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

[Septentrionalis]

This issue might be inherently related to Medieval 2 rather than EB2 itself, but I would like to hear the opinion of other EB2 enthusiasts. Namely, when retraining troops, their experience get diluted when casualties are replaced by fresh troops. However, people have pointed out that saving the game, then reloading and assigning troops for retraining the very last thing you do (not moving units etc. afterwards) negates the effect and the unit retains its experience level after retraining.


Is that the bug and consequently an exploit, or is it a bug that the units lose experience all the time? In the original Rome: Total War units would automatically retain their experience level when retraining with or without trickery. In the real world, the effect is probably somewhere in the middle ground. Collective memory and experience, the ability of the leaders etc. contribute to the unit's performance and morale. While new recruits are not equal to veterans, they probably do not lower the unit's abilities quite as much if they are surrounded by experienced and confident companions and leaders with considerable fighting experience.

What is your opinion? Do you train in the end of the turn to retain experience levels or do you let it get diluted? How does AI come up with such high levels of experience early on in the game if they are subject to the same treatment as a human player without exploits/workarounds?

[Baharr]

I definitely use the "exploit" if I'm recruiting a unit in a city with a +experience building, since it sometimes fails to apply otherwise.

I guess this bug doesn't affect my narrative gameplay regarding retraining because really I only retrain garrisons after a siege or units that I've merged and who now are now 2-3 dudes short of a full unit. In most cases I merge units and then bring up fresh troops.

[tentaku]

whaaght I been retraining and my units keep the experience bars, so you mean in reality my retrained units are faking their experience bars?

[Septentrionalis]

whaaght I been retraining and my units keep the experience bars, so you mean in reality my retrained units are faking their experience bars?

What I am saying is that each time you retrain your units, the new recruits decrease the overall experience level of the unit. Unless you save your game when your turn is done, then reload the save, and assign units to be retrained and do nothing else until you actually end your turn. Then the units get replenished by equally experienced troops without a loss of experience.

[tentaku]

What I am saying is that each time you retrain your units, the new recruits decrease the overall experience level of the unit. Unless you save your game when your turn is done, then reload the save, and assign units to be retrained and do nothing else until you actually end your turn. Then the units get replenished by equally experienced troops without a loss of experience.

But everytime i retrain my units keep their exp bars though. Without saving or anything.

[alex33]

I personally never heard of this. But I generally play very RP heavy so after I reached my goals, according to my house rules, I disband my army. I mostly don't use retraining at all only really the merge function

[Sint]

You don't need to save and reload you simply need to retrain the untis as the last thing you do during the turn.I don't see it is as an exploit since without it units will not get the exp bonus from buildings.

[Jurand of Cracow]

Me, I'm getting more and more convinced (by eg. Lusitano here) that if someone wants to be true to history he should not retrain units but only merge them. The new recruits should not have the same experience as the veteran soldiers in the units. They may get an initial training - but it's provided by some buildings. Given that the EBII system provides for little battle loses, it should not be impossible to get to the golden chevrons in this sense.
IIRC, the buildings do provide experience bonus, but you need to make the recruitment of the new units as the very last thing you do in your turn (eg. make all the moves with the agents, all the purchases etc - and only then recruit the new units (as @Sint mentioned). Admittedly, it's not possible with the 2-turn-recruitment units but then you may retrain them in one turn any time after they're recruited.

[QuintusSertorius]

Retraining is a player exploit; the AI hardly ever does it.

[mephiston]

I tend to agree with Jurand. If going for roleplay, merging units instead of retraining is the way to go for me since EB1.

The variety of available units may prove problematic in this regard, since you probably don't have two of each unit all the time, but IMO there are workarounds to this (I mean, it's not difficult to justify it). If you include one single unit in your army, this could mean that:
1) It's an elite unit. It wasn't easy to replenish losses in such a small and chosen group of professionals, especially in a short amount of time. The number of veterans should dwindle due to attrition (and diseases and age too, but that's not replicable in the game).
2) It's a regional unit, whose recruitment pool is limited. Allies/semi-independent kingdoms/provinces with a certain degree of freedom were usually not that keen to send their troops to fight far away from home, and they were usually the first to back out. Defensive wars in proximity to the region might be something different, and retraining can be preferable in this case.

Historically, when an army (or a battalion, or a brigade or whatever) was overflooded with raw recruits, for example after a long and bloody campaign, the veteran units were usually disbanded and divided among the newly formed segments, while promoting officers and soldiers to senior positions so that experienced officers could lead the newbies in the first-line duty. Napoleon's Grande Armée needed this special treatment several times. No way this can be accurately replicated, unfortunately, but I think the closest procedure is to merge low-exp units with high-exp, depleted ones. If going full-roleplay mode, I'd avoid merging high-exp units only, in order to avoid experience stacking that the AI cannot replicate; this can simulate the retirement of old soldiers too.

All in all, I don't like retraining a whole lot, whereas I usually merge. If you really care about experienced units you should use them conservatively, committing them when most needed, which is what usually happened in military history. If they die, they die (as Ivan Drago says)

[Septentrionalis]

But everytime i retrain my units keep their exp bars though. Without saving or anything.

I personally never heard of this.

You don't need to save and reload you simply need to retrain the untis as the last thing you do during the turn.

Ok, thank you all for correcting me. And thank you for relieving me from doing the load ritual every time I need to retrain. I could have sworn that my units had lost experience after retraining. I also remember reading a lengthy explanation somewhere stating that the game keeps track of individual soldiers experience (!), which supposedly causes experience to drop with fresh recruits and also explains how the battle report sometimes shows -1 experience for units (experienced individuals dying and thus lowering the overall experience of a unit).

Now I cannot reproduce any of that, however. In fact, I tested it training a cavalry unit with three bronze chevrons that was down to one third of its full strength. The unit not only recovered the numbers but came out with a single silver chevron! There were no special buildings in the city. Quite confusing.

[Septentrionalis]

But I generally play very RP heavy so after I reached my goals, according to my house rules, I disband my army. I mostly don't use retraining at all only really the merge function

Me, I'm getting more and more convinced (by eg. Lusitano here) that if someone wants to be true to history he should not retrain units but only merge them.

Retraining is a player exploit; the AI hardly ever does it.

I tend to agree with Jurand. If going for roleplay, merging units instead of retraining is the way to go for me since EB1.

That is a great idea. My only concern was that the AI would be gaining an advantage on me, but the confirmation by Sertorius settles it. The only problem that remains with the approach is that it will result in smaller stacks. I roleplay in a way that avoid conflict with proper factions and mainly go for the rebel/eleutheroi that keep sending raiders in my territories. Those have crazy stacks that exceed the 20 unit limit that I have. I wonder why that is, but it sure makes expansion costly, especially with the cramped spaces within cities and the plaza morale reset. If I can make it with losses under 25 % (huge unit size), I consider the battle successful.

[Cryoshakespeare]

In my experience, unit chevrons do very little anyway. I've done numerous tests in custom battle mode with units charging into each other, one having max chevrons and one having none, and at most you could say the max chevrons had a bit of an edge, but other things factor in way more really.

Edit: And much to my woe, my favorite units, the Rhompaianai, don't become killing machines at max chevrons. And I worked so hard on retraining them to max in one campaign ;-;

[Jurand of Cracow]

Those have crazy stacks that exceed the 20 unit limit that I have.

come one, 20 units is peanuts. just have a look how it is in the Rome 2 TW (with DEI submod) - the AI comes in 80-unit packs

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[BailianSteel]

I let it get diluted. I haven't seen a unit lose more than one chevron in retraining unless they take a ridiculous amount of losses (let's say over half) and are replenished from there. Hell, they might not have lost more than one chevron even in that case. It doesn't bother me, and I wouldn't use the exploit.


The AI probably gets high levels of experienced soldiers through auto-resolving, it's the only way you can get high experience infantry (especially Phalangitai) in a reasonable amount of time.

[Sint]

1) It's an elite unit. It wasn't easy to replenish losses in such a small and chosen group of professionals, especially in a short amount of time. The number of veterans should dwindle due to attrition (and diseases and age too, but that's not replicable in the game).
2) It's a regional unit, whose recruitment pool is limited. Allies/semi-independent kingdoms/provinces with a certain degree of freedom were usually not that keen to send their troops to fight far away from home, and they were usually the first to back out. Defensive wars in proximity to the region might be something different, and retraining can be preferable in this case.

That's nonsense you can only retrain a unit if you can recruit them in the same settlement and only when enough unit pool is full enough.

If you have a unit that takes 10 turns to replenish and another unit of the same type that is depleted to 50% of it's original size you will need to wait for at least 5 turns until you can retrain it.

[mephiston]

That's nonsense you can only retrain a unit if you can recruit them in the same settlement and only when enough unit pool is full enough.

If you have a unit that takes 10 turns to replenish and another unit of the same type that is depleted to 50% of it's original size you will need to wait for at least 5 turns until you can retrain it.

The situation I sketched is assuming you have the possibility of retraining said unit. You know, this is the topic of the thread: if you can retrain an experienced unit, will you actually do it?

I wouldn't, I'd prefer to stick around with the depleted unit (if it's the only one in the army) or to merge multiple units rather than bringing them back and retraining them. The sentences you quoted are my "roleplay explanations" for this.

[tentaku]

In my experience, unit chevrons do very little anyway. I've done numerous tests in custom battle mode with units charging into each other, one having max chevrons and one having none, and at most you could say the max chevrons had a bit of an edge, but other things factor in way more really.

Edit: And much to my woe, my favorite units, the Rhompaianai, don't become killing machines at max chevrons. And I worked so hard on retraining them to max in one campaign ;-;

I hate medieval 2's way of handling experience. I always like rome 2's experience system more, chevrons translate straight into stats, and into both attack and defense.

[Septentrionalis]

I let it get diluted. I haven't seen a unit lose more than one chevron in retraining unless they take a ridiculous amount of losses (let's say over half) and are replenished from there.

Here is another user who reports witnessing dilution. Many others report not having seen that. I suspect that there is a bug that causes different behaviors in the game from time to time.

[Domaje]

I do not recall having a unit losing chevrons after retraining it. But I think retraining an experienced unit significantly raise its cost. More feedback about that would be interesting, yet I believe I payed 2000 mnai or so once to retrain a medium cavalry with silver chevrons (Eranag Aswar IIRC) which was depleted of a quarter or at max half of its maximum size.

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).
I do not know if other levels of experience have an effect on retraining cost.