The veterancy UI (in barracks, the thing with the stars) says that you have 5% extra life and damage per star. But the extra life is 10% per star - easily seen by looking at the tooltip over a soldier’s health bar. Using Unity Explorer, it appears that the extra damage is 5% per star however.
I don’t know if the mistake is in the UI, or in the life bonus applied. IMO: a max of 20% extra life and damage is pretty small, and it would rarely be enough for me to want to keep the manpower tied up in barracks (and pay the upkeep) continuously when I only need soldiers for a couple of years every ~3 months.
This is with mods (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to use Unity Explorer), but none of the mods touch veterancy at all.
Good idea, but I don’t have that relic active. Besides I’ve looked at the live game data: there’s a modifier for life on that soldier that’s flagged as “Veterancy” and is +40%. I’m seeing 40% extra health on that soldier. There’s a similar modifier with the same flag for extra damage that’s only set at 20%. I think what’s happening is pretty cut and dry.
I get attacked by raiders on average every 3 years or so, and each attack lasts a couple of months. The rest of time, soldiers do nothing, yet they still eat food and get paid. I usually fire them, and only rehire them when I get warning of an attack. Cavalry is the exception, because they take longer to get ready, and I like using them for an immediate pre-emptive strike.
I keep them around so that I can use fewer of them when the time comes. Eye of Hunter and Markovian’s Blade relics give your Xbows a lot of OOOMPH and a one-star vet can one-shot Thieves and 2-shot Warriors.
Plus, the cost to rehire is usually more than the annual cost to maintain.
But I’d want to run the numbers on your strategy after checking the files.
Thieves and warriors aren’t what I’m usually worried about. In the vanilla game archers are of limited value against rams, catapults, champions, cavalry and the invader tier of raids.
Hiring cost is 4 to 5 months of pay, not more than the annual cost (except for lancers where it’s just over 7, which reinforces my point). +40% health is a lot though, especially for HI which needs to tank a lot of hits, so maybe it is worth keeping them around. Archers are incredibly week to any attack, so +40% of almost nothing hardly makes a difference.
But that’s getting off topic. Do check the health bars of your units and see if you’re getting boosts of 10% increment (0 Veterancy life for archers should be 150). Would be good to confirm that it’s not just something weird happening exclusively on my end.