experience and autoresolve, a testcase

[Delvecchio1975]

Hi,

I think one of the coolest facets of the game is the experience gaining of your units. Playing RTRPE1.9 i tried the following: playing as Pontus, I conquered both Ancyra and Pessinus, the only cities producing Galatians. Made two full stacks of them (all swordsmen, two horsemen in each). The Pessinus stack I used to fight myself, not on auto-resolve. It went straight west and conquered Sardis, Abydos, Pergamon, Prusa and Nicomedia PLUS beating two half stacks of Seleucids and four full Macedonian stacks (all well balanced armies) - returning in the mean time for retraining (note: retraining does not diminish their experience: five Galatian swordsmen with 1 silver chevron become 80 Galatian swordsmen with 1 silver chevron). The Ancyra troops went South and conquered Halicarnassus, Smyrna and Milete (rebel) plus half a stack of Seleucids, all on auto-resolve.
result: The Pessinus stack has an average of three bronze chevrons, the Ancyra stack an average of two silver chevrons - after many less battles, but on auto-resolve.

Apparently the auto-resolve makes your units much more experienced? that's a bit disappointing to my feeling ... The Pessinus boys must have killed something like 6 or 7000 enemies, the Ancyra stack less than 2000 ...

[Brusilov]

Yes, auto resolving does appear to do that. I will usually only auto resolve when fighting a very small rebel force with a full stack.

My understanding is that with auto resolve the units are sent in one at a time, the first unit (after the 'general') will usually have more casualties than the subsequent units. So, don't put your light troops early in the order, use your heavy infantry.

I'd much prefer to fight the battles on the map! There are times when you're attacking, spend ages moving your army to the far point on the map only to have the enemy army run away. I've even seen the attackers run away before closure!

[Delvecchio1975]

like this, the best thing to do is autoresolve a bunch of battles, retrain and then use your gold chevrons for your manual battles. it would be nicer, and more of an incentive to play yourself, if it was the other way round ....

[Brusilov]

like this, the best thing to do is autoresolve a bunch of battles, retrain and then use your gold chevrons for your manual battles. it would be nicer, and more of an incentive to play yourself, if it was the other way round ....

But it isn't as satisfying as fighting the battles yourself and gaining the experience slowly.

The following is one of my veteran armies;





@Artax
Even in battles where there's been no fighting (the AI ran away) some of my units have gained experience! Maybe, just for walking around the battlefield.....

[Delvecchio1975]

But it isn't as satisfying as fighting the battles yourself and gaining the experience slowly.

The following is one of my veteran armies;

i'd love to have a look, but my 3G card blocks anything from photobucket

[Artax]

Even in battles where there's been no fighting (the AI ran away) some of my units have gained experience! Maybe, just for walking around the battlefield.....

I've also seen this. Not only when the enemy flees from the battlefield (ahh I love when they are doing it), but also during usual battles. Unit gains a new chevron at the beggining of the battle even if does no fighting at all. Maybe this is done to represent the experience gained for just attending a battlefield many times...

[Artax]

The Pessinus stack has an average of three bronze chevrons, the Ancyra stack an average of two silver chevrons - after many less battles, but on auto-resolve.

I'm not an expert in this, but I know that when you are fighting battles yourself there is a special system which counts the experience of units. The unit which killed the most enemy troops will get more experience. Cavalry get experience faster, becouse they have less men in a unit.

As I think (please correct me if I'm mistaken) this system is not applied during auto-resolved battles. I say this becouse I have seen units gaining experience even if they had 0 kills and 0 losses. And I think that auto-resolve uses another system to determine experience, so you get a result that you just mentioned.

Again if I'm mistaken, someone with better knowledge please correct me as it is just my thought why this happens.

[Delvecchio1975]

thanks brusilov, for the attachment!

and GAWDAMMIT! how do you get them like that? I keep killing and killing and killing until my hands are purple, but I rarely get a few units into the gold!

[Brusilov]

thanks brusilov, for the attachment!

and GAWDAMMIT! how do you get them like that? I keep killing and killing and killing until my hands are purple, but I rarely get a few units into the gold!

Given that it's 38BC that army has seen a fair bit of action - I do have several armies like that in this campaign. It is an RTR 6 Gold campaign so there is only two turns per year.

I try an limit the number of field armies that I have, so they tend to become veterans as they see a fair bit of action. Settlements usually have garrison troops - the cheapest ones unless it's a front line settlement where a semi decent garrison is used. I usually have an army nearby to break the siege, anyway.

Even playing manually and winning heroic battles is no real guarantee of gaining experience. Sometimes, it's possible to see a unit gain that experience on the battlefield, I think the units may 'shimmer' (well, either that or I've been playing too long).

I usually re-train units in the barracks often rather than merge them with fresh units (which can dissolve experience). Some people won't re-train but merge. It's a personal preference. Play like you want to.

When I fight a battle my main line is set on 'guard mode' this means that although my units don't kill as many men as they would otherwise it does mean that more men in the unit survives. This wa smainly done to preserve the line - there is nothing worse than having your units running after a routing unit only to get surrounded in the process. When the opposing army routs (with help from my flank attacks) I make sure I destroy as many units as possible with the cavalry. Sometimes it's best to have a light cavalry unit to chase down routing heavy cavalry, unless they are Katophractoi where anything can run them down.....

@Joerd9
The experience does mean that they are more effective in battle than rookie units. For each unit of experience (a chevron) the attack and defense skill goes up by 1.

Check out post #13 in the following thread;

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=123060

I do notice the difference when fighting with a freshly trained army compared to one of these veteran armys.

[joerd9]

That is a very mean army he's got there. Wouldn't want to face it on the field. I would ... despair I think.

[pannonian]

AFAIK on autoresolve the kills are distributed among the surviving troops, but in a played battle the main killers on the frontline are often killed and lose their experience. Also, in my own experience, units usually degrade in overall experience after retraining, as a result of the chevrons being averaged out over a larger number of troops. There have been occasions when this hasn't been so, but they are rare and the exception.

[thegravytrain18]

In my very first campaign as Rome in vanilla, I had mixed silver chevron units on the Gallic front and I merged them all into one army of nothing but silver. They were pretty tough, I always used them for the most important battles/sieges. Ofcourse, the rest of the armies were weakened by losing most of their experience, but they still had some red chevrons.

[CiusFortius]

For infantry the best way to get experience is to autoresolve and win. For cavalry and archers/slingers I find manual battles are best. I tested this extensively a while ago as well and ended up with the following understanding and assumptions on it:

First: In manual battles individual units on a battlefield get experience. For instance I once saw a cavalry unit which killed a lot of routers gain 2 exp in a battle only to loose a few men to a spear unit that wouldn't route and loose those 2 experience points when 10% of the unit died. Same with infantry. The front line units get kills gaining experience and then die as they are in the front so you loose the experience. Ranged units on the other hand spread their experience better as the kills come from all of them The ranged units also die less often when well managed so you don't loose experienced soldiers. Autoresolve tends to kill off archers and cavalry and slingers much more than I do so for archer and cav heavy armies I fight myself. Infantry armies I don't mind autoresolving as much if I have plenty of cash and retraining nearby.

Second: Autoresolve, unlike manual battles, assigns experience evenly to all men within a unit. So even individual infantry that kill no-one within a unit get experience, unlike when you fight the battle yourself. This is why on average you get more experience when autoresolving. The kills are distributed evenly rather than to the front line guys who are most likely to die in your manual battles.

Thirdly: Kills are not the only determinant of experience. The game gives a little experience to units for other things in the battle than killing. What these things are I am not sure but I have seen units with no kills get a new chevron many times for both manual and auto-resolve battles. When fighting the battle yourself I think that many times those conditions are not met so little or no experience is given. The autoresolve on the other hand gives a median (possibly random) amount of this type of experience to all units always. Some of the triggers that may give non-kill experience I think may be:
- Units getting tired
- Reforming
- Wheeling using hotkeys
- Being within a certian distance of a routing unit or army.

What I often do in campaigns is autoresolve less crucial battles like against rebels or smaller forces to gain additional experience. This paractice is best when coupled with an army containing mostly heavy infantry and a healing ancilliary of some sort. Defensive battles I fight myself as I mostly defend with only a few infantry and mostly ranged units and cav. There I get more experience taking the field myself.