Training Recruits at Military Academies

An odd thought that occurred to me at the weekend...

In the rules you can send recruits to a military academy for a year to train, after which they are considered to be 'well drilled', so for example send recruits to a cavalry academy and after 12 months they can then be used to form horse squadrons that are already well drilled.

I am a little puzzled by this-it only takes 6 months to drill so I can't see the advantage to sending recruits to an academy first, unless by sending them to the academy not only are they well drilled but they also are just generally better trained somehow.

Does anyone know if there is an advantage in sending recruits to an academy first?

you can send more to an academy, usually 1000 at a time, where as you you have to drill units, soon as they do anything active the drill stops. The advantage is say having 3 academies is that in 1 year you have 3000 trained (in whatever) recruits to use.

I used to use academies for expert things like Arty or engineers, some times cavalry

I tend to have a lot of academies, artillery, metellurgy, cavalry and such. But I find I don't see he point of it, not only does it tangle up your academies when you could have them doing better things with them. Like in one of my games I am researching the Sextant, always handy!

My guess is that because you can then turn them into any type of unit and they start out well drilled.  

So if you already know exactly what you want, do that, but if you want to be able to fire up different troop types, this speeds that process, leaving them as recruits until you need to actually form units.

That said, I think it's mostly a bad use of an academy.

Thanks guys

I did wonder if by being trained at an academy they would be better soldiers, being trained 'centrally' rather than in their units, but in retrospect I guess that is a bit too modern thinking.

And yes, do agree with Deacon and Mark, it does seem a waste of an academy.