Talk:Experience

EtherealC, thanks for pointing out that mistake in the Secondary - CMs table. I did the calculations in a spreadsheet, but then typed the table by hand, since it was such an irregular table. Clearly I copied that "6" wrong... I had a whole lot of numbers in my head. :P

I did a linear equation for this CMs table, instead of using the actual stairstep function shown on my other page... the reasoning being that, because you can't say someone will always get the average as they perform combats and "advance through" a step, smoothing it seemed a better idea... it better approximates what you'd see, on average (you might take one step fast, another slow).

That said, I just tried making the linear equation again to double-check "what was I thinking" when I put that 6, and found to my dismay that I am not reproducing the same numbers with my linear equation. E.g. I get 2.5 for TUs R_min (50), not 2.2 (and 3.5 for STR R_Min, as you said). I can't remember what I was thinking but I can recall there was some reason it made sense to not be right at the average with the linear equation. But now I can't remember it. So unless/until I do, the table should be re-done using a straight-forward linear equation (or even stairsteps).

Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to reconstruct my work to the point of putting the combat mission counts on top of the linear equation again... wouldn't you know it, it looks like this is one of the few things that I didn't packrat away. So for the time being I've just made that comment there. Maybe I'll get back to it some day, or anybody else can take a shot.

As for your comment about "probably only 10 Bravery experience points are needed for an increase", here's how the data looked:

   AC    Min    Ave +/- SDs   Max      N
    0     0     0.00   0.00     0    2004
    1     0     1.00   3.02    10     100
    2     0     0.90   2.88    10     100
    3     0     2.91   4.55    10     179
    4     0     4.47   4.99    10     150
    5     0     4.97   5.01    10     185
    6     0     5.13   5.01    10     150
    7     0     6.80   4.68    10     150
    8     0     6.80   4.68    10     150
    9     0     8.53   3.55    10     150
   10     0     8.92   3.12    10     249
   11    10    10.00   0.00    10     250
   12    10    10.00   0.00    10      50
   13    10    10.00   0.00    10      85
   30    10    10.00   0.00    10     133
   90    10    10.00   0.00    10     129
  250    10    10.00   0.00    10      50

Where AC is the "action" count (or experience count) value hacked into the Unitref.dat counter for Bravery (UR[85]), and Minimum, Average +/- Std. Dev. (sample), and Maximum are shown, together with the number of times tested. (The Ns are often nice round numbers because I would e.g. hack 10 soldiers in a savegame, then end that combat 15 times.) Don't be confused by the average; that is, you only get a 10 (or not), so the ave+SDs is actually a weighted average, as it were, of how often you get 10 or not for a given UR[85]. (That's why the SDs are huge and pretty much =5 in the middle.)

The average kind of goes from 1 at AC=1 to 9 at AC=10, and then is always 10, for AC=11 and anything higher. As you can see, it is not smooth and odd at the ends (AC=1 practically equals AC=2, and AC=10 might've been expected to be equal or very close to 10, but it wasn't, etc.). Anyway, that's how the data was. Don't ask me why they chose 11 for experience counters and especially this, but they did. As you can see, I zeroed in around that 10/11 border with a bit of additional testing, but it held up.

Since Bravery is a pretty boring statistic all in all, I didn't do anything more with it except to make that simplified statement on the other page. But if somebody wants to stash this data or comments on it somewhere, go for it.

For the record: The above was for varying values of Bravery, as long as they were less than 100. (Which is actually stored as an "inverted" single-digit value which equals a x0 value - see Unitref and Soldier.dat - but nevermind that.) As for other primary stats, I found that the current Bravery value (0 to 90) had no effect on the increase, as long as it was below the cap of 100 (data not shown).

You can delete all this after reading, if you like.

---MikeTheRed 16:30, 17 May 2006 (PDT)

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I much prefer leaving discussions undeleted -- they often let you know more about the thinking that went into an edit. The bravery data you input above is just what's needed to ward off "why 11 and not 10?" questions, for instance. Yeah, I know you can find them in the history -- but discussion pages don't need tidying like article pages do, IMO.

Anyhow, thanks for the data, I'm convinced. Good luck cleaning up the CMs table. :-P