I'm a little mixed on this. On one hand its a way to level up skills that are currently borderline impossible to level. On the other hand I could somehow get a character with extremely high levels in a skill that I've never actually used.
I think once they flesh out the actions you can take to level certain skills, and fix bugs related to actions granting XP, the current system is capable of working well.
I do think they should bring back shared XP after battles though. I find that my high tier units end up stealing all the kills and my low tier troops take forever to upgrade.
If there was a skill you never use, why would you bother increasing it? Also, it wouldn't be that easy (if balanced in that way) to get insanely high skills never using them.
Let's use an example:
Let's say looters (or any other tier 1 unit) give you 24 XP.
Increasing skill level from 5 to 6 takes 60 XP. If we were not to use any learning rate modifiers, this means with 3 looters killed we can increase our skill by 1. So ok, it's quite fast, but it's at the very early levels.
Increasing from 15 to 16 takes 277 XP, this means killing 12 looters.
I'm going to use the average of 3 and 12 looter kills for all levels between 6 and 15, giving 7 (actually 7.5, but you'll usually have some XP leftover after every level so lets round that down) *10 level ups meaning roughly 70 looters to get from skill 6 to 15, if we add 3 and 12 that's
rougly 85 looters to get skill from level 5 to level 16.
85 looters that you need to kill/incapacitate
personally to increase your skill from 5 to 16. Sure, depending on your playstyle, this could be a lot if you don't engage in combats or very little if you take out whole groups of enemies alone.
But since last perks in skills appear on level 275, getting 11 levels in a skill is like increasing it's mastery by... 4%?
But that's 11 skill points on very low range of that skill.
Increasing from 24 to 25 is 657 XP, meaning 27 looters just for one skill point.
Increasing from 38 to 39 is 1613 XP, meaning 67 looters just for one skill point. (That almost the same as increasing from 6 to 15)
Increasing from 86 to 87 is 8703 XP, meaning 362 looters just for one skill point. (5 Times as much as increasing from 6 to 15)
I don't that's something that could practically be used to increase skills to insane levels. (of course depends what skill level you define as insane, I'd say <50 is abysmal, between 50 and 100 low, between 100 and 150 medium, between 150 and 200 high, between 200 and 250 very high, and above 250 insane)
Sure, higher level units would mean you need to get less kills on them to level up any skill.
But, this would of course need to go through the balancing process. Maybe it would be tier 3 units that would give 24 XP, while tier one would give only 8? Who knows.
It could also use a campaign setting for "Free XP Modifier". Very easy could be +100%, easy could be +50%. Or 50/25%. Or very easy would be basic, easy would be -50% and normal would be -100%, so people who don't want to use it won't have it.
Personally i'd counter with minor XP from any source for this general pool. I mean, why just for killing enemies?
Sure, anything could give XP.
Quests, raiding…
Actually, maybe implement it in such a way that instead of XP from enemies, every time you gain some XP in any skill, you also gain some percent of it, as free XP?
Actually, I think that's what I would like the most.
Aaaaand still maybe some extra XP from quests too.
