experienced units not very valuable?

[davea]

According to data\exp.whdat, each experience level adds +1 to initiative, +5 to accuracy, +1 to attack and +1 to defense. For most units, this is not very valuable. Especially for some units which have 100% accuracy anyway.

I was hoping that there would be a good incentive to avoid getting experienced units killed. But, since these bonuses are pretty small and damaged units lose a lot of experience after each scenario anyway, it almost doesn't matter.

Has anybody found that experienced units are a big benefit?

In another game, "People's General", experienced units had a chance of getting a trait which had a lot of benefit, such as +1 range (!). I felt a stronger sense of loss (and/or a reload ) whenever I lost an experienced unit in that game.

[Kerensky]

Well a couple of things to remember.

There are 10 experience levels in 40k Armageddon, so unlike say Panzer Corps with its 5 stars, units go from 0 skulls all the way to 10 skulls. 10 skulls is a a pretty significant number of advantages.

As for accuracy, sure a unit may have near 100% accuracy under optimal conditions, but as soon as you factor in range degrading accuracy and also defensive and covering terrain further adding in, it's good to have the accuracy bonus to counteract these factors which are dropping a unit's accuracy to far lower than 100% in real battle conditions.

[davea]

I've played most of the way through the campaign one time on normal difficulty. Do units gain experience faster on higher difficulty levels? I have one unit with five skulls but it didn't really seem any stronger than a starter unit. Of course it is a destroyer which always has 100% to hit at any range anyhow; so this may be a bad example. It also doesn't help that the UI doesn't display the increased stats. My 5 skull destroyer shows with 70 defense and 11 initiative, same as a brand new zero skull unit. I guess we have to take the experience effect "on faith".

[FuFuHunt3r]

Experienced units are extreamly valuable! Especialy the accuracy and the initative make a huge difference. Most units have accuracys of far less than 100%. Even if the weapons may hit with 100% die untis skill is often far from that. For example: all salamander units except scouts have 60%. The difference between that and 110% is huge. Units almost double their damage.

The defense bonus can also be very handy for units with an already high deffence. Example: Salamander assault terminators have 80 defence. That makes them already immune to fire from big shootas. If they go up to 90 defence and stand in cover with a +5 bonus, they become immune to all orkish small arms like chopas and shootas. With that, they are perfect for fights in trenches were you have to root out tons of infantery in good cover.

The initiative helps as well. The higher that stat is, the more orks you kill before they can fire back at you.

I belive highly experienced units are very much mandatory to win in higher difficulties. The hard part is to minimize losses so they can get experienced.

[davea]

Thanks for the insight. I looked around in the files but I can't tell how units gain experience and what the level breakpoints are. Is this known, from some file? I can see in diff.whdat that the player gains double experience at "easy" but all the other difficulty levels have the same experience rating. And experience.whdat shows the benefit from the levels I mentioned. But I can't find anything else.

Also, is it correct that damaged units lose experience the same way from in-field reinforcement as they do at the end of a scenario? For example, suppose a unit has 10 men and has 1000 experience. During combat it is reduced to 5 men. If I reinforce in the field, it goes back to 10 men but its new experience is 500 because all the new men have 0 experience. If I make it to the end of the scenario and then go onto the next scenario, the unit loses the same amount of experience. So if you have the requisition points to spare, there is no benefit from keeping a wounded experienced unit out of combat so it refills at the end of the scenario; the damage to experience is irreversible.