Can someone please explain how units gaining veterancy works?

[Batleth777]

So the tutorial says that retraining units will keep the veterancy level, so there would be an incentive to keep a unit alive and not merge them, instead sending them back so you can get a full 80/80 unit with all the men being at the same chevron level. However I'm seeing a lot of discussion posts saying that retraining AND merging units both lower veterancy, and you should combine weaker veteran units to maintain veterancy.

Which is accurate? And how can you actually get units more experienced? I had a single bronze chevron unit of hastati lose half it's men in a fight and it lost the chevron. And this was a unit that was trained and started with a chevron so I would think losing half the men would still leave 40 men with a bronze chevron of experience. It seems like there's so many different ways to lose experience and the only way to gain it, by killing enemies, will also cause you to lose it because you inevitably lose men. Any youtube videos or a guide somewhere that breaks all this down?

Thanks.

[Enigmatic]

When looking at unit stats it seems to increase damage and moral along with most of the units stats.

[Rancor]

The exp system in the game is much more complex than people think.

in a nutshell:
- As insane as it sounds the game tracks experience (kills) for every soldier in a unit and the unit gains experience when most soldiers in a unit pass some unknown threshold.
- If those soldiers die the unit loses exp.
- In the original game retraining didn't cause you to lose exp (probably was a bug) but merging did at least sometimes, not sure about remastered.
- Killing routed enemies gives less experience around 1/5 of the normal exp according to some people
- Auto-resolving gives way more experience which means if you like to fight battles yourself you're at a disadvantage compared to AI
- Unit scale matters a lot. Generally the more soldiers there is in a unit the longer it takes for you to get experience and the easier it is to lose it.

I was hoping they balanced this for remastered but seems like it's the same. Basically you get punished for playing with huge unit scale. Kinda like in the original game where you got punished population wise for playing with big unit scale. Thankfully they fixed that.

[Batleth777]

That's kinda messed up. You have no idea who's more experienced and using a veteran unit to hold the line ends up ruining the unit. Oh well. Maybe they'll patch that later, since they seem to have indicated they will be providing support in the future.

Thanks for the help.

[Guardian of the Blind]

Originally posted by Batleth777:

That's kinda messed up. You have no idea who's more experienced and using a veteran unit to hold the line ends up ruining the unit. Oh well. Maybe they'll patch that later, since they seem to have indicated they will be providing support in the future.

Thanks for the help.

afaik you do not lose xp by retraining, just by merging. so sending your most experienced unit to the front is a good thing, because xp is ridiculous.

[Augustus666]

Takes forever to gain xp on experimental unit size.

[Guardian of the Blind]

Originally posted by Augustus:

Takes forever to gain xp on experimental unit size.

you really should not use that size in the campaign. it completely breaks sieges.

[Beagle]

Originally posted by Danox:

The exp system in the game is much more complex than people think.

in a nutshell:
- As insane as it sounds the game tracks experience (kills) for every soldier in a unit and the unit gains experience when most soldiers in a unit pass some unknown threshold.
- If those soldiers die the unit loses exp.
- In the original game retraining didn't cause you to lose exp (probably was a bug) but merging did at least sometimes, not sure about remastered.
- Killing routed enemies gives less experience around 1/5 of the normal exp according to some people
- Auto-resolving gives way more experience which means if you like to fight battles yourself you're at a disadvantage compared to AI
- Unit scale matters a lot. Generally the more soldiers there is in a unit the longer it takes for you to get experience and the easier it is to lose it.

I was hoping they balanced this for remastered but seems like it's the same. Basically you get punished for playing with huge unit scale. Kinda like in the original game where you got punished population wise for playing with big unit scale. Thankfully they fixed that.

this can't be true. The way i do it is i'll replenish less experienced units with more experienced units. This way they often gain experience, and then I send the experienced unit with sometimes as little as 10 men in to be retrained, if what you were saying here was true that unit would end up losing its experience. This doesn't happen. You do have to be careful not to combine a unit with another in a way that would completely absorb them, and also i've had it happen several times where i combine one leaving 1 or 2 men behind and they lose all the experience.

[Batleth777]

I think that still sounds like Danox is correct though. The few men that are left behind lose experience because those individual soldiers are not experienced enough to keep the chevrons, because the more experienced ones got moved.

[Beagle]

yeah i get that but i think the experience of the unit may be based on the most experienced individual in the unit rather than an average of them all

[Winged Hussar]

Retraining used to keep the experience of the unit intact. Is that not happening? If you want to preserve your units, don't throw them away, win battles by routing not brute force. Eventually your units will gain experience, retrain, don't merge unless it's necessary.