Hard cap on glorious/battle promotions?

[User0918]

One of my early game strategies on Deity difficulty is trying to get as many "free" promotions as possible through combat victories on my starting units. This works fine for a while until I seem to hit a roadblock in that I can't manage to be awarded another one, even when going against suicidal odds like 33% or worse. I started several new games and I was able to observe this behavior pretty consistently in all of them.

Is there a hard cap on the number of promotions by combat victories that a unit can acquire? If so, is there a way to adjust those numbers? It feels pretty bad to manage to survive a 50% battle and just get awarded with some measly xp which is probalby not even 5% progress to the next level I'm playing with "more XP to level", so that's why I need these extra promotions for my few top tier units. Yep, kinda cheesy to do, but I like to have this mix of a few good units and a lot of filler ones.

 

[Thunderbrd]

The 'cap' you're hitting may be due to there not being any further promotions that qualify due to the parameters of the combat itself. There isn't a hard cap on battlefield promotions that can be awarded but each promotion tag is considered such as, if the plot of battle was a forest, then perhaps the unit may qualify for a forest move or combat modifier promo. It would seem strange to run out of qualifying promotions unless you were gaining a LOT of these.

When you gain them, you don't gain XP, and this can sometimes mean the normal XP gain would've been a better deal. Maybe not so often with more XP to level I guess.

 

[User0918]

That's good to hear.
Terrain definitely plays a role, when I fight on Barren I might get a Rugged promotion and a Wetlands one when fighting in swamps. I could have sworn though, that in all of the games I still had many promotions left, mostly specialist promotions like the Guerilla line, Sidestep, Hillsman and all of the pursuit ones. The ones I reliably get are the Combat/Sophistication/To the Death lines, pretty much in every game.

I'll come clean here and admit that I use a strategy that might or might not be an exploit and/or bug. A few games ago, while randomly killing various types of animals, I found out that a few animals have a very high chance of awarding a battelfield promotion on victory. And not like you might expect the beefiest of the bunch - no, it's pigeons, ducks and pheasants. When fighting those three (and only those, owls for example did not work for me) *something* seems to make the game think that you fought a very tough battle. Feels almost like an overflow type of thing, considering those are amongst the weakest of all creatures. But then again, it doesn't work on the other 1-strength units, only those three mentioned. On average I'd say it's at least a 33% chance, probably closer to 50% even.
As cool as it is to stack promotions, that might be something you guys want to look into whenever you got some spare time on your hands

 

[Thunderbrd]

That's good to hear.
Terrain definitely plays a role, when I fight on Barren I might get a Rugged promotion and a Wetlands one when fighting in swamps. I could have sworn though, that in all of the games I still had many promotions left, mostly specialist promotions like the Guerilla line, Sidestep, Hillsman and all of the pursuit ones. The ones I reliably get are the Combat/Sophistication/To the Death lines, pretty much in every game.

I'll come clean here and admit that I use a strategy that might or might not be an exploit and/or bug. A few games ago, while randomly killing various types of animals, I found out that a few animals have a very high chance of awarding a battelfield promotion on victory. And not like you might expect the beefiest of the bunch - no, it's pigeons, ducks and pheasants. When fighting those three (and only those, owls for example did not work for me) *something* seems to make the game think that you fought a very tough battle. Feels almost like an overflow type of thing, considering those are amongst the weakest of all creatures. But then again, it doesn't work on the other 1-strength units, only those three mentioned. On average I'd say it's at least a 33% chance, probably closer to 50% even.
As cool as it is to stack promotions, that might be something you guys want to look into whenever you got some spare time on your hands

Are you playing on the latest SVN version? Some efforts have gone into attempts to greatly curb this strange mathematical effect that comes from the high chance that the creature may be able to withdraw but maybe not as good a chance as it may seem when you have first strikes to tear down it's very limited amount of HP before it can even attempt a withdrawal. The high withdrawal is what makes the system think it was a very unlikely fight to have won.

 

[User0918]

I'm not really sure how to check for the version number, but due to a problem with my OS I had to reinstall about 2-3 weeks ago, so it should be fairly recent.
I realized a few days ago that this behaviour is even more apparent with siege units. When I fight a log ram/battering ram I'm pretty much guaranteed a promotion, see screenshot below. Can I check for an update without immediately downloading it? I have a good game going and don't want to mess with that atm.

 

[Thunderbrd]

You'd want to get the SVN version. It can be updated easily and you can back down to an earlier version there if it causes problems to update to the latest. As far as the battlefield promos being related to Rams, that must be due to the way the automatic withdrawal factor plays in... That's probably something I haven't considered as I've tried to correct the formula in the past. I'll have to give it some thought how that should be corrected.