A Question on Replacements

[salwon]

In one of the 1000 Normandy threads, I posted the following:

What about troops that start off green, but gain experience through a campaign? You know, the old "if you're here tomorrow you'll be a veteran." Or would a scenario designer have to hard-code that in?

and got the reply:

Wouldn't work unless you also had provision for units taking casualties and incorporating green replacements for instance. This might be way too much overhead for either the programmer or the computer. Besides which, different units did not learn at the same rate or necessarily the right lessons. Yet more overhead.

Now, I certainly agree that this could be opening a huge can of worms in what the unit "gains" from one battle to the next. But my basic idea is this:

1)Model experience at the individual level, as opposed to the unit.

2)Allow a unit to gain experience, assuming it survives and makes it to the next battle in a campaign.

This way you could have a veteran unit on June 6th, say a squad from 16th RCT, become a mostly green unit on June 8th as untested replacements came onto the line. But by the 9th, maybe the squad is down to 6 men, but all 6 of those men are ready and willing to fight.

But that would assume that there's going to be some replacement system in the game in the first place. I could see it working like a resupply-type system from battle to battle, but is that realistic? How regularly did line units receive replacements - would it even make sense on the scale of a CM campaign? And is individual experience modelling even possible in the game? It seems so easy - just add a variable for each soldier! But then, how would a half-veteran-half-replacement squad behave in the game?

I hope some of that makes sense. It would be awesome to have something like that modeled, but I can easily see it as a "more trouble than it's worth" situation