Troop Experience

[To Hell With The Trolls!]

I never really paid attention to who was lvl'ing or not, I would just manage my troops as needed per numbers/health and what I needed for the current situation.
Now I'm paying attention to it and it seems random.
Numerous times I've had troops killing 100's of enemies and not getting exp, while some are killing 5-10 and getting a point?
What am I missing?

[Sebasta]

I think it not just about kills, but also about casualties. Troops need to survive to keep their xp. So if half of your unit perishes, but they heroically did kill some people, they will get as much xp as a unit that survives full force and kills as many.

[76561198814511849]

Killing matters little if the enemy is beaten already. To farm experience you need your men to to kill enemies whose morale is still intact. Incorporating this fact into your general strategy will change your stile of warfare significantly.

Another thing to keep in mind that the kills per experience point grow as the fibonacci sequence.

0 to 1: 1
1 to 2: 1
2 to 3: 1+1=2
3 to 4: 2+1=3
4 to 5: 3+2=5
5 to 6: 5+3=8
6 to 7: 8+5=13
7 to 8: 13+8=21
8 to 9: 21+13=34
total of 0 to 9: 88

The last few points of experience are really expensive. Still experience is worth a lot. 2 points of experience increase your kill ratio in close combat by about a factor 2. So at experience 8 your troops are 2^(8/2)=16 times as efficient as at experience 0. If you can recruit troops at higher experience, usually with the help of some temples, then this is worth a lot.

Casualties have no effect on the experience of the survivors. But replenishing casualties means that you add men with no or little experience to the unit which will drop the average experience of said unit. You want to avoid losses as much as reasonably doable.

Experience is displayed as an integer. In truth there are more decimals. If a unit is slighty below the next point of experience, then few kills will suffice to move to the next integer. Such rounding issues do matter, especially on the small scale. On the large scale not such much.

In addition to experience from killing, simply surviving a battle against an enemy that is not inferior can give your troops a point of experience. This can be a motivation to prefer attacking with slightly inferior troops.

[dont_ask_me_again]

The value of the troops killed determines a lot of the experienced gained vs the value of the unit fighting them... if you have a general cavalry fighting cheap base infantry nothing much is achieved due to the value difference... it still farms XP though if killing fleeing troops ofcourse but not much. - You might get 1xp fromthat but the next time your general tries this it might take another 3 times ontop or something because their value went up.

The main way to gain XP is to basically allow the brute force execution of battles where every man holds their ground but you have to win those battles.

The statistic bar of chances to win also I am very sure adds XP if you overcome low odds. - A good cavalry charge followed with some flame arrows is often the basic strategy to achieve these.

Basically the troops vs'ing troops in their best state determines the best value as it would in real life.

If going against heavy infantry and they're fleeing and you use some cheap troops to outrun them the XP will still be really good just for the value.

Overall XP is only really good for saving money on the total war campaign because stronger troops means clearing the map easier and simpler but this process often gets stumped by the AI taking more advance on the map as you're just trying to follow/farm.

I wouldn't worry about money on the campaign at all though, you still need to buy a lot of troops to hold cities etc (can be cheap ones like town watch though and a few archers and 1 cav to support a general), and I'm fairly sure higher XP troops don't impact quelling the rioters at all.

[To Hell With The Trolls!]

(about quelling rioters)
I've always read and found it to be true that the number of soldiers is key to suppressing riots.
I could have 2 high lvl small units but get more of an effect from 2 peasants because of the number.
Don't get me wrong, I keep a defensive force, I just throw in peasants when they get agitated to quell things.

thanks for the tips guys!

[76561198814511849]

Originally posted by dont_ask_me_again:

The value of the troops killed determines a lot of the experienced gained vs the value of the unit fighting them...

As far as i can tell this has no impact. Only the amount counts and morale still being intact. Broken morale means a 90% discount on experience gained. Killing 1000 peasants is as good for exp as killing 1000 proper troops. In fact the later will be worse due to higher losses suffered.

In practice it makes sense to take out troops with low morale first. When their morale breaks but chances of them regaining their morale are high, then retreat so they do regain their morale. If this is unlikely, then kill them of anyway. Enemies should not leave the battles, they should simply die.

Once the weaker troops are taken care off one needs to coordinate attacks in a way that delays a full scale retreat of the enemy as long as reasonably possible. Once a retreat of the enemy is inevitable all gloves are off and every enemy is to be killed so the enemy cannot regroup. Chasing enemies on the battle map is fine, chasing them on the campaign map is not.

Ranged attacks should not be used against weaker troops, they are meant to be beaten in close combat. Stronger troops however can be weaked by ranged attacks. This mitigates losses suffered.