Health

[Philippe]

After multiple quick re-reads of the game manual I'm throwing in the towel and embarassing myself in public.

What exactly in game terms is health, and what is its function?

What causes you to lose it?

And how do you go about regaining it?

I'm guessing that it has something to do with how fast or easily you lose strength and cohesion, and that gaining or losing it has something to do with the availability of supply.

[Philippe]

I think I may have figured it out. It's not an important game function, which is why there isn't much written about it. It seems to be the ratio of current strength points to total possible strength points for a unit. I'm guessing that it goes up by adding replacements or down by taking losses.

[Durk]

Others who understand the tables better than I may have a more precise explanation of health.
As you correctly observe, it has something to do with supply. Observing naval units provides the best vision of what happens with health using the unit overview tables.
Units which have supply only suffer poor health if they get the troops in the swamp or largest force bad sanitation result.
This causes a visible drop on the Cohesion rating on the unit counter. Internally on the unit characteristic table, it causes a drop in Cohesion and Speed Coefficient or as I learned to call it, Celerity.
These things cause a drop:
Marching, especially marching in bad weather.
Forced march.
These can be attributed to cohesion, only, and may actually be merely a cohesion loss. But the effects are the same as if your force in the swamp takes a disease hit.

Health is regained the same way cohesion is regained. Be in full supply. Rest.
I am not certain there is a difference in health and cohesion, they have much the same effect.
You might say, loss of health is only a random game event. Regaining requires being in supply.

So not replacements. Random events.

[simovitch]

Definition of Health from AGEWiki:

The strength of a unit or element.
Displayed as a percentage of the Hits assigned to the elements in the Model database and files.

[Durk]

True, but this is a different meaning of Health than Philippe is inquiring about. You are referencing the broad meaning of hits, rather than the narrower meaning of hits in cohesion only.