Veterancy Bonuses Seem Meager

[AnonMilwaukean]

I've probably got 200 hours in on Attila, and there's a lot of good things going on despite a few hold-over issues from R2 (naval battles primarily).

But something I just noticed in my most recent campaign was: the bonuses from veterancy appear to be really low in Attila. Through a combination of technology, governor edicts, traditions, and general skills, I had the ability to pump out triple-gold vets with one of my armies in the late game, and (being the Franks) I trained a bunch of triple-gold Elite Sword Heerbann, among other units. Lo and behold, after I trained them, I moused over the units and they didn't seem substantially improved over a few triple-bronze Elite Sword Heerbann I had trained earlier and still had in an army garrisoning a settlement for happiness. The morale was better by a fair amount, but the melee defense and attack were not much higher at all.

This is a change I sort of can explain, but still feel disappointed over.

For one, with certain edicts and army traditions, it's actually not tough to be able to train units to double or triple silver with those two thing alone. I mean, if you can get 3 or 4 governors going, you often (with most factions) will have the ability to use edicts that stack per governor/province issuing them that grant +1 rank per unit trained faction-wide (as opposed to only in that province). Secondly, with certain army traditions, you can add to that by using a 'training army', which trains all your troops and passes them off to other armies. The training army will have traditions that add + 1 rank for infantry recruits, etc. So, with these two things alone, especially edicts, it's now fairly easy to get veternancy. Then add to that any techs that add vet ranks, and it becomes possible to have very high vet levels for brand new units.

Because it's easier to get vet levels, I think they decided to make vet levels do little but increase morale... the other bonuses tend to be very meager indeed, and melee attack and defense hardly go up at all, now.

I see the logic they employed: by making the peace-time options for increasing veterancy more numerous, they made the peace-time turns more interesting: you have to plan edicts, what army you will train with, what general is leading that army, etc. to really get a vet advantage. No more 'Champion taking everyone from nothing to triple-gold' now, as Champions had their training ability nerfed a bit alongside the additional options allowing for veterancy. Again, I get the logic, and this indeed makes peacetime more interesting in some ways. But they realized that making veterancy depend less on combat itself meant that the bonuses had to be smaller, especially since the new options often stack together. Unfortunately, the result is disposable armies after a while.

In previous games, getting vetrancy was not as easy. Even in Rome 2, being able to train brand new troops at more than double-silver was very tough since generals died so quickly, and often it took using a Champion on an army to, after a number of turns, get any troops at all into the gold levels. Veterancy was harder to come by, and even in the late game it was often a bigger deal if I lost gold-level units since this meant that replacements would need a number of turns of Champion training to be at that same level. The result was that veteran armies were something to really focus on and be careful with. But in Attila, by even the mid-game I'm often churning out units that are triple-silver or single-gold vets. Which, combined with the vet bonuses being smaller, means that veteran armies are basically disposable.

I don't like this because in previous games, both high-level generals and high veterancy levels were tough to get and were something that if I got them, I used them carefully. Then Rome 2 came and made high-level generals worthless (die every 20-40 turns from agent spam, or every 30-50 turns from old age) while veterancy was still a pretty powerful mechanic.

In Attila, I feel like they realized generals needed to be more important, and thus we now have generals that can serve as governors and use acquired skills to boost stats of trained troops in that province. And the generals themselves, while in the field, can boost defense/attack stats. And killing generals has a more severe morale impact, while being near a general has a higher boost. All well and good, but to do this they seem to have thought that they needed to reduce the vet level bonuses in these categories in order to not make general skills overpowered when used on high-vet troops. Which is a problem. High-level vets under a highly skilled general should have a powerful bonus, as getting these things combined means I had to be careful not to let the general die while also being smart about a variety of ways to get veterancy up.

All-in-all, it's a minor thing to tweak, but I feel like they need to look at the vet level balancing again. Because T3 gold vets should see more than a 7 or 8 point increase on attack/defense (i.e.: gold-vet Elite Sword Heerbann should have a substantial boost, like maybe up to a 15 point boost on melee attack/defense, not half that at 7-8 points).

Thoughts? Like I said before, I know CA employed reasonable logic to an extent, but vet level bonuses should be at least a little higher than they currently are, and to me it feels like they thought they needed to keep the bonuses down since even medium-level generals now buff units more easily. But really, if you manage to get a general with a bunch of attack/defense buffs, as well as high-vet-level units, then it seems like you should have considerably more powerful versions of the unit than if they were without a good general/high vet levels.

[Neige]

This should be possible to tweak pretty easily through modding:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Quite sure edict effect can be edited as well.

[Telenil]

I didn't play much of lategame Attila, but isn't moral a bigger deal than it used to be? I don't recall units leaving the fight before losing a single man in Rome II, while it routinely happens in Attila. Do veteran units fight substantially longer than others?

[.Mitch.]

Veterancy was overpowered in Rome 2, I honestly don't know how you could say otherwise. Every major mod for Rome 2 either reduced the potency of veterancy or hugely reduced how much could be gained from the likes of training, and that was because it was such a viable option.
My usual tactic was to get a General with a recruitment veterancy bonus trait, then get a Champion who specialized in training and pump out armies from Italia that had a minimum of gold level veterancy before they even hit their first combat. It was dumb and I loathe my playstyle because it made everything far too easy.

I do agree with you that veterancy should be a very potent boost, especially (if not primarily) to morale, just look at the Old Guard as maybe the best example of how much veterancy can actually count for when concentrated on a unit, veteran units in history were usually your unit you could count on to not break so morale is the fitting stat to boost.
However the ability to gain veterancy needs to be solely based on that unit having been fighting in a battle. Training, or any other non-combat means towards gaining veterancy, needs to be capped at bronze at most. It goes without saying there's obviously a very real limit as to how much you can learn from training, and you certainly can't teach a new recruit to be as 'veteran' as some guy who's fought multiple wars.

Ultimately as I've said I'd like to see veterancy be something only achievable through combat, by the very nature of the game gaining experience outside of combat is a defunct mechanic, because it's covered by the fact that you have a choice to recruit (and hence train) different units of varying quality when you build an army in the first place.
Unit quality, i.e. attack/defense stats, should be the deciding factor on which you recruit units. Morale, and the likeliness of a unit to break in combat should be largely effected by how much combat they've seen, i.e. their veterancy. Which to be fair is not unlike how it now is in Attila.

Just my humble opinion.

[AnonMilwaukean]

I agree with you, .Mitch. I think the vet bonuses in R2 were made to be overpowered to compensate for how difficult it was to get a high-ranking general to live for more than 15-20 turns. Seriously, in R2, by the time you had a high-ranking general, chances were that general was 10 turns from dying of old age. So, they tried to at least make veterancy a worth-while investment, probably to make-up for the fact that generals were not overly useful compared to past games. At least in R2, veterancy was meaningful, though too easy to acquire via champions.

And Telenil, I agree with both you and .Mitch. that morale should be the biggest boost of veterancy. Attack/defense and such are already different according to the unit type itself.

And I think .Mitch.'s comment about capping training at triple-bronze is on to something. Peaceful means of adding vet levels should be limited to three levels per unit. So, if a unit is brand new, it can pop out as, at most, triple-bronze, but if the unit was already a vet before any training, then the three new levels are added to whatever is there. I don't want to do away with peace-time training entirely in Attila, because it's a fun side-game of sorts, but I agree that a few changes need to be made. Vet levels should be more powerful while getting vet levels needs to be tied more to combat. Make it so only 3 vet levels can be achieved via training, and then make some forms of training that grant vet levels now instead grant a tiny stat boost (like +1 attack, + 1 defense, etc., though not both from the same edict/genera skill/etc.).

Again, not a tough thing to mod, as Neige's table shows. But something that shouldn't really have to be modded to correct... CA could easily balance/patch this to make it a bit more sensible. But right now, late-game Attila usually sees me pump out disposable armies since high veterancy is so easy to get on units right-out-of-the-box at that point.