Experience medals

[Col. Kurtz]

I have some questions concerning experience medals:1)Just how powerful are they? For instance, what is the combat effectiveness of units under the command of a general with four experience medals compared with a general with no experience medals? 2) What is the best way for a unit to get medals;a)delivering a knockout blow,b)scoring heavy losses on an opponent,c)just being involved in a lot of battles? 3)Can units receive experience in defensive situations? 4)Units sometimes lose experience when they reinforce and sometimes don't. What determines this? 5) Sometimes commanders lose experience when their units reinforce. Why, and can this be avoided?

[hellraiser]

I will try to answer to some of them:

1. They are more powerful than the rookie ones

They have their own experience medals which increase damage dealt to enemy as well as decrease losses suffered. If they are under an experienced HQ command, the bonus passed by the HQ is greater compared to a lower xp HQ. I think this is translated also into readiness values, which can go beyond 100% in this case. (HQ passes a 'morale' bonus to troops under its command)

I'm sorry I can't help you with numbers, but at least you get the larger picture, right?

I guess you can use the campaign editor and add units having various xp levels and compare the odds they get.

2. Best way to gain xp is attacking succesfully and defending succesfully. - this answers to the 3rd question as well.

4. Units ALWAYS lose experience when they reinforce. The problem is that sometimes you won't see a change in the graphics of the xp medal if the reinforcement was light. If a 5 strength 4 stars xp unit is reinforced to its full complement, you will notice immediately the loss of 2 or more stars. But if you reinforce a 9 strength unit, probably you won't always notice the change in medals' graphic representation. BUT, just before you confirm the reinforcement in the reinforcement screen, take a careful look and you will notice the loss of experience written as percentage (Experience loss = x% ).

5. Commanders losing xp when troops reinforce? Hmmm, never noticed it. All I know is that HQs lose xp when units under their command perform poorly.

Hope that helps.

[ April 08, 2005, 05:43 AM: Message edited by: hellraiser ]

[Terif]

So I will help with the numbers :

- combat units collect experience by battles indepent of the result:

0.2 exp as attacker

0.1 exp as defender

0.3 if it kills an enemy unit

- HQ´s collect 0.1 exp if a unit under its command either

1. during attack: does more damage than it takes,

2. during defence: does more or the same damage to the enemy than it suffered.

Otherwise the HQ looses 0.1 exp - i.e. here it depends on the battle result if a HQ gains or looses exp.

- HQ experience increases the readiness of the units under its command:

Readiness = (supply + strength + command rating + HQ experience) / 3

- combat unit experience increases its defence and attack values by exp/2 + decreases its losses - each medal is one point exp, max exp is 4 (so e.g. a corps without exp has an attack value of 2, a corps with 4 medals has an attack value of 2+4/2 = 4)

- if a unit reinforces, then it looses experience according to the amount (e.g. a str 9 unit that reinforces to str 10 losses 10% of its exp, from str 6->10 -> 40% etc..). HQs only loose exp if they are damaged themselves and reinforce - but they don´t loose exp if units under their command reinforce. Therefore HQs usually only can collect experience and will sooner or later reach 4 medals.

- the medals shown on the screen only roughly represent graphically the units experience. Internally it will be calculated exactly. Therefore you e.g. can not see an experience of 0.1 in the graphic, but it is still there and used in the calculations. Therefore it makes no sense to only reinforce to the point before the medal is reduced to keep the experience (like some players think ) - this is only a not exact graphical representation, but internally the exact number is saved.

To answer your questions directly:

1) combat units can increase their combat values by max 2 via experience - therefore exp is very valuable for units with a low attack value (e.g. ships/carriers bombarding ground units start with an attack value of 1 and can tripple it by exp to 3 - for armies on the other side exp is not that important since they already have an attack value of 4)

Each medal HQ experience increases readiness by 3.33%, i.e. the overall combat effectiveness can be increased by 13.33% points with a full experienced HQ.

2) simply to take part in many battles, preferable in battles against weak enemy units where they don´t take much losses + the units used to do the final strike gain 0.3 extra exp points.

3) yes, they gain 0.1 exp points

4) they always loose exp - but sometimes you can´t see it since the graphic only shows 0.2-0.3 steps. But internally the correct numbers are saved.

5) This is not correct, from reinforcements commanders only loose exp if they reinforce themselves - not if units under their command reinforce (but if units under command loose their battles, then the HQ exp is reduced – has nothing to do with reinforcements). So to avoid that commanders loose exp: never place them too close to the front where the enemy can attack and damage them .

[ April 08, 2005, 06:34 AM: Message edited by: Terif ]

[Col. Kurtz]

Thank you.