I have noticed a strange thing after a couple battles....I don't know if this is a bug or not but it sure looks like one..... I have seen a couple times now at the end of battle when I press details that one unit will get a crap load of exp points while the rest are spread evenly between them..... Like I saw one unit get three thousand some odd points while the rest of the party got 239........ Has anyone else noticed this happening in their game?

Can't say that I have, but I frequently have units in pairs, and the pairs always level in tandem so I don't think the scenario you are describing actually happens.

But I did notice after certain battles, the experience gain sometimes are displayed as being in the tens of thousands - but in actuality, my units did not get such obscene amounts of points. A display bug, perhaps?

I think this phenomenon is a consequence of the new "level system" introduced in D3. While in D2 there were level 1 squires and level 1 knight and so on, in D3 there are level 1 squires but the minimum level for a knight is 5.

The huge amounts of XP displayed at times in the results screen are distributed to those units that move up to the next tier, e.g. squire to knight. A unit only levels up 1 level when it´s got enough experience but the building necessary to reach the next tier is not available and gets normal experience. When the building is available however, the unit transforms to the next tier and levels up several levels, e.g. from level 1 squire to level 5 knight and the XP that are necessary to make that big leap from level 1 to level 5 are gained "for free" and are displayed in the battle results screen for those peculiar units.
In case of high tier units moving to the next tier, this results in e.g. several 10000 XPs allocated for free.

My vote, it´s not a bug but a consequence of the new level system where each unit has an individual level independent of the unit´s class, representing its overall power or dangerousness.

Your explanation sort of makes sense, StupendousMan, but I got confused again after thinking it through a bit. Is there a fixed amount of experience points separating the levels? Is there's some sort of background experience system independent of the unit types that can only make sense of the level 1 to level 5 leap if it forcefeeds the unit with free experience points?

A level 1 squire needs somewhere around a thousand points to level up to a knight (level 5), which is correctly documented up until it makes the leap. Are there two separate experience point systems going on here? A thousand points to trigger a buttload of even more experience points to move a squire 4 levels up? It all sounds like a really complicated way to go about doing something pretty simple.

I think your way of explaining it is quite correct.

Level 1 squire needs those assumed 1000 XP to level up to level 2. If he levels up and the next tier building is already built, this triggers a level up not to a level 2 squire but to a level 5 knight which has his own underlying basic level 5 XP requirements (which are nowhere shown because every knight starts out as level 5 but which is existant nonetheless). The difference between basic level 5 knight and the overall XP the unit would have after the battle normally before leveling up are "forcefeeded".

Maybe it looks complicated, the advantages that come with the new system are that you can roughly estimate the potential danger from a given unit by having a look at its level (level 30 squire should ROUGHLY be equally dangerous as a level 30 paladin), and, as far as I understand the system, the leveling speed of low tier units which are not upgraded (unit lock, although not present so far, only feasible by not building the next tier building) is no longer disproprtionally fast compared with the upgraded units. E.g. All units´ level up XP cost in D2 were the same/equidistant for the first ten levels IIRC (maybe even beyond the first ten levels) and in most of the cases only a tiny fraction of the level XP requirements of upgraded units, giving them sometimes an edge versus the upgraded units. With the D3 system the level up XP costs of every unit increases with every level gradually.