Retraining bug/feature: what is your opinion on the workaround?

In my experience, the units don't lose the chevrons.
The retraining costs scale with the size of the units - the more depleted unit you retrain, the more the costs are similar to the costs of recruiting a new unit.
It's very interesting that the chevrons impact on the cost of retraining, I haven't noticed it.
To my mind, the biggest exploit is when you merge two units but a few guys are still left after merging and you retrain them. They have the most experience of all in the initial unit, so such a depleted unit has even more average experience (sometimes visible in more chevrons) than it had initially. So you can get gold very quickly.

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Originally Posted by Jurand of Cracow

It's very interesting that the chevrons impact on the cost of retraining, I haven't noticed it.

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I have done some more tests and the results are surprising. I merged 2 units with high experience (3 silver chevrons for both of them) and the retraining cost was never the same. When a good numbers of the veterans soldiers where not in the depleted unit, with the unit losing a chevron, the retraining cost was more or less halved. But even when the whole unit had the same level of experience, it was never the same cost from one test to another.
So I think that when retraining, the game keeps tracks of each individual soldiers, and that you pay for the experience of the new recruits that fills the ranks in order to avoid losing a chevron, unit wide. The higher the experience of the whole unit, the more you pay, still the higher the number of soldiers of that experience level in the unit the less you pay (relatively).

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Originally Posted by Domaje

In fact I just tested it now and I found that retraining a unit with a silver chevron costs 18% more to resplenish than a unit with 0 or 1 bronze chevron (no difference there).

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Originally Posted by Domaje

I have done some more tests and the results are surprising. I merged 2 units with high experience (3 silver chevrons for both of them) and the retraining cost was never the same. When a good numbers of the veterans soldiers where not in the depleted unit, with the unit losing a chevron, the retraining cost was more or less halved. But even when the whole unit had the same level of experience, it was never the same cost from one test to another.
So I think that when retraining, the game keeps tracks of each individual soldiers, and that you pay for the experience of the new recruits that fills the ranks in order to avoid losing a chevron, unit wide. The higher the experience of the whole unit, the more you pay, still the higher the number of soldiers of that experience level in the unit the less you pay (relatively).

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Thank you for your effort of testing and reporting. This is really interesting and seeing the algorithm would really make my day. The more I learn, the more it seems like only recruiting fresh units and then combining them makes sense. Then again, the AI gets a lot of experience from auto-resolve battles and there are logistic and logical downsides to never retraining. Like the fact that slowly refreshing cities (cf. civitas libera in Roman campaigns) are able to retrain after a while but would take a years and years to train a new unit altogether. It doesn't make sense that suddenly you can recruit a new unit but before that there is no way of replenishing ten or twenty men to an existing unit.

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Originally Posted by Jurand of Cracow

To my mind, the biggest exploit is when you merge two units but a few guys are still left after merging and you retrain them. They have the most experience of all in the initial unit, so such a depleted unit has even more average experience (sometimes visible in more chevrons) than it had initially. So you can get gold very quickly.

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Thank you for the heads up. I have to make a conscious choice of not retraining at all if I start combining. It is a great temptation to exploit something like that when one sees it happening.

By the way, it is quite an ambitious game design decision to actually track the experience of each and every soldier in the unit.

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Originally Posted by Domaje

The higher the experience of the whole unit, the more you pay, still the higher the number of soldiers of that experience level in the unit the less you pay (relatively).

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This is a great observation. It would be cool if a unit's upkeep scales with its chevrons. More experienced veteran units gets paid higher. Would make human players think twice about grooming and keeping stacks of expensive elite units.

Cool, but not something we can implement, unfortunately. That's all in hardcoded spaces we can't touch.