Ranged units losing upgrades?

[Drakir89]

Hello everyone! Been lurking for a while, this will be my first post.

I've seen many people say ranged units don't keep their promotions when they upgrade. This confuses me since in my games the promotions remain and still add combat strength in the preferred terrain type (knight with barrage gets bonuses when I attack rough terrain).

I especially like Chariot archers for this reason because March only requires two ranged promotions as opposed to three melee ones, and is really useful for hit and run cavalry.

Am I missing something?

 

[Adjuvant]

It's a little different now that ranged have their own "lines". It "used to be" crossbowmen would promote to riflemen, losing ranged promotions. Still there is a factor machine guns promote to mech infantry, but I've not done it, heeding the warnings.

also, welcome.

 

[Harv72b]

I especially like Chariot archers for this reason because March only requires two ranged promotions as opposed to three melee ones, and is really useful for hit and run cavalry.

Just to expand, it's not that ranged units lose their promotions when the upgrade path changes them to melee (they don't), it's that you have to start over again in order to earn second-tier promotions such as march or blitz. G&K partially fixed that issue by including gattling & machine guns at the end of the archer upgrade path, allowing them to remain ranged up through the modern era, but as the previous poster indicated you'd still end up with a melee unit (mech inf) if you finished their tree.

In the vanilla game it was especially annoying, as you were stuck either re-doing your promotions or fielding crossbows along with your modern armor and rocket artillery.