bolts at the elephants, and when the elephants stampeded I sent the ballista crews chasing them with their butter knives in a bizarre, Benny-Hill style chase. Needless to say, the greenhorns would rout after one stomp, but the triple-gold guys were very persistent indeed.

Now that's how proper men do it! None of your wrapping up in sheets of steel armour or hiding behind 20 foot pikes, troops who will take on a rampaging elephant with only a butter knife are my kind of soldiers!

[ataribaby]

You do realise that the accuracy vs. towers is different to the accuracy vs. units? Don't know if that would make a difference.

I didn't know that. I've just tried to contrive a Custom Battle with ballistae vs infantry where the infantry just stand there and get shot to bits (as can happen in some campaign battles), but it's proving to be more difficult than I thought.

I tried a couple of river crossings. One against all slow moving halberdiers - they simply advanced inexorably at snails pace across the river and knacked all my ballista crews. Another against all peasant archers with a big wad of my own armoured swordsmen stuck in the middle of the bridge for them to shoot at while my ballistae picked them off from a distance. They too bum-rushed across the bridge in a mass butter knife charge.

Perhaps in a siege defence sally the enemy might comply and stay put. Does anyone have any ideas on testing arty accuracy vs units?

Also, ballistas are pretty accurate to start with, so a small increase might not be very noticeable.

Honestly, there really was very little variation in the hit rate of the ballista units. Sometimes the greenhorns even crept ahead. All towers were destroyed at about the same time though, so any variation was averaged out. I tried the battle again a couple of times to make sure, with similar results.