Experience; traditions | Army TW: Rome II Guide

Experience

Units can gain experience points in several ways. The most common way is in the fight, through killing enemy soldiers, destroying enemy siege machines or destroying enemy ships. In addition, units can be trained during recruitment thanks to train buildings and actively with help of champions attached to the army. Subsequent experience levels increase attack and defense efficiency in melee fights, missile shots per minute, missile accuracy and morale of troops. They also reduce vulnerability to fatigue.

Experience level can be easily checked with the icon on the upper-right corner of the given unit. Brown icon indicates levels 1-3, silver 4-6 and gold 7-9.

All units in the army were trained by a champion.

As you can see, experienced units are more efficient in the fight than fresh recruits, so you should take care of them and do not use them in suicide mission if possible.

Traditions

Each newly raised army has its own name and symbol. During the game, both the army and units in the army gain the experience points through battles. When army advances to the next level, you can choose one of many available traditions, which will give bonuses to units within the army.

After choosing a general just press details button (2 key) and you can see name, emblem and unit history on the first tab. In addition you can check amount of experience points and current army level. If you have unlocked a new tradition, you'll be able to choose it from the list - with higher experience levels it will be also possible to "upgrade" previously gained abilities.

Traditions are of great importance in Total War: Rome II. Even if your army is defeated or you disband it, the experience gained by it is not wasted. When raising a new army you can restore traditions, so your units will immediately use previously unlocked abilities. Same as with disbanding the army, this system allows you to rapidly move legion with traditions from one corner of the map to another.

Which traditions should be chosen? Again, I recommend specializing your legions and armies. In the initial stages of the game, especially when playing with barbarian factions, projectile units are very useful - hence you should train at least one army in that direction. On the other hand, effectiveness of projectile units decreases with time and more important is to have heavy infantry. For this reason I would suggest focusing more on bonuses for infantry than projectile units. The latter are useful mainly in Eastern countries, where archer horsemen and great foot archers will have an impact on the result of the battles till the end of the game.

Another very important type of troops is engineer/siege legion. If you choose traditions which increase efficiency of your units during the attack on defenses and improving your siege machines, you create an army capable to assault enemy settlements in the first turn. Such units should start the siege - after that send infantry armies into their area of influence, click on siege specialists and start the assault. Due to previously described ability to move legions over the map, your specialists can always be there, where you need them.

Bonuses for cavalry should be left for auxiliary legions, the ones, which join the battle as second wave. West armies using cavalry unfortunately aren't very effective, so riding traditions are not very popular among them. The situation is different in the East, where due to the vast areas many cavalry clashes takes place. Here you should focus especially on having excellent cavalry.