XP costs?

[Fenikso]

Aug 13, 2011 15:49:10 GMT -5 slawyer said:

Severian is up to lvl 280 now.

Impressive! On what difficulty if I may ask?

[Cory Trese]

Good question =)

[slawyer]

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.

[Cory Trese]

Nice link. Amazing how far Expert Systems have come since 1984.

[slawyer]

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.

[Fenikso]

Impressive once again! I am using another approach (basically boosting Pilot and Tactics, completely omitting Stealth) and I am happy that it seems to be also well doable. But I have still some catching up to you ;D. Right now I enjoy lower level characters more.

[slawyer]

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.

[Fenikso]

Aug 18, 2011 16:00:08 GMT -5 slawyer said:

I bet omitting Stealth makes it harder.

I do not think so. As I usually get boarded only by Aliens and hit occasionally by 2x My Level warships or bounty hunters. Imagine splitting all your XP used on Stealth between Piloting and Tactics, that gives you also pretty good score in terms of hitting enemy and not being hit. But the encounter rate will be much higher -- so more suited for aggressive gameplay preferred by pirates and specific types of military, bounty, zealots and that like.

Aug 18, 2011 16:00:08 GMT -5 slawyer said:

We should compare scores...

Yea, we can try. 1425 encounters in 306 years, 5514 XP, 766 destroyed ships (588x stolen cargo ).
That's 4.65 encounters a year. 18 XP per year on average. So destroyed ships are 53%.

Those numbers make perfect sense to me.

Maybe we can also compare out skills relative to level? Is that even valid comparison?
Explorer = 1/82 = 1%
Pilot = 100/82 = 122%
Negotiate = 25/82 = 30%
Tactics = 117/82 = 143%
Stealth = 1/82 = 1%
Warrior = 25/82 = 30%
Intimidate = 25/82 = 30%

[Cory Trese]

good info

[slawyer]

I have made a spreadsheet in Excel to calculate stats, skills, character level, and experience for particular XP allocation strategies. It can be used to start from 1 Experience with any profession, or it can be used to plan future XP spending for a current character by plugging in your current stats, skills, and experience.

Following a counter-stealth XP allocation strategy definitely lets you boost your skills much farther above character level than high-stealth strategies like I typically use. Since Stealth counts twice as much as other stats, putting lots of extra points in Stealth reduces the available points for other skills greatly for a given character level.

Some interesting stuff I have found so far:

A Pirate who puts XP exclusively into Pilot and Tactics (and Quickness and Wisdom as necessary) can get those skills significantly higher than character level and keep them above 150% of character level for a very long time:

@level 50: 83 (166% level)
@level 100: 158 (158% level)
@level 200: 308 (154% level)
@level 300: 458 (152.66% level)
@level 400: 608 (152% level)
@level 500: 758 (151.6% level)

Such a pirate would need to shoot enemies and avoid boarding.

A pirate who puts XP exclusively into Pilot, Tactics, and Warrior (and Quickness, Wisdom, and Strength as necessary) can get those skills significantly higher than character level and keep them above 120% of character level for a very long time:

@level 50: 66 (132% level)
@level 100: 126 (126% level)
@level 200: 246 (123% level)
@level 300: 366 (122% level)
@level 400: 486 (121.5% level)
@level 500: 606 (121.2% level)

I like play Explorer (easier to start off), which is very close to those (just a bit behind Pirate).

Explorer spending XP only on Pilot/Tactics:

@level 50: 81 (162% level)
@level 100: 156 (156% level)
@level 200: 306 (153% level)
@level 300: 457 (152.33% level)
@level 400: 606 (151.5% level)
@level 500: 756 (151.2% level)

Explorer spending XP only on Pilot/Tactics/Warrior:

@level 50: 66 (132% level)
@level 100: 125 (125% level)
@level 200: 246 (123% level)
@level 300: 366 (122% level)
@level 400: 486 (121.5% level)
@level 500: 606 (121.2% level)

I will have to try these counter-stealth allocation strategies in my next games and see how they work.

Severian's current stats now:
1870.18 AE (94294 turns)
$191,274,260
Lvl: 350 [70394] (overall average ~0.75 XP/turn)
Charisma 109
Wisdom 109
Quickness 385
Strength 385
Explorer 6
Pilot 152
Negotiate 10
Tactics 109
Stealth 385
Warrior 385
Intimidate 109

4846 encounters, 283 hostile (283 and 0)
105 contracts, 1 rejected (oops!), 105 completed
1374 enemies destroyed (28.35%)
920 times looting (quit bothering long ago, got plenty of $)
1813 years in career
37 different ships
40 harvests, 40 explores (none in a long, long time)

[slawyer]

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

[k0rd]

you guise are pretty good at star traders.
i don't play enough to get to such high levels. i've got some good captains alive but i'm still a newb compared to your captains.
skill/level percent comparisons are interesting too. i'll have to check out your spreadsheet when i get home from work.

i'd be interested to know how some of the captains compare that run on cory's human emulator for ST.
@cory, does your testing stuff keep stats of some of the most powerful captains it has achieved?
if so, they would be interesting to see i bet there are some beasts that come out of it every once in a while (law of large numbers notwithstanding - i'm just talking about the oddities that spring out of the test plays)

[slawyer]

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?

[slawyer]

One more revision to optimize the VBA script code -- third time's the charm!

[slawyer]

OK, one more . . . added conditional formats to show skills and points to allocate for skills red when it exceeds the corresponding physical statistic.

Spreadsheets are cool.