Recruit Speed :

Starting experience:

Considerations for the military experience resource

Conclusions:

Suggestions:

what if you added an additional modifier speicfically for peace-time and perhaps increasing the general impact that average cohort xp has on ME-gain.

What if each foundry increased the recruitment speed slightly for the whole province?

What if drilling reduced xp decay by 0.5 ?

What if cohorts trained with foundries received a temporary modifier to xp-decay ? (scale the impact of this to the number of foundries. 0.05 per foundry for 5 years or 0.02 for 10 years, for example)

What if maintenance policy decreased or increased xp-decay by 0.25 ?

What if fort maintenance also impacted xp-decay or ME-gain ? (not sure how to best calculate its scaling X fort-levels per pop for a scaling value?)

What if generals martial ability added +0.01 per skill to drilling xp-gain?

what if Barracks decreased xp-decay in the local province with 0.01 per level ?



with 0.01 per level ? What if particular traditions or inventions gave more xp-decay to particular units, such as heavy cav?

Hey. I've been thinking about the buildings a bit today. i find myself squinting really hard to find justifiable reasons to build foundries.Making Foundries for the recruit speed could perhaps be worthwhile for ship-building for countries that are rich without having many ports / took big ship losses that they struggle to recuperate.. but making foundries in port cities has very steep opportunity costs so it seems far fetched.... you could also conceivably want them to expedite prodution of quality-units that you're only able to build out of one province due to resource constraints. particularly the long training-time units - elephants, and to a leser extent Heavy cav (if you should think them actually usefull) ..... but even then, any land unit that can be trained in one city can also be trained in the rest of the province, so in most cases the foundry wont really help with training.At a glance, the starting-xp modifier seems nice, but in the environment of drilling and rapid xp-decay, how valuable is this xp bonus?5% starting xp compared to 0 % is a very small difference, not only in absolute terms but in relative terms as well; 5% experience can almost be gained in a mere of two months of. drilling costs you 33% maintenance, so in absolute gold terms, this will save less than 2% of the units recruitment cost.....the fact that the xp-decay is proportional to the current xp level means that the net xp increase of drilling per month will drop off the higher your xp is (wether from previous drilling, from starting xp or from combat)with 50% starting xp, furs in capital and one decay reduction invention, drilling will still gain me xp, but only 0.5% the first month and less after that -im not about to do logarithmic math, but i think that adds up to somewhere around 10% of the cohorts recruitment cost. not much, but also not negligible.(i got 50% starting xp using 4 foundries, local furs and furs in capital)millitary xp-gain is significantly impacted by the average xp level of our troops. This is an incentive to keep xp up, by warfare or drilling, and arguably by starting xp boons from foundries and other sources.Gold is pretty scarce in Cicero though, and drilling for extended periods of time can be expensive - especially compared to using "decreased pay" for army maintenance. A country with notably larger economy than military can keep drilling everything that isnt roadbuilding, at all times. Though, a country with large military without large economy, may not remotely afford to do the same.... when considering if foundries are worthwhile, we should probably think of it in terms of how it relates to keeping the average unit-xp up over time. if your average unit xp is low, training new units that start out higher than your average can be either a relief for your drilling expenses or a boon to your ME gain, pending your priorities.Foundries in their current form canbe useful for increasing starting xp, saving time and gold for drilling. It is very difficult to gauge the opportunity-costs for choosing foundries over economic buildings, and even for comparing how long it would take to drill units up to X amount of xp for comparison.If manpower is not an issue, foundries can be stacked in cities that have many freemen (or tribesmen) without losing out on the benefits to research and income that other buildings can give in cities with more citizens & slaves.the value of lifting starting xp is notably higher after you've compounded a few bonuses, with respect to what you can achieve with drilling alone. Though, very high levels of starting xp will not impact your armies or ME a lot long term, if you arnt able to also keep everything drilled. @Arheo & any devsand for discussionWe've been told that armies can be drilled up to 50% . this is true, on year 0. when we add modifiers to xp decay, this changes. This also changes how long it takes to drill up to that "max" where decay = 2.5%.- For sake of comparison. (i dont think im alone in my reluctance to do logarithmic math on the spot?)tuning ME and xp gain / retain is key to balance from several perspectives, including balance to general-loyalty. Its possible to dismiss generals very liberally, especially in peace time. Leaving armies without a leader currently gives an increased xp-decay with 1 and disables drilling. (Plus a morale debuff) i dont think this is enough.(during war, its more common to train and move cohorts around without generals for logistical and tactical purposes, while doing it in peace time is only a loophole-gimmick - if you want to keep them organized yet not support untrustworthy generals or governors, you should at least have incentive to put them in your capital region)(given x number of such additions, tweaking the base level of decay would obviously be adviced)every time i see cohort xp mentioned, people seem to like to theorycraft extensive reworks or very significant changes to rate of xp gain or decay without really justifying it....I think it would be more productive to discuss the stuff above; the granular aspects of how the current system in Cicero works, and what tweaks and small additions / alterations could achieve ... if you've got issues with the current unit xp system, try to brake down the reasons and we can talk about those!