There have been a lot of talk on whether experience matters or not. Experience not only improves the stats for your units, but also allows you to overstrength. Combined with generally good use of units, it becomes very powerful. See Exhibit A.
Exhibit A:
This was at the last scenario of DLC 41 right before DV, on Rommel difficulty. I had no knowledge of any of the maps, and I didn't even deploy the best variant of various types of units, since I stopped caring about halfway through the DLC. For instance, I used the same 3 starting towed artillery in the last scenario as I did the first, even though normally I would've changed that.
The infantry I lost was an auxiliary in Crete, and the AT unit a green Marder II I bought for kicks and left on a forest without artillery support. The recon units, of course, were lost having been sent out to see what the maps were like, as I have never played them before.
Why didn't I lose anything? See Exhibit B:
Exhibit B:
The problem was combat stats like these. A combination of overstrength and boosted stats make my units invincible against the AI. I can't imagine why other players want experience to matter even more. If your units aren't ever in danger, how would that be interesting?
How could I afford elite reinforcements and overstrengthing everything on Rommel you ask? Because my units rarely even took strength damage, much less were in any danger of getting destroyed. Only in the scenario Streets of Moscow (absolutely EPIC, btw) were my units even in danger of being destroyed. Perhaps if I had not played so many games of Urban Warfare they would be, but as it stood, I beat the hardest mission of the scenario handily, mostly because of all these 3 star units I had vs the 0-1 star units of the Soviets.
On the attack, a StuG IIIB attack, a stuka attack, and a PzIV attack usually meant I lost no strength against anything except the KV tank, to which I might lose 1 or 2 strength in the worst case. Proper use of experienced units made even the scenarios I recognized as well-designed and in theory challenging to be quite easy.
Can you imagine a combination of stronger experience modifiers with the late-war units, the Panthers/Tigers? You won't ever take damage on your units, making it so you won't need to spend prestige to reinforce them, and you'll find the game very boring unless the AI were given pure elite JS2/SU-100s. As it stands, I'm already somewhat concerned about that.
To be fair, this resulted in numerous stat changes, notably the PzIVF had its defenses lowered, the StuG IIIB was nerfed slightly, the T34 had its armor increased slightly. But the German units, with their experience and combined-arms tactic, will be vastly superior to the Soviets.
For those of you interested in my opinions (AKA many complaints), especially those of you who want the game to be harder, see below:
viewtopic.php?t=29337
I think the current experience system is mostly fine, but there is one big room for improvement. I feel experience isn't felt enough is for infantry and other low-stat units. The best solution is one which many turn-based games do these days, like the Civ series, which is to use fractions in the calculations. This will likely require some reworking of the code, and probably won't happen until at least an expansion is out, but why not? This will solve any sort of rounding problems. For those of you who play Civ4, the "binary science" strategy was more or less fixed by going to a fractional system for commerce calculations. No reason why it can't be done in this game, or really any game these days.
, way to go guys.
