Fixed levelling messed up

[Hylie Pistof]

After 7 months game time neither I nor any of my officers have gained a level. I have gained about 40% of the points i need to make level 6.

Leadership and Luck are the worst as they are both still at 0% in spite of my best efforts to boost them. Grappling is still at 0% too but I have only grappled 1 time.

The only things that seem to be moving are the melee, accuracy, and cannons. I wanted a slower leveling system but this is too slow for the important stuff. Is the only way to level up really getting into constant combat?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That doesn't sound right at all.

@Levis: What is that setting again that you decreased?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Hylie Pistof: What Difficulty Level are you playing on? If you reduce that to the lowest, do you start gaining XP more quickly?

That isn't a fix, of course, but I wonder if that might be related.

You could also enable all the debug toggles at the top of PROGRAM\Characters\Leveling.c and then post your compile.log here after a while of playing.
That may then contain some useful information that @Levis can use to fix this quicker.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

1) Shwashbuckler

After I posted the above I continued playing and one officer and meself did gain a level and it seemed to be from fighting. We fought our way across an island and did some dungeon diving. My leadership and luck both have 1% now.

This makes me appreciate the low level weapons and things more. I used to zoom past them so fast many never got used at all. It is very difficult at the lower levels. I attempted a boarding where the opponent had awful morale and I outnumbered them anyway. In the battle I lost all my crew and two officers. Since I had no officers left to fill the holes and still had all the lower decks to do it was obvious we wouldn't make it and I reloaded from when we left port.

Will do the debug.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Here is the debug info. I started at San Juan port and ran around town for a while, picked up a cargo run to Cayman and sailed there.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

PROGRAM\Characters\Leveling.c contains two #defines that were changed with the ZIPs.

Specifically, these:

#define SKILL_EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER   1.0       // FLOAT - Must be a float higher than 0.0 - default is 1.0 - the rate at which the characters gain skill experience: For a 30% increase set to 1.3
#define EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER   0.9         // FLOAT - Must be a float higher than 0.0 - default is 1.0 - the rate at which the characters gain experience: For a 30% increase set to 1.3

Were changed to these:

#define SKILL_EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER   0.8       // FLOAT - Must be a float higher than 0.0 - default is 1.0 - the rate at which the characters gain skill experience: For a 30% increase set to 1.3
#define EXPERIENCE_MULTIPLIER   0.8         // FLOAT - Must be a float higher than 0.0 - default is 1.0 - the rate at which the characters gain experience: For a 30% increase set to 1.3

Can you see what happens when you put those back to 1.0 and 0.9?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Done. It might be a while before I see any changes.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Done. It might be a while before I see any changes.

Fair enough. Thanks for trying.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Wow! That made a difference. Just talking to a few town folk raised my Leadership from 2% to 12%. I had about given up on chatting anymore. But Luck used to go up as well but it is still stuck at 1%.

Overall it looks like it is slower than before this change, which is good as we were advancing too fast before. More testing required.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

So that suggests the system may still be working as it should, but the numbers aren't right.
Possibly the effect of difficulty on experience is exaggerated.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Dunno. After one game year I have moved from level 5 to level 7 and one officer has also gone up a level. The first officer I hired, Baldewyn Coffier is still mostly 1-1.

 

[Levis]

Hmmm maybe I lowered them a bit to much XD.
Also note there are multipliers for different skills so if a skill isn't progressing fast enough we can change that. Please keep me informed

 

[Hylie Pistof]

So far Luck has advanced 1% in a year.

 

[Levis]

So far Luck has advanced 1% in a year.

Did you do anything which would progress it like gambling? I believe I've also added some luck xp to smuggling...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

So what's the latest news on this? Do the 1.0 and 0.9 values make it reasonable again?
Or is it still something else?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I never gamble and always bump Luck by chatting with the town folk. That no longer works. I have only done 1 smuggling run. It sounds like major huge broken changes have been made here.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

On topic, in a year of playing I have gained 2 levels and one officer has gained 1 level, and the only skills that seem to be advancing are melee, accuracy, and cannons.

So, for starters the officers XP gain should be at least doubled judt to keep up with the player.

Then XP gain for all should be increased a little.

It seems some skills are now emphasized much more than others leading to an unbalanced game. My personal opinion is that all skills should be weighted the same and the player's actions will determine which ones advance the fastest. Those that get used a lot will advance quickly while those that do not get used will advance very slowly.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Do you reckon you could play a bit on lower Difficulty Level?
I wonder if the effect of difficulty is exaggerated and show it down more than it really should.

Of course we WANT all skills to be equally weighed.
But it isn't as simple as that. Skills get added in many different spots in the game code, some which are called very often and some which aren't at all.
So the ones that get called often need to return not too much, while the rarer ones should give extra gain.
That way, on average, it balances out.

But it is extremely hard to balance out those weighing factors so that if seems like it is all balanced the way it is meant to be.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ok, here is a little story. I landed on Cartagena and set the difficulty to Landlubber to see what it takes to open up certain perks, then got called away for a while. When I came back I forgot about the level and went to the shipyard where I found a very nice Neptunus, so bought and equipped it.

WHAM!!!

Myself and most of my officers suddenly got huge level ups! As in I went from level 8 to level 36!

I then went to the store and got a merchant run and then remembered about the level. Reset it to Swashbuckler. Headed for the ships and the game crashed. Of course I had forgotten to save...........

So yes to me it looks like the levelling system works just fine at the lowest level and almost not at all at the highest level. Since no other players have noticed anything thing it looks like the problem only exists at Swashbuckler level.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That does suggest it is a balancing issue and the Difficulty indeed affects the Levelling more than can be considered reasonable.

You also remind me: When I tested your "Moulin" issue, I gained a HUGE amount of XP upon killing that evil French officer guy.
Definitely more than would seem reasonable.