XP costs?

He's up to lvl 319 now. Almost bought it against a pirate yesterday -- got down to 1 life in the duel before beating him. Now I turn the toasts back on before fights (I had no idea I was getting hit so bad!), and got a new ship with omni-stealth.

Ever heard of Rog-O-Matic? I think something like this for ST-RPG would be interesting:

www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html

It's like your simulator, with AI logic to try to optimize the player decisions based on past play outcomes.

This is on Impossible. Same game as in the screen shots in this thread (but much later on):

startradersrpg.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=rules&action=display&thread=961

I'll have to download more recent screen shots from my phone, then I can post a new one of the current Severian. He's been keeping Quickness = Strength = Stealth = Warrior = 110% of level, and putting XP in other stats as he can within that restriction. His pilot is at 138, tactics at 100, intimidate 100. Low ones are still explore and negotiate.

He was already pretty kick ass before ST-RPG you know, back when he was Autarch and ruler of Urth:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severian

Awesome book; too bad it's out of print. I used to have a D&D character based on him.

I bet omitting Stealth makes it harder. We should compare scores and see how it affects the average number of encounters / year (you probably have a lot more), which might actually increase the rate of XP / year just from more encounters. Severian has very few now, since his Stealth is very high (353 and rising). Currently he has had a total of 4381 encounters in 1587 years, or about 2.76/year. He's destroyed 1230 ships, about 28% of all his encounters (and he doesn't attack nonagressives ships -- these were all aggressors attacking me).

Now that I understand about how Stealth affects your character level twice as much, and Strength doesn't affect it at all, I want to try pumping Strength more (maybe 120% or 130% of level) so I get wounded less. That would make my level increase more slowly, and make the game date advance faster, but my character would be that much stronger at each level and less likely to get wounded.

good info

Update to fix up the macro code and protect workbook.
Yellow cells should stay yellow when selecting a profession.

That's why I mentioned ROG-O-MATIC earlier -- I wonder what kind of heuristics can be used to spend XP such that the probability of survival to very high levels and high turn count is maximized. It deserved another linking:
www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html

If Cory could put some logic in the simulator to try to play "better" over time, and find these heuristics, I think that would be super cool. Of course, there is a lot more to playing the game well than how you spend XP -- you gotta know when to fight and when to run! Severian does a lot of running away, and uses his high Intimidate and lots of Weapons to fight off boarders. The simulator would need logic to handle combat better too. I bet there are heuristics that could be developed for improving combat outcomes too -- when to use torps, advance, fire guns, board, retreat, or duel.

So far my best is the 110% Stealth/Warrior strategy. Severian's hard to hit (or even find) and tough as nails. He's got Leviathan System, Shalun Mercenaries, and Titan Components on his ships, and keeps 150+ Weapons around at all times (more than 2 for each crew). But eventually, he too will get to the point where even those advantages won't compensate for the difference between his level and the enemy NPC level. If he reaches level 500, he'll be running into level 1000 enemies that might have significantly more Stealth and Warrior than that, and I don't know at what point his advantages from ship upgrades and cargo will be insufficient. In ST-RPG on Impossible, there is always somebody stronger than you.

I also wonder, given that Strength is not counted toward your level, whether putting extra points into Strength from time to time would increase survival rates further. The extra XP costs game turns though, and the game gets harder as the turn count increases. I'm not clear about how the game turn count affects encounters though, so I'm not sure whether spending too much extra XP on Strength might actually make encounters worse somehow from the turn count increasing. It seems to me that it would unbalance the game to allow for endless XP spent on Strength and that not affect your character level, and thus not affect the difficulty of your encounters at all. But maybe that was the intent of leaving Strength out of the character level formula?

The formula sill seems kind of strange to me, because I tend to think of "Strength" as being somehow "more important" than "Stealth" -- maybe this is an artifact of all the anime I have been exposed to. Strength is what lets you fight better and makes you tougher, and Stealth is what makes you hide better and harder to hit, but doesn't actually help you damage the enemy any better, so it seems to me that Strength should be the one that affects your level more, and Stealth is the one that shouldn't affect it at all. But that's not how Cory designed it, and I'm sure he has thought all this through very carefully already when designing and balancing the game. Maybe he can enlighten us on the logic behind the formula? I imagine it makes much more sense when you know all about how the combat mechanics work and how the skills and stats are used to make the dice rolls.

Anyway, it is what it is, and now I think I completely understand how XP works in ST-RPG, and I really appreciate Cory's help with it!

Cory, if you keep giving me more info about game mechanics, maybe this spreadsheet can become a ST-RPG-O-MATIC?