Best Way To Restore Troop Numbers?

[Ravioli]

Which is the best way to restore troop numbers? AFter a battle i like to replenish my squads to full counts but i notice that when i combine 2 squads of the same type that if one of them is higher ranking and the other one isnt, their ranks(echelons) drop unless they are the same rank.So the other option is to route them to a city which can build those same types of units and retrain them, but sometimes that can take awhile if u can only do 2 or 3 at a time and u have 10 squads.Is it worth it to save their ranks or just replenish them by combining them even if they drop rank. Hope i explained this, had trouble trying to .

[Revan The Great]

It has caused me great frustration, having to take 7 turns (or 14 years) to replenish my full-stack army to full strength. So usually i'll just combine troops and have a steady supply of no ones coming in. I suppose that's how it would have worked anyway.

[Ambrosius]

i only bother replenishing when they are significantly down. if theres still 90 left out of a 120 man unit, ill leave it as is until it goes down to 60-70 or so and then replenish.

you should have some sortof fodder troops in your army's vanguard anyways. my front line is always just cheap-o units. ill use militia, or even crappy town guards, and often if im running low on fodder ill just hire up some merceneries, doesnt really matter what type.

theyre the first line that charges the enemy - they soak up 90% of the arrows/bolts, and theyre the line that gets charged by the enemy cavalry and takes the majority of the losses. then i send in my mop-up troops like jannissary heavy infantry to clean up. doesnt matter if at this point half of my fodder breaks, since my elite troops have high morale and my general is seconds away from charging into the flank and blowing his warhorn anyway.

you cannot avoid casualties in any large battle of reasonably evenly matched armies. but with some strategy you can CHOOSE what you give up as casualties. always use fodder troops.

[lawngnome]

Peasants! Lots of Peasants!

[dawgish]

Which is the best way to restore troop numbers? AFter a battle i like to replenish my squads to full counts but i notice that when i combine 2 squads of the same type that if one of them is higher ranking and the other one isnt, their ranks(echelons) drop unless they are the same rank.So the other option is to route them to a city which can build those same types of units and retrain them, but sometimes that can take awhile if u can only do 2 or 3 at a time and u have 10 squads.Is it worth it to save their ranks or just replenish them by combining them even if they drop rank. Hope i explained this, had trouble trying to .

Retraining experienced troops at a city/castle is the same as merging it with another unit with 0 experience.

[morble]

Probably the best way to restore troop numbers is to merge like-experienced troops. The reason ranks drop when combining newbs with veterans is that the game keeps track of every single soldier. What you see listed on the unit is an overall average. Thus, it's possible to have a mix of uber-elites and total rookies in a single unit, which will likely fight unevenly--the strong guys will still kill their opponents while the newbs will be more likely to get hosed. You can get more shock/punch out of the unit if they are all high-experienced.

One advantage to letting troops drop in number is that morale tends to increase faster for smaller units. OTOH, it takes fewer combat losses to rout them.

[Endeav]

If you have the cash, you can always recruit backups for what you expect to lose the most. If I'm going campaigning somewhere away from my top level castles, I'll put out a couple extra of the units I'm bound to lose, I.E. heavy infantry and cavalry, in a backup stack that tails your main army. Doesn't solve the problem of losing experienced units from merging, but beats heading back to a castle.

Plus, if you're french, you can potentially have 6 expereince knights on hand, and very easy to get them to come out as 4 experience.

[FriendoftheDork]

Retraining experienced troops at a city/castle is the same as merging it with another unit with 0 experience.

eeeh! Wrong!

This whas what it was like in MTW1, but not Rome and not this game. (despite what the manual says). I've retrained a single knight with 4 xp, and it turned into a 40 men 4 xp unit!

So how do you do it? First merge only units that are too big to merge completely.

Say you have normal sizes, and one unit of crossbows with 30 (xp 2) men and one with 45 (xp 1). Drag the 30 man-unit over the 45 man one, and the lowest xp of the 30 man unit will fill up the 45 man unit. Thus the 45 man unit will be full probably with 1xp or perhaps even 2.

The 30 man unit (now 15 men) will probably now be an xp 3 unit as only the "hardcore" remains. Retrain these 15 men (either send them home or retrain them in a newly conquered castle). It's no longer possible to retrain the whole army in one turn after taking a castle (good call, ca), but even so retraining is worth it.

By merging units that are too big you will get a few units to retrain while the rest of the army will be at full strength.

[Soryn Arkayn]

I ALWAYS replenish my units to full strength before I continue to do battle. It's just not worth the risk to attack with under-strength units; although if you're attacked obviously you have no choice. That said, just because I prefer to replenish my units before continuing that usually doesn't inhibit me from continuing my advance, because I'll usually have a second stack trailing my Invasion Army, which I use to reinforce my losses while I send any under-strength units back to my settlements for replenishment.

[Hurricane]

I usually just drop one unit card on to another if they have similar ranks, then send the units with low troop numbers off to cities and castles to be restored back to full strength. Also say a full unit size of spearmen is 120, I'll drag the unit cards together as long as they still stay two separate units, if I have say 59 spearmen and 60 spearmen, I won't drag them together since they will merge into one unit.

Also if you have a lot of units with low numbers and you want to restore them fast, divide them up into 3 or 4 groups and send them off to different castles and cities... this is really only a good idea though if the units are just your average units that can be produced/restored in most low level cities and castles.

[Ahiga]

A strategy I used in the old RTW was to have an entourage army following the main one. It would be made up of 25% of the main army, for instance, if I had a main army mostly made up of Saracen Spearmen and Ottoman and Turkish Archers, the entourage might have 3 saracen spearmen, 2 ottomans and 2 turkish archers.

They also can fufill the role of a garrison, and the only risk you run is of them getting hit by a flanking opponent.