Hey, thanks for the questions!
- Morale matters because if it did not one can just fill up bandit troops to their party and not care about the party at all and by simply waiting and paying wages one can gain roguery experience.
- You can, it is similar to roguery and it requires at least 75 morale to gain experience for leadership for each party member you have. Formula is (Morale-70) x Total Man Count x 0.01
- Because the current design prioritizes the management aspects for governors and therefore rewards stewardship experience to them. However, it might be expanded to award engineering skill as well as it makes sense.
I know this has already been discussed ad nauseum, but I just saw this post from last month showing the actual leadership xp gain formula and I thought it was interesting, but not in a good way. I'm curious how you guys decide on the values for formulas like this:
(Morale-70) x Total Man Count x 0.01
Putting this formula into practice, let's say you're leading a party of 100 with morale of 75, that's (75-70) x 100 x 0.01 for a whopping total of 5xp/day
Best case scenario: 300 man party, 100 morale – (100-70) x 300 x 0.01 = 90xp/day
Assuming this guy's calculations are correct, it takes a total of 382,059 xp to get to 100 leadership skill (its not actually that high in practice since you don't start at 0, but the early skill points are the cheapest in xp cost, so I suspect the actual total isn't too far off). So in other words, it would take over 4,000 days of constantly leading a massive party with perfect morale to level leadership up to 100 if you were to rely on just the passive xp from leading troops. Forget about amassing the 7.3 million+ xp required to get to level 250.
And the xp gains don't scale up at all, since they're based on raw headcount. The xp formula for leading armies is entirely different and its based on troop tier (Army Strength x Morale x 0.0004), so at least you're rewarded more for your elite troops. Why doesn't the regular formula use party strength instead of raw headcount?
These numbers make zero sense when you relate them to the amounts of xp needed to level skill points. Its as if somebody looked at the xp requirements for skills below 50 and based the gains on those figures, forgetting that the requirements increase exponentially as they go up to where you're looking at tens of thousands of xp per skill point when you're over 100. Leadership needs an entirely new formula that takes troop tiers into account and scales somewhat with the level requirements so that its actually possible to reach the high skill levels before the heat death of the universe.