Reinforcements and Replacements

[TheDoctorKing]

I have been playing these games for a while and you would think I would know this....

A friend of mine, who also has been playing these games for some time, told me the other day that when you buy a unit from the reinforcement screen, it needs replacements of the proper type in your replacement pool to actually gain strength and become active. This is why, he said, units I had bought that were supposed to take 60 days had been on the map for at least 60 days and still showed a good amount of time before they were completed. Is this true?

If so, it seems weird to me. If you buy, for example, a regiment of infantry, you pay 10 money, 7 recruits, and a war supply (in CW2, more or less). Your regiment appears on the map but at first it has no strength or cohesion. It is supposed to be ready in 30 days and during the two turns, the strength grows until it is full of hits and has most of its cohesion. I always thought that was automatic - you paid the cost of the unit at the beginning of the process. If you bought an infantry replacement, it would also cost 10$, 7 CSC, and 1 WS (more or less). If the process of growth of the unit cost a replacement, then you would be paying for that regiment twice. If you have to pay the cost twice, what is the reasoning? Or has there been some misunderstanding somewhere?

[Ace]

As far as I know it is not true. You only pay reinforcements for uncomplete units you have received via event.

[TheDoctorKing]

You mean replacements. Like in SCW when you get the empty brigade HQs and they fill up over time with militia replacements.

I had always thought this was the case myself. Can we have a definitive response from somebody who knows the game code?

[Ace]

You can test it yourself. Use a small scenario, buy all the new units you can, turn attrition off, do not buy any replacements and see what happens. Open the scenario sct files to see if you receive some replacements via event.
If the replacement number has gone down, then they draw replacement and it is a bug, but I do not think that is the case.

[TheDoctorKing]

Good idea! You and I are correct and my friend is wrong, at least insofar as CW2 is concerned. The reinforcement units grew normally without consuming replacements. I built a few units for which there were no replacements in the pool (sailors and marines), and they came in normally as well. The test was slightly contaminated by an "epidemics" event, that caused some hits to units and consumed replacements, but I had turned off the automatic replacements function so I just noted the declining number. Ran the test for four turns, enough for the units I bought on turn one to come in.