Matrix Games Forums

Experience loss

The only way units lose experience is through receiving replacements. After watching several weakened divisions and air wings through a few turns, I've been able to determine the following, undocumented rules. The surprise (for me, at least) is that the rules for air units are totally different from the rules that apply to ground units!

A. AIR UNITS

A little more than half the damaged planes in a unit (but not more than 40) are repaired each turn. If the wing is not set to receive replacements, no experience loss occurs.

If the wing must receive replacements, they arrive as exactly 10 damaged planes (provided there are enough in the pool). Also, when these damaged planes (some of them to be repaired next turn; after a couple of turns of receiving replacements, 10 planes begin to get repaired each turn) arrive, the unit loses experience, the amount lost depending on its current experience level, as follows (roughly):

<35 experience: lose 1
35-50 XP: lose 2
50-60 XP: lose 3
60-75 XP: lose 4
75-99 XP: lose 5

If they are at the same experience level, a unit with 150 planes, for instance, will lose just as much experience as a unit with only 10 aircraft when they receive replacements! I don't think that this is highly realistic and I have no idea of what it simulates .

B. LAND UNITS
(coming soon)

Originally posted by K62
Experience loss

A. AIR UNITS
If the wing must receive replacements, they arrive as exactly 10 damaged planes (provided there are enough in the pool).

If there are over 1000 planes in the pool the wing will receive 30 damaged planes.

Originally posted by K62
Experience loss

..................
If they are at the same experience level, a unit with 150 planes, for instance, will lose just as much experience as a unit with only 10 aircraft when they receive replacements! I don't think that this is highly realistic and I have no idea of what it simulates .

B. LAND UNITS
(coming soon)

K62

Yes, a bit wonky in the realism department.

A better formula might be

(exp/(Planesinunit/Newplanes))x .3 = % of exp lost
(round all up)

Thus in your example of 150 ac unit with exp of 75
getting 10 new planes is (75/(150/10))x .2 = %1

75 x .01 = .75 or 1 experience lost

A unit of 10 planes (exp75) getting 10 more would
lose 15 experience.

You can change the '.2' up or down to modify the equation to suit different national cadre training
for new pilots (germans better?)

Loki

Svar,

Thank you for the addition. Indeed, this is a good explanation why those I-16 and SB-2 groups get re-built so quickly Also, the experience does not seem to be affected more when receiving 30 replacements than when receiving only 10! (again, I must say, quite unrealistic; unless we assume that, given the large plane stocks, the pilots can wreck more of them while training ) So, if someone can build a pool of more than 1000 of some modern aircraft, by all means, do so...

Loki,

Your formula is indeed much better than what the program already does with the experience. Also, as I am going to prove, the current formula, being so dissimilar to the one used for ground troops, puts the player in a great dillema about his reinforcement levels (which happen to apply to both ground and air troops).

Land units may receive as replacements a maximum of:

-60 for squads
-10 for each equipment type

provided there are enough in the pool. As I read somewhere (the readme.txt, I think), troops with a supply level of 3 or less have a random chance not to receive replacements in a given turn. Troops with a SL of 0, of course, receive none.

As far as I can tell, the new XP level is calculated as a weighted average. In simple maths:

OldCombatValue=OldStrength*OldXP
AddedCombatValue=Replacements*ReplacementsXP
NewCombatValue=OldCombatValue+AddedCombatValue
NewXP=NewCombatValue/NewStrength

The effect is that the combat value of the unit surely rises (which can not be said about air groups). More precisely, it increases by the CV of the replacements. The replacements XP level depends on nation and year; for instance, in 1941 it seems to be about 60% (:eek: a Soviet troop at that level can be called elite) for the Germans and somewhere around 20-30% for the Soviets.

As I have already shown, the game uses two different formulas for experience loss, depending on the type of the unit (land or air). However, only one replacement rate can be set to an HQ. Is this a problem? I think the answer should be a definite "yes".

In the (simpler) case of ground units, taking replacements always increases the combat value. If we can ignore the eventual bonuses for certain experience levels (of which the naming of Soviet Guards units is the only one I'm aware of), it is always good for a unit to receive replacements. From this point of view, the Soviets in 1941, for instance, should set their replacement rate everywhere close to 100%. The Germans might consider a more careful distribution of their comparatively scarce replacements; but, in critical spots, they should also aim for a high rate (they also have "favoured" units, which train replacements quickly).

But the situation is totally different for air wings. Units with high numbers of aircraft seem to take higher losses (!). That means they'll need more replacements; because they lose just as much XP as the less populated ones through this process, the net result is that large air units lose experience quicker than small ones. Also, smaller groups of fighters seem to fight more efficiently, i.e. lose fewer planes for each enemy shot down, so they should gain experience quicker. Now, XP has a very important role in the air: for instance, it is checked and, if it should prove too low, the wing might participate in a mission at half strength or not at all. Taking all these into consideration, the air units are better off small and experienced than large and ineffective (take the I-16, for example: it has better ratings than the Finnish Mixed Fighters and fights in much larger numbers; yet, because of its lack of experience, it is cut to pieces when set against them). Therefore, the WiR player should aim for quite low replacement rates for air units.

So here is the dilemma: I'd like to set replacements to 90% for land units and only 30% for air units (this one gives me groups of 50-60 planes, which are just fine). But I can't, because they are in the same HQ! I can't assign them to different HQ's: the aviation would no longer support the ground troops during the combat phase. So I wonder: how could Manstein or Jukov solve this type of problem when it occured to them?

My suggestion is this: the land troops are rather OK; so, either change the (highly unrealistic) XP loss system for air units, or - make them take replacements only when set on training.

I've seen the problem caused by high air replacement rates...it can be quite shocking to see your fighter units drop to 54 EXP when they've started at 80 EXP, for example. Since there is no hardwired fix for this, I've developed my own.
Basically, I put the maximum number of air units in an hq...for example 2 fighter and 5 bomber...throw in a Jabo or air transport wing if I have them. Then I fly as many missions as possible, attacking many seperate targets, as well as often using bombers for air supply. This means that some HQ's with only 1 fighter and one bomber lose out on EXP until I rotate them with units that have high EXP. This kind of rotation is also good for the German fighter units cooling their heels in West Front, OKW, and OKH.
I'm also experimenting with this as the Soviet player, where fighters escort transport A/C (whose experience is so low that 200 TB-3's only deliver 6 tones of supplies) to rear areas. I'm hoping it will pay off more than having them sit in HQ's training. Fortunately there are so many red fighter units that I can spare a few for this experiment.
On the ground side, the German player suffers that first blizzard year which gnaws away at divisions, no matter how large. From all-too-recent experience, I've found that full units end that first year of blizzard depleted horribly. That is what I get for having high replacement values. In my newer games, I'm not raising the replacement rate over 50% until the spring 42' rains come.