retrain question and exe?

**Rahl** · 10-20-2010, 22:46

Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

With rtw.exe, the AI never retrains, so it's effectively an exploit in favour of the human player.

I have often seen armies with several silver or gold chevron units with full manpower and no small units remaining from merging. Since the AI can't disband I'm sure they were retrained units, what else could they be?

@Vollorix
If you don't disband where do you get your veterans to fill up the ranks?

**Paltmull** · 10-20-2010, 22:55

Originally Posted by Rahl

what else could they be?

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

**QuintusSertorius** · 10-20-2010, 23:03

Originally Posted by Paltmull

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

Indeed, if it has anything more than bronze upgrades on weaponry/armour, it's a rebelled unit (subject to vanilla RTW mechanics).

**vollorix** · 10-20-2010, 23:06

What about former battles the faction armies fought? Do i have to disband veterans from the campaigns i fought, are there not enough from previous battles, campaigns and wars? ;)

**Rahl** · 10-21-2010, 20:25

Originally Posted by Paltmull

Units that the AI faction got from a settlement that rebelled to it, perhaps? Such units often have messed up stats.

I played EB a lot and I know how units from rebelling cities look like.
Units from rebelling have, at least in my game, most of the time level 2 weapon and level 3 armor upgrade, the same or nearly the same experience and slaves are often part of this armies. I'm quite sure that the unis I meant where no rebells.

**Ca Putt** · 10-22-2010, 11:53

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

**Ludens** · 10-22-2010, 14:01

Originally Posted by IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer

Still, I'm quite sure nobody forgot to have the value changed to zero. The game is supposed to do this.

It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

Originally Posted by Ca Putt

thats a very interesting thesis ludens. so you don't add new troops to a unit but rather reincarnate the dead ones when retraining?
but how would that work with merging units?

That would be a way of putting, but it's more accurate to say that the individual soldiers do not exist on the campaign map. On the map, a unit is a table of, say, 300 by 3, with every row representing a soldier. The first column would be an ID number for the battle engine; the second a binary value indicating whether he's dead or alive; and the third his experience. (Obviously, a unit would contain other parameters besides the table to indicate unit type, upgrades, etc.) This table is used by the battle-engine to construct the unit on the battlefield; once the battle is over the battle-engine will pass information to the campaign-engine so that it can update the values in the unit-table. The rows of the unit-table that now belong to dead soldiers do not get deleted: they take up very little space, and constantly changing the memory allocation of a table is a waste of CPU time. Instead, the second value is simply set to "dead". When the unit is retrained, this value is changed to "alive" again. Merging most likely occurs through a different programming routine that also copies the experience values from the table of the donor unit.

**IPoseTheQuestionYouReturnTheAnswer** · 10-22-2010, 20:54

It's possible, but I doubt it has much effect on the game's difficulty. It's also, from a programming point of view, convoluted and inconsistent. Why not use unit's average XP for new soldiers instead of the inconsistent values we see now? Why not extend this to merging? You are right that CA intended to make the game easier, but they would have chosen a simpler way to do so.

True enough, but it does have an affect on game difficulty insofar as new players to the series might get mad if their beloved companions are punished for being restored to full, as was the case in Medieval 1 and valor.

Remember that this same system exists in Medieval 2, and it is far more consistent and polished in that game. I'm guessing the veterency system in Rome was just one of those "unfinished" parts of a rushed product, since it seems every CA game since Medieval 1 has been a rushed product with several incomplete features. I can definitely say that it is supposed to be this way in these games, and it is not a bug or a programming mistake. Incomplete programming, maybe.

As for your explanation of how retraining works, sounds sensible to me. It mostly matches what I've seen from the game, however inconsistent it may be,

**AstroCat** · 10-22-2010, 20:59

So basically to sum up, in most situations if you want to be more "realistic" you'd merge in order to reduce experience but there is a case to be made for being able to retrain to some extent perhaps in major cities since retraining does not mix units but simple turns dead ones in to live ones at the exp. level they had when they died?