How to train infantry?

[Yin]

I've been trying for quite sometime but I can't get my army up to rank when it comes to infantry. I managed to grind my cavs up to 2 stripe and 1 star, but infantry would always loose rank and I've only gotten 1 or 2 up to stripes and stars. Any ideas?

[SupAll]

Don't reinforce, always resupply by having them sit in a town. What I tend to do is I keep my lower ranked units up front and keep my more experienced in reserve. This allows me to level up my infantry in a relatively even manner.

[Chewie]

Find regions where only militia can be built and look for large stacks.

[Yin]

So I have to station them in a town instead of just letting them regenerate in the field?

[Tommy8kins]

No, do this;

1. raw troops. Stick in front, when nearly decimated (down to less than 40-50% strength) pull them back and if you can afford to send them off the field immediately so they dont get wiped out. (white flag) or just keep them out the way.
2. corporal, sergeant (2, 3 stripes) second rank or out on the wings, use after raw troops are killed off.
4. 4 stripes - keep in reserve or flanks to keep up morale and to repel counter attacks.

After 3 years I have whole armies of nothing but sergeants and 4 stripe troops, they are fantastic, dont run and repel cavalry well.

[xxoverlordxx]

Well what I did in my French campaign was take Napoleons Armies to a " training " mission to Great Britain or Russia.

[Clodius]

Never merging units and rotating armies between a more or less full-strength front line stack and a replenishing under-strength stack in reserve seems to do the trick.

Also avoid autoresolve as at harder difficulties this makes it far more likely that you will either lose your whole army in a defeat, or have smaller units disappear altogether even with a victory (the little skirmisher and cavalry units seem particularly fragile).

Or if you don't mind exploiting the system build several line infantry only full stacks send them somewhere like Berlin that spams endless enemy hordes - and then autoresolve away and pull back and replace with more balanced armies when the line infantry units have acquired enough experience.

Its also arguable that in our obsession with finding the perfect balanced killer stack and having as many of those cool elite units as possible we tend to undervalue infantry anyway - at least on SP I find the biggest challenges are the armies made up almost entirely of Prussian musketeers and fusiliers or British line and light inf.