SP - General Leveling system and level caps

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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.
  • 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
Now, here's where the calculation begins: every attribute point >1 adds 10 to each of the corresponding skill caps. Every pip adds 30 to their skill cap.Easy to see that every level our overall skill cap is raised by 30, and every third level by an additional 30. At level 1 it sums up to 750 skillpoints across 18 skills.
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:
f9UN8TE.png


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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The upper bound is not the same as the learning limit. You can see that here

Limit is where how far your learning limit is maxxed out. Upper bound is when it becomes 0 and you cannot level anymore.
 
Could you please elaborate on this? What does it mean? Is it something explained in the game to any extend?


It's fairly hidden in game but take a look at that chart. 7attributes and 5focuses will let you get to 210 at the maximum learning rate. After 210 you start to learn slower until you reach the upperbound of 288, where your learning rate becomes 0.
 
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.
  • 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
Now, here's where the calculation begins: every attribute point >1 adds 10 to each of the corresponding skill caps. Every pip adds 30 to their skill cap.Easy to see that every level our overall skill cap is raised by 30, and every third level by an additional 30. At level 1 it sums up to 750 skillpoints across 18 skills.
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:
f9UN8TE.png


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 13 (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 6 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.
Fookin "A" (y) (y)
My character will die before I hard cap smithing...
 
Thanks, guys! Though as Bellicosity pointed out, the cap listed as "training limit" is not actually a limit, so theoretically we can still level till probably lvl30-ish. However, between the dropping leveling multiplier, growing XP requirements to gain the next skill point and taking into account that normal people will not be trying to level all the available skills, I think the general point of my post still stands. Hopefully the devs will come around to balancing it at some point.
 
Oh man, I completely misunderstood the patch details... This
Changed Skill XP increase formula to 10 + skill level.
means that the amount of XP one needs to advance from level N-1 to level N is N+10 higher than the previous level... So, if at level 0 we need 30 XP to get to level 1, the formula is
XP(N-1,N) = 20+N*10 + (N-1)*N/2

That changes nothing for the level caps, and I don't even know the formula that was used before that...
 
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