Drilling and Cohort Experience in Cicero

[Johan]

I talked a little bit about Military Experience this morning (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/military-experience-in-cicero.1196882/)

Another thing we're adding to Cicero is a new ability to armies called Drill.

Drill will give you experience each month, for a higher chance of the cohorts becoming loyal to their commander, and a small extra monthly payment.

Experience on cohorts have also changed
- You now get more experience from combat.
- You do not lose experience from reinforcing.
- Experience on cohorts now decay, relative to their current experience.
- Various inventions and other attributes can reduce your decay.

Tomorrow I'll give you some more information about "mana" removal.

 

[Palando]

When "there won't be any more DDs in July" actually means that we get daily snippets

 

[cristofolmc]

I suppose that just as with EU4 the unit goes to morale 0 while drilling right?

And I hope its balanced so you still gain a hell of a lot more experience if you actually fight wars.

Tomorrow I'll give you some more information about "mana" removal.

Yes! Very much looking forward to this, finally!

 

[Nuukov]

Excellent. This means that even peaceful nations will be able to earn Military Traditions at a decent rate, yet still be outdone by nations who practice war more often. Perfect! Keep up the good work Johan, loving the look of the Cicero update more and more each day.

 

[Lord Finnish]

Two feature posts today and more tomorrow? You're spoiling us!

 

[CassCD]

I like that Legitimacy is on the top bar now. That's a number I always forget about and just trust that it's always going up.

 

[Palando]

Excellent. This means that even peaceful nations will be able to earn Military Traditions at a decent rate, yet still be outdone by nations who practice war more often. Perfect! Keep up the good work Johan, loving the look of the Cicero update more and more each day.

This change also means that smaller nations will have an easier time gaining military experience, as bigger nations will probably have several governor troops around that don't fight.

 

[Darth.]

What this tells me is Johan is working even during what should be his government mandated summer vacation to improve the game based on community feedback after a negative reception.

#Respect

 

[Darth.]

This change also means that smaller nations will have an easier time gaining military experience, as bigger nations will probably have several governor troops around that don't fight.

Easy fix is to have governor troops not count towards percentage ratio of cohorts drilling to those not drilling.

 

[cristofolmc]

What this tells me is Johan is working even during what should be his government mandated summer vacation to improve the game based on community feedback after a negative reception.

#Respect

You can critisize many thing about Johan but not his willfulness, passion and hard work. #Respect indeed. I dont think the patch could come in september with all the massive changes its bringing if Johan wasnt "breaking his horns" as we say in my country, working even during holidays.

 

[Denkt]

Experience on cohorts have also changed
- You now get more experience from combat.
- You do not lose experience from reinforcing.
- Experience on cohorts now decay, relative to their current experience.
- Various inventions and other attributes can reduce your decay.

Make so much more sense than how experience currently is working, great job

And I hope its balanced so you still gain a hell of a lot more experience if you actually fight wars.

As experience decay you will have a hard time to reach high experience with just drilling but if you are at Peace it can slow down the decay for highly experience cohorts while increasing experience of low experience cohorts. The current numbers mean drill will approch 50% xp and atleast halve the decay above 50% xp.​

 

[EpicProGamer76]

Does experience have a larger impact on how powerful troops are in combat as well? Or did potentially always have a large impact? Especially at higher levels.

Also whats the difference between this and a small dev diary? I don't understand. Is it unscheduled or something?

Also how do this work with elephants does it stack or what? I Image 30% of the elephants 50%.

 

[Styo]

What this tells me is Johan is working even during what should be his government mandated summer vacation to improve the game based on community feedback after a negative reception.

#Respect

Aye, @Johan this is impressive. Keep up the good work.

 

[Wethospu]

Does experience have a larger impact on how powerful troops are in combat as well? Or did potentially always have a large impact? Especially at higher levels.

Also whats the difference between this and a small dev diary? I don't understand. Is it unscheduled or something?

Also how do this work with elephants does it stack or what?

Currently 100% experience gives about 30% damage reduction. Based on the image seems to still be the same.

 

[Reman]

- You do not lose experience from reinforcing.
- Experience on cohorts now decay, relative to their current experience.

Excellent! This is exactly what the game needs to make it so experience is actually relevant. Drilling in EU4 was a failed/useless mechanic precisely because reinforcing removes it at a 1:1 ratio in that game. I'm glad this won't be the case in Imperator.

 

[Lord Lambert]

While not losing experience from reinforcing is a little unrealistic, I am still totally onboard as it is such a massive gameplay improvement. Great stuff!

 

[Oglesby]

This change also means that smaller nations will have an easier time gaining military experience, as bigger nations will probably have several governor troops around that don't fight.

Did I miss somewhere where governor troops cannot drill?

 

[Todie]

Yes, at this rate 1.2 will blow a lot of expectations out of the water.


I read these xp-changes as a streamlining effort; xp has been made important for military traditions, so its important to have the means of xp gain & retain be made easy to grasp. im thinking in particular about the changes to x-retention; if xp is not lost at all when reinforcing, that effectively removes the difference between consolidating and not consolidating cohorts after a battle. indeed, consolidating will actually reduce the number of experienced cohorts after reinforcement finishes, without affecting the xp per cohort. (as compared to in 1.1 where consolidating after combat is the only way to avoid the decay that comes with reinforcing)


my one problem with this is that it might not give the victor of a battle or war notably more experience than the looser, at least if the looser is able to avoid stack-whipes.

... there are probably ways around this, like associating xp gain with casualties inflicted and to some extent reduced by casualties sustained (but still never a net negative?)


... this also gets me thinking about possible ties between a countrys manpower pool and its military-experience resource and / or its xp-decey-reduction modifiers... if you exhaust your manpower to the point of scraping the barrel, your cohorts will struggle to retain their battle-hardened lessons as they replace fallen comrades with young boys and old men. as opposed to when you are near full capacity of manpower; plenty of available recruits means you may be able to find more good soldier material, more eager and able to learn and retain that experience in their cohort.

 

[Facepalm]

Sounds cool.

Not a complete fan of effectively getting military traditions from drilling. But as this peaceful Experience only goes up to 50% (without modifiers, at this early stage.) this is probably perfectly fine.

I think one unfortunate consequence is that legions will lose a lot of experience when being moved around, in particular for very large Empires. This is a bit counter to how I would like to use experienced armies. (This isn't a big change from now though, since I almost never have any high XP units to shuffle around. Most of them are probably at their peak when built.)

 

[Wethospu]

...

(as compared to in 1.1 where consolidating after combat is the only way to avoid the decay that comes with reinforcing)

...

If you consolidate you have to recruit a fresh unit with even less experience.

So I would say that consolidating removes more experience because reinforcing only removes half of the experience. And that can be greatly reduced in some cases.

Edit: Forgot about starting experience. If that is high enough then consolidating definitely makes sense.