Please keep in mind that training with apprentice units is probably going to be pretty slow going at first. You are going to want to do all of your training after lieutenant on DESERT if you where we have a +8% bonus to our soldiers. Fortunately apprentice horde riders have reasonably low HP and so you should be able to train every 2 (maybe 3) ticks with them for awhile. Please try and be diligent to get through the apprentice phase as quickly as possible.
Once you are a Captain with 46 soldiers you can start to promote them. I suggest to promote your soldiers as evenly as you can instead of spending the your wage to just promote a few soldiers many times.
Your training runs should begin to improve dramatically at this point. My only suggesting for training at this point is to STOP training once you have less than about 40-50% of your army standing. Ranged accuracy is very important for us and so it is better to have a lot of low XP battles with 100% of your army standing than to have a couple high XP battles with only 20% of your army standing.
I suggest staying at a full 46 soldiers while you rank up. It will mean that sometimes your wage will be hardcapped and you will have guys waiting to promote, but that is better than dismissing down and being very FAR from hardcap at the next rank. Eventually (when your commander is a very very high rank) you can get buy with only 43 soldiers, but it will take quite awhile to get to that point.
If Anything I've mentioned for Option 1 doesn't make sense or doesn't sound explained enough then please message me and I'll do my best to help.
~~ Option 2: 36 Bowman/Mangudai + 6 Tatar/Keshik ~~
This option starts out EXACTLY like option 1. Training with APPRENTICE Tier 1 Horde Riders until you have "enough" of them to begin promoting them.
That means DO NOT PROMOTE YOUR SOLDIERS UNTIL YOU HAVE ENOUGH OF THEM. (In this case that number is 42)
The benefit of using this strategy is that you only need 42 soldiers, not 46 before you can begin to promote them. That means you only need to hit Lieutenant**, not captain which will save 500 XP of training with apprentice units. But the drawback is that you will not have 100% Mangudais. You will end up with a mix of Mangudai's and Keshik, which aren't quite as good, in my opinion. So it's a trade off and the choice to take is yours.
Just like with Option 1; at Private you will buy 8 apprentice horde riders and begin training with them.
When you hit Corporal you will buy 2 more.
When you hit Corporal* you will buy 3 more.
You keep doing this. Every time your commander ranks up you need to buy as many more Apprentice Horde Riders as you can. Reminder: DO NOT PROMOTE THEM YET.
You should have the following number of Apprentice Horde Riders at these ranks:
Private - 8
Corporal - 10
Corporal* - 13
Sergeant - 16
Sergeant* - 19
Sergeant** - 22
Lieutenant - 33
Lieutenant* - 37
Lieutenant** - 42
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~C~ Eff_Dee
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