Unit's experience..

Createure wrote: The combat system in Illy is already quite finely balanced (I think, or the devs think anyways). We have other more pressing and interesting stuff to look forward to first.

Yes, no hurry, but it would be a good thing to consider at some time, because as HM puts it:

HonoredMule wrote: Experienced divisions would become something we carefully build and prize highly.

That is exacty what I was aiming at and would enhance gameplay consideraby imo.

I like this idea.

Sounds very difficult to implement though. Needs more thought as to what factors would influence unit experience.

I used to play an awesome game that used a similar idea, was called Genesis. Each unit type had 5 tiers. During a battle a certain proportion of the troops in an army would be promoted to the next tier, some would be promoted up 2 or 3 tiers. The number promoted would depend on the quantity (or experience/gold upkeep quantity) of the enemy army destroyed. Obviously a certain proportion of troops would also die in the battle, this was slightly weighted towards lower tier troops (rookies are more likely to die) so eventually the force would become higher average rank and stronger, the more battles it fought in (which was counteracted by the influx of new troops into the army).

There was also a building in the city, kinda like barracks, that passively ranked up troops at a very slow rate while they were waiting in the garrison. There was also a couple of researches to increase active and passive troop experience.

I think this idea of using discrete unit 'ranks' is a much better idea than having unit experience (which would rely on a more continuous scale (hence MUCH more data is required to define the status of a unit).

But even so, using a 5 tier ranking idea would almost be like quintupling the total number of player-owned troops, which seems a little hectic to me.

Just my 2-cents. I like the idea but I doubt it'll happen, at least no time soon. The combat system in Illy is already quite finely balanced (I think, or the devs think anyways). We have other more pressing and interesting stuff to look forward to first.