Elephants won't get experience - Total War Heaven Forum

Topic Subject:

Elephants won't get experience

Amanebak
Legionary

posted 09 August 2019 18:48 EDT (US)

Hey, guys.
I am playing Imperial campaign as the Seleucid Empire.

tldr version. In a non auto-resolved battle, if no elephant dies in a unit of basic elephants, that elephant unit won't get experience upgrade. Please, prove me wrong.

longer version. I don't want to use auto-resolve in army battles and I don't want to have unnecessary casualties (apart from peasants and general bodyguards).
I have conquered all civilized faction and Scythia, having left some barbarians to play with. Some of their border towns (eg Porrolissum) are used as training camps for my old poor armies of milita hopolites and others. They conquer the town, get ouside, the town is given back by diplomat, and repeated in the same turn (well, waste of time. but I listen to some interesting podcast while playing).
I just can't get my elephants - the basic ones - level up. Last time, I just auto-resolved and they got 2 exp for killing only 22 peasants. Reloaded I fought that battle, killing 320 peasants, but they were given no experience.

BTW I play with the scaling where unit of peasants have 60 soldiers, but that shouldn't matter, should it? Version 1.5.

Author

Replies:

Terikel Grayhair
Imperator
(id: Terikel706)

posted 14 August 2019 13:10 EDT (US) 1 / 5

The game engine awards more experience in auto-resolve than it does from fighting things out. It also causes more casualties.

I am sure it is not the quantity of dead that give the experience, but the number of hits dished out in battle divided by surviving soldiers of that unit. My cavalry runs down fleeing foes and kills hundreds, yet they get very little experience versus the spear warbands who take the brunt of combat, suffer the losses, and fight the longest, yet slay only a hundred or so.

60 Peasants in a unit of peasants sounds like Normal scale. Huge scale gives them 240.

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Amanebak
Legionary

posted 16 August 2019 07:47 EDT (US) 2 / 5

Thank you, Terikel.
It seems to work as you wrote. I have seen a unit gain an experience even though they didn't touch the enemy. Average experience of my army units is about 4, only elephants are at 0. It was starting to be frustrating, so I decided to ask here. I would love to know, whether anyone has ever seen a basic elephant unit gain an experience in battle, while not taking casualties.
I just can't decide whether it is a bug or that the requirements for elephants leveling up are absurdly high.

General Sajaru
Tribunus Laticlavius

posted 16 August 2019 22:01 EDT (US) 3 / 5

Looking through a number of Carthage and Seleucid games I've run, I couldn't find any regular elephants with experience. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a regular unit of elephants with experience from combat.

War elephants and armoured elephants, however, gain experience fairly easily- I have one Carthage campaign where some of them are up to 7 or 8 experience.

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[This message has been edited by General Sajaru (edited 08-16-2019 @ 10:02 PM).]

Amanebak
Legionary

posted 17 August 2019 03:44 EDT (US) 4 / 5

Glad to hear that.
I looked into export_descr_unit.txt to see whether there is something weird about elephants. But there is nothing to tinker with regarding leveling-up afaik.

ShieldWall
Legionary

posted 21 August 2019 03:37 EDT (US) 5 / 5

Despite playing this game for about 12 years my experience with elephants is weirdly small, so I doubt I have much to add here. On a general note about experience, units which are very understrength seem to get it very fast where a unit that's always intact needs a few battles where it gets several hundred kills (of stuff that's not running away) to progress. I think you need to cause casualties out of all proportion to the unit size, which is why small units, like berserkers charging into the back of a unit or onagers getting a good few hits with flaming missles, seem to do well. As do cavalry, because they're medium sized units and get to run down hundreds and hundreds of routers all the time.

Elephants are small units too so you would think the same logic would apply. If it is a bug, I wonder if it could be anything to do with their charging method of attack? War and Armoured Elephants might do okay because they've got archers on their backs making a different sort of attack. As there's only a few of them they probably wouldn't need to kill so very much to start chalking up experience.

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