In Waronline these days, rank in campaigns is determined by rank for experience gained by killing plus rank for overall tribute gained.

In the olden days of yore circa 2007(?) and before that, rank was determined by experience in combat gained AND lost. You wanted to keep your troops from getting killed. If you thought your cause was hopeless, you quit producing troops so as to avoid the loss of helpless troops.

In changing this feature to how it is now made a subtle difference in strategy, in that it is less important to guard your losses, except that you still want more kills than losses, obviously. But in a hopeless situation you might as well produce more troops, they might make some extra kills to pad your score. losing them incurs no penalty.

(Just a thought about the changes made on the game.)

So this makes you killing barbarians without thinking about losses unless you actually really need those 2-3 pop for your tier 1 army ^^. Not like in older times.