Gaining experience

**glorfindel87** · July 21, 2006, 04:17 PM

Im playing a Gaul campaign, and I'm having LOADS of trouble trying to get any of my units to gain experience. I have one army that has fought 10-15 battles. With the same units, btw, with only a little retraining. And yet NONE of them has more than 3 red chevrons. It's retarted. Anything i'm doing wrong ou think? This is really bothering me.

**Decimus Equitius** · July 21, 2006, 04:41 PM

That sounds about right. Are you slaughtering everyone before they can get off the battlefield? That Helps, also your cavalry may be stealing some of your experience. So let your infantry help with the slaughter by making your cavalry chase the first routers and your infantry chase the main routing line. I don't know if that makes sense. Also a sacred grove of epona helps, but it depends on the mod I guess.

**Yossarian** · July 21, 2006, 05:49 PM

I have no problems getting general's units and cavalry up to silver chevrons, but infantry seem to be really hard to get even a little experience with in vanilla. Maybe it's because soldiers get killed so fast and easily in the battles in vanilla or something.

**Hannibal Barca** · July 21, 2006, 06:04 PM

I'm not sure what rate units gain experience but this could well be normal. I have had some units get no experience for the greatest feats. A series of huge heroic battles and they get one poxy bronze chevron. I have noticed that an auto-resolve battle now and then really gets the experience up. In auto-calc the experience seems very generous. I had a battle in which i killed about 30 soldiers yet around 8 units got experience and most had kills: 0 and casualties: 0.

I think that the amount they kill and the battles that they do it in (tough fights or walks in the park) affects this rate. Really don't know what to suggest. Just keep fighting away and maybe it will pick up a bit.

**glorfindel87** · July 21, 2006, 10:39 PM

Just had a long drawn out battle with the Romans. 2500 men vs 2300 men.
Long and bloody. I lost about 600, they lost everybody. One 20 man Barbarian cavalry unit gained 1 xp. And that is with several swordsmen units getting 200+ kills.

**Severous** · July 22, 2006, 12:56 AM

glorfindel87

Im playing Gaul also. Its my mobile forces that do most the fighting and gain the experience. Nearly all the infantry is low in experience most of it obtained from temples.

A suggestion which may remove the bother you are having. Small fresh infantry units will be better for chasing down tired routing infantry. The difference in health will give them the speed to run routers down, the size of the unit means more kills per man.

Killing routing troops bestow far less experience (1/5th?) than killing fighting troops.

A technique that moves experience along well is to merge/retain in a certain way. Say you have 2 warbands of 120men each and no experience. After a battle they are at 80men and 60men..still no experience. Merge one unit into another and check the experience of the 20men left over. Still 0exp? Now merge the other way..a different 20 men are now left over. Still 0 exp? Repeat a few times. Exp1? On occassion you will see experience appear as a group of experienced men in the units are collectted together. Its those experienced men you send for retraining in town. The replacements they recevied will be at the exp of the average of the men in the unit. Thus your unit of 20 exp1 will now be 120men at exp1.

So merge in such a way to create experienced 'leftovers' and retrain them.

Hope that helps.

PS I bet your Forresters are gaining experience OK.

**joorik** · July 23, 2006, 04:19 PM

Playing RTW:BI I had Carriage Ballistas with 6 men in each group. Sent them to kill some rebels and one unit gained 2 exp and the other 3 exp in one small battle where both killed some 100 enemies. On the other hand gaining exp to infantry units seems to be much harder, but with autobattle the expgain seems to be no problem