Besides technology there’s another way to quickly improve both your troops and your country in Imperator: Rome. And that is by unlocking Military Traditions via Military Experience. Let’s get to the point straight away, the steps are as follows:
- Raise Levies
- Disband Levies
- Profit
Now, the real question is how do you make the most of this? Well, you need to understand how military traditions and military exprience works. So let’s start by going through those details.
How is Military Experience Calculated?
It’s all rather simple: you get 0.15 points of Military Experience for each point of Cohort experience, for every cohort that you disband. You also get a ticking score that increases military experience every month. This is a combination of factors like advisors, base value, average corhot experience and more. However, it’s pretty rare that this would be anywhere close to one full point per month.
Thus, your primary method of gaining military experience is via levies. And here there are two things that matter: pure numbers, and different modifiers. You want to raise as many levies as possible.
Make note that you need to keep the levies on the field for eight months before disbanding, otherwise you get no experience.
Stacking Modifiers Is the Way to Go
Once you have your levy numbers high enough, which means somewhere around 80 cohorts from a single region, you can really start farming the experience. But before you do this, you need to ensure that you have all the right innovations unlocked.
There are two factors here that you want to keep an eye on: Starting Experience and Experience Decay. The higher the starting experience the more military experience you are going to get when you disband the levy. That starting experience decreases fast, with each monthly tick giving a base decay of 4.50 % of current experience. In other words, the decay is not a flat sum. This can be reduced with various inventions, traditions, and other factors.
In short, get as high starting experience as possible, as low experience decay as possible, and as many levies as you can. Then just raise them, disband eight months later, and raise four months later.
Any Downsides to Raising Levies?
Yes, obviously. First off, levies take food with them when they mobilize. This can really impact your provices if you have massive levies, to the point of starvation. The mobilized levies also means that those pops are not going to be producing. It’s going to tank your research and tax income. But on the other hand, when you are at the point where you can do this, you usually don’t need to worry about such things anyways.
And if things go really bad, just hold abreak of year or two where you don’t farm xp via levies.
Unlocking New Military Traditions
Doing this, especially mid to late game, you are going to sail your way through the military traditions fast. Which means that you want to start unlocking new military traditions. And the way to do this is pretty easy:
- Intregrate a minimum of 300 pops from a different culture group
- Study Their Ways of War
And that’s all you need to do. Once done, you can start unlocking these Military Traditions. Make note that if you remove their rights, or unintegrate the pops, you will lose access to the tradition tree. So make sure to unlock everything you want before doing this.
And that’s it! Start unlocking traditions and take your playthrough to the next level!
