Slitherine

Is there any info available on the specific advantages each level of experience provides? It seems to impact attack, defense, and efficiency but is there a cost/benefit sweet spot to keep your units at?

Experience level affects every aspect of a units performance, so the optimum sweet spot would be to keep it as high as possible at all times against a tough opponent, but if he's not so hot you can only keep some of your key units high and not worry too much about the rest; it all depends how much points you've got in the piggy bank to spend.

Regular repair always costs 50% of unit cost divided by 10 for each strength point.
Elite: 61-140% cost depending on XP. That means, it’s hardly recommended to still elite-repair while a unit has 4 stars.
It really depends on the amount of RP the player gets on scenario start and income how wasteful you can be on elite-repair or not.
As general rule, the own unit experience shouldn’t drop lower than the opponent’s; otherwise your units attract too often enemy attacks in direct confrontation that further increase the repair bill.
The lower the unit cost, the more attractive a unit becomes to prefer elite-repair, like early-war infantry, snipers, and even recon units.

Expensive units tend to be tough and good at destroying things, therefore don’t necessarily ever need elite-repair. Battleships, tanks and well-armoured anti-tank units come into mind.

Artillery units that can stay out of sight and combat shouldn’t really ever need and get elite-repair either as they can easily accumulate XP during campaigns either without much losses.

AA units have a hard time to earn XP, so they are worthy of elite replacements. Try to use their AT-mode to sweep over heavily damaged units to gain extra XP if no enemy planes are present.

As for any aircraft, I can’t really recommend elite as the losses are typically that high that you are better of with normal repair and try to regain XP by strafing ground-attacks without retaliation. Try to make AA-traps by luring enemy fighters to squishy recon planes that are additionally escorted by fighters above, so the AA can weaken enemy planes to reduce the repair cost of own planes.

Lots of good advice, Horst.

I might add that elite repair on aircraft becomes pointless anyway if you have the spec Pilot Rotation available later. 70% saving xp on regular repair is somewhat too powerful.

So no definitive set of benefits per level? Ex. 1 star = +1 to stats & 10% reduction to efficiency loss, etc.

The only thing the manual says about experience is this below-



PS- and when we begin a scenario we can click an option to allow units to gain exp in combat quicker than the default if we like.

PoorOldSpike wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 3:46 am PS- and when we begin a scenario we can click an option to allow units to gain exp in combat quicker than the default if we like.

According to a test with 7.1.6 now with units of the same stats:
5-star vs 5-star: 2+ : 2+
5-star vs 0-star: 3+ : 2
0-star vs 0-star: 3 : 3
0-star vs. 5-star: 2 : 3+

The base attack/defense value height doesn’t matter. I still remember from the past this was different, like percentage-wise, but I haven’t followed any undocumented change.
The difference is not a lot as it seems. To better imagine the damage results according to attack vs defense progression on the first attack at 100% efficiency:

Attack/Defense: Damage
1/10: 0
2/10: 0+
3/10: 0+
4/10: 1
5/10: 1+
6/10: 1+
7/10: 2
8/10: 2
9/10: 2+
10/10: 3
11/10: 3
12/10: 3+
13/10: 3+
14/10: 4
15/10: 4+
16/10: 4+
17/10: 5
18/10: 5
19/10: 5+
20/10: 6
21/10: 6
22/10: 6+
23/10: 6+
24/10: 7
25/10: 7+
26/10: 7+
27/10: 8
28/10: 8
29/10: 8+
30/10: 9
31/10: 9
32/10: 9+
33/10: 9+
34/10: 10

Damage/Strength is calculated in fractions, so even showing 0 damage can be really something like 0.1 damage. It gets much more complicated on follow-up strikes and reduced efficiency. So, experience roughly interpreted according to these 10-strength vs 10-strength, 100%-efficiency, 0-shock, same stats combat results on the first attack:
5 stars earn you maybe +2 attack/defense versus 0-star units. If both units are fully experienced then attack is reduced by 1.

Incidentally what's the situation with AI units experience? Do they only use Default (non-elite) replacement points?

I haven't noticed that the AI ever uses elite-repair. Each AI unit is destined to be short-lived, so it would be a waste.