Quote Originally Posted by Ciaran View Post
Strictly speaking, ransoming would almost always be the better option (I donґt do it often, though), as you get back your surviving veteran soldiers. And valour is never lost, but tracked by the game on a per soldier basis, according to the Beginners Guide. There is also an option to create logfiles showing it. So, while it seems like the valour rating of a unit goes down after retraining, that is only the average valour. So, especially if you have a veteran unit, or one that heroically fought before routing, you should consider ransoming those few surviving killing machines.
As Drone in post #3 remarked, heroically fighting units usually take so heavy casualties that they are reduced to few people that will just dissolve in a mass of zero-value retrained unit soldiers. Besides, how can you be sure that you will get precisely that unit of outstanding fighters back, but not a heap of peasants?
By the way, does the AI return all captured soldiers or only some of them?