Experience for infantry

**Sitalkes** · January 08, 2012, 04:51 PM

I've read in other threads about players getting mulitple gold or sliver chevrons for their troop experience, but I only seem to get experience for my Britannia campaign cavalry and generals. An infantry bow unit caused 200 casualties and got no experience - is the only way to get experience for infantry units to let them be cut down to about half normal size and then be the unit to get the last man in an enemy unit or what?

**Aeratus** · January 08, 2012, 04:53 PM

An infantry bow unit is twice as large as a cavalry unit, so it needs to kill 2x as many men to gain experience. Also, captured prisoners count as kills, so it is harder for infantry units to gain experience because it's harder for them to chase prisoners.

**Sitalkes** · January 08, 2012, 07:12 PM

So how is experience worked out - is it something like the value of [ unit size / (kills + Prisoners)] has to be greater than a certain number? In MTW1 you had to kill the unit standard/flag bearer - does something like that apply?

**Surgeon** · January 08, 2012, 05:34 PM

Yep, experience is divided by the total number of people in the unit, therefore cavalry and especially generals have a much easier time gaining experience because they a) usually have less men than infantry, b) kill a lot more people, faster thanks to their charge bonus and c) can run down fleeing enemies more easily.

An easy way to get experience for infantry is to take them on a crusade or jihad, which will give them an extra chevron once you take the target city. You can also exploit this by quickly having several armies join the crusade/jihad the turn before you take the target. Something else you can do is selectively merge your units after a battle: all you need do is merge the unit with more experience with one that has less, but make sure that the units don't merge completely! The result will be such that the more experienced unit will have less men, thus they will have more average exp and might even go up a chevron or two.

Unfortunately for the last trick, however, when you retrain an experienced unit you will have a lot of greenhorns in it who will need to catch up exp-wise to the vets. The unit will not lose chevrons and you still get all the bonuses, but it will take longer to attain a new chevron than before.