User talk:MikeTheRed
Here be more detail than you ever wanted to know. Please put comments/question in italics. If you want an email reply, either be a regular of here or xcomufo.com, make a User page, or just type in yer email addy.
The Experience of Experience
A.K.A. more details than you ever wanted to know, about testing XCOM:UD 1.4 experience counters versus stat increases
My observations under Experience are getting incredibly long-winded. And at the same time, I am doing yet more research on it. So I've made this space to put levels of detail that are way more than a casual player is interested in. I will probably move some stuff out of Experience and over to here as I polish the info.
Non-Randomness
This section only applies to primary skill increases:
When I've talked about experience rolls, I've made it sound like you always get the average (halfway between the ranges). But this is definitely not the case, especially when there are very few experience points (EPs) in UNITREF offsets 80-85. Specifically, when there are only 1 or 2 primary actions - the first 'step' for primary skill points - I saw very weird, non-random stuff. Example: I would set up 16 soldiers, with only 1 or 2 EPs for each soldier. When I ended the combat, the skill point range was undeniably 0-1. But far more often than not, the 16 soldiers in my test crew would all get 0 skill points, all across the board. Then every now and then they would all get 1 skill point, all across the board. And even less often, there would be a mix of 0s and 1s in the results. The actual average increase was about 0.2 points, not the 0.5 points I wrote in Experience. To this day, I cannot get a handle on what is triggering them to all be 0 or 1. My best guess is that it is based on some high-level bit mask over the system clock... it seems to come and go in unpredictable spurts. (If this is true, it's possible that my DosBox wrapper is messing with the results. But then, it would be for anyone using DosBox.) I tested by reloading and quickly ending some particular savegame, so I can never be sure my problems weren't caused by the fact that I was doing this (instead of racking up experience points au natural, where some unknown randomness seed might be being kept somewhere).
Anyway, I kept the main wiki summary simple, and just strongly advised people to try to get at least three primary actions. At 3 actions I saw little non-randomness. More precisely, I did see some non-randomness, such as all stats getting the same result for several tests in a row. But, when summarized across any larger n (20+ tests), the summary stats were always close to the average of the range. So, there was a little bit of weirdness at 3+ actions... but it was nothing like at 1-2 actions.
Secondary "Steps"
In the wiki on secondary stats, I said that there is an even slope for secondary skill point gains, from an average of 4 (range 0-8) at (hacked) secondary level 0, to an average of 1 (range 0-2) at Cap-1. In actuality, it's more like this:
The three stats TUs, Health, and Strength have a range that decreases by 1, at every increment of 10. Stamina - that high-winded beast - decreases at every increment of 15. This is working backwards from their caps. So a graph of the range of points looks like this:
(TBA)