I have seen the changes made to the leveling system, and while it looked like it went down a bit, there was still something I found fishy about the level caps...
After playing one campaign on the main branch and starting a new one, I've noticed that the overall leveling requirements gets really steep, and so I went and calculated just when we're hitting the brick wall...
These are my observations, which might not be true at higher levels - please correct me if that's the case.
On the other hand, we start with 120 skill points already assigned and therefore know exactly how many we need to get to level N:
Now here's the thing - the level cap grows linearly with level (if you divide the attribute point gain between the three levels, the overall cap is raised roughly by 40 skill points per level). The overall number of skills needed for the level up, however, grows quadratically, so we're quickly outpacing the allowed skill ceiling here. I made a small chart to visualize this:
You can see that at level 24 you will not be able to advance any further because all of your skills would be at their cap. It means, the further leveling is essentially not possible (though I've seen levels reaching beyond the level cap, not sure if bug or feature).
To put it in perspective: 1615 skill points is roughly 90 skill points in every skill. And even more, if you want to reach the 275 skill points in something, you will need to have the corresponding attribute at 14 (130 + 5*30 = 280), which means, even if you put all the attribute points you gain by leveling into it, you will still need to start with 7 points in that attribute (by level 24 you only have 7 attribute points to assign).
Overall, I feel like this is not something the devs intended - it's kind of a waste of time to create those 275-point perks if you quite literally need to gear towards getting it from the beginning of a campaign, gimping pretty much everything else. Besides, close to level 24 you will need to power-level a bunch of skills you're not really using, which will turn the game into a munchkin nightmare. So, I would suggest maybe rethinking this leveling system to be even a bit more relaxed compared to what we have after the first round of balancing.
After playing one campaign on the main branch and starting a new one, I've noticed that the overall leveling requirements gets really steep, and so I went and calculated just when we're hitting the brick wall...
These are my observations, which might not be true at higher levels - please correct me if that's the case.
- We start with 120 skill points distributed along with 12 skill pips, plus an extra pip for level 1
- We start with 18 attribute points
- To get from level N to level N+1 we need to gain 5*(N+1) skill points
- Every level we gain a new skill pip and every three levels we gain a new attribute point
On the other hand, we start with 120 skill points already assigned and therefore know exactly how many we need to get to level N:
120 + (5*2 + 5*3 + ... + 5*N) = 120 + 5*(N+2)*(N-1)/2
Now here's the thing - the level cap grows linearly with level (if you divide the attribute point gain between the three levels, the overall cap is raised roughly by 40 skill points per level). The overall number of skills needed for the level up, however, grows quadratically, so we're quickly outpacing the allowed skill ceiling here. I made a small chart to visualize this:
You can see that at level 24 you will not be able to advance any further because all of your skills would be at their cap. It means, the further leveling is essentially not possible (though I've seen levels reaching beyond the level cap, not sure if bug or feature).
To put it in perspective: 1615 skill points is roughly 90 skill points in every skill. And even more, if you want to reach the 275 skill points in something, you will need to have the corresponding attribute at 14 (130 + 5*30 = 280), which means, even if you put all the attribute points you gain by leveling into it, you will still need to start with 7 points in that attribute (by level 24 you only have 7 attribute points to assign).
Overall, I feel like this is not something the devs intended - it's kind of a waste of time to create those 275-point perks if you quite literally need to gear towards getting it from the beginning of a campaign, gimping pretty much everything else. Besides, close to level 24 you will need to power-level a bunch of skills you're not really using, which will turn the game into a munchkin nightmare. So, I would suggest maybe rethinking this leveling system to be even a bit more relaxed compared to what we have after the first round of balancing.
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