(2-51) Proposal: Units lose XP on upgrade

Sure,

Both systems are comparable for how complicated they are for the player. You either lose a % if your current XP or all of your progress towards your next level. In both cases there is a player decision: do I risk leaving an obsolete unit in and try to grind the next promotion out before upgrading or do I pull him back and upgrade right away? But, if the next level is a floor for XP loss, the player gets to also influence how much XP they lose, so it will feel like the player has a little more control and that the system is something they can try to mitigate.

Without that level floor, a %XP loss is just a function of how many times you upgrade that unit. That means it will have a greater effect on unit lines that upgrade more often and less on ones that don’t. The XP loss on melee units will be consistent while this will have a sporadic effect on recon and mounted, who often dip in and out of usefulness anyways. Having a floor that players can use complicates that straight nerf in a way that players can work around, rather than it just being a straight nerf. Flat %XP removal also looks like it will favour civs with later UU unlocks, who have a power spike where they want to build larger armies later. Aztecs and other ultra-early UU civs have a fun mini game of trying to preserve their ancient elite regiments while still preventing them from being overtaken by the free building XP on new units. Any form of XP reduction on upgrade frustrates this, but with an XP loss floor you can at least reason that if you played better and timed upgrades well you could have kept your jaguars in action. If it’s a flat modifier players might feel they’re just being punished too hard for any of this to be worth it.

Im particularly interested/worried about what effect either implementation with this would have on the recon line. WRT your starting scout, a later ruin upgrading him could actually set you back, assuming ruin upgrades deduct XP too. Your starting scout will hemorrhage XP on upgrades for the rest of the game after the exploration phase is over, either way.
 
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I like that the proposal is simple (the concept) and addresses a concern that it seems most of us share. However, I'll vote against it strictly, because I agree with the responses that it's "gamey" and unlikely that the AI will appreciate the subtlety of the decision making. I'm also philosophically opposed to changes that only affect the AI or the human player exclusively, so making it human-only doesn't move the needle for me.
 
An example:

If you have your starting warrior and XP loss per upgrade is, say, 20%:
You will need 19 XP when upgrading to spear for parity with a new barracks spear
You will need 44 XP when upgrading to pike for parity with a new armory pikeman
If your starting warrior manages to keep up, he will need to have earned 55 XP in order to keep 35 XP through 2 upgrades.

If your starting warrior managed to reach lvl 4 (60XP) at some point, he would be at 38 XP once upgraded to pike, and be 62 XP away from his next promotion.
 
This is a hard pass for me, honestly. If too many promotions is the problem, there are a number of ways to fix that without XP decay. Scaling XP thresholds for higher levels (after 4), for example, or reorganizing the promotion trees so you don't juts get T4 after T4 promo once you hit level 5. This congress is already packed, I don't think we have the bandwidth to address this issue in the best way, so my vote is one part disagreement, one part deferment.

After some thought, I could maybe see this working for the "big shake up" upgrades: swordsman/pikes to tercio, lancer to landship. In that context it would at least have some thematic resonance. Of course the list of what counts under that umbrella would be up for debate, but my rule of thumb would be things that change their resource requirements or core battle role.
 
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This is a no for me since it might encourage gamey behavior even more than right now.
The nature course of action when you hit a tech with upgradable units is to upgrade them whenever you can, but with this ppl might be "forced" (as in you can do something else, but not doing it this way means you lose for nothing) to keep old units and farm until they got their desired promotions before stacking all the upgrades in several turns (very easy for ranged units, which also are the ones which can make best use of extra promotions)
 
This is certainly not something I agree with, & would lose alot of the fun of obtaining promotions, which as Stalker said do get harder/longer the more you get. Also, this is a slap in the face for more peaceful nations, who might not fight many wars.
 
Actually this is a buff for peaceful play - your newly trained units are now not that far behind compared to multiple times promoted elite units.
 
I sponsor this.

Proposal sponsored by Recursive.
 
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