NPC skills improvement

[Madeloc]

Hello, don't know if I am right or wrong but it looks to me that fighting skills for NPCs only improve when the player is in the battle. Else only "campaign map" skills improve all the time.

With fighting skills, I hear : weapon masteries, riding, athletics (those have a slight increase on the campaign map it seems, not very significant), Engineering (significant if the NPC uses a ballista and hit people).
With "campaign map" skills, I understand : scouting, tactics, roguery (that they probably don't use/improve provided how they overload prisons...), Charm, Leadership (this one even improves well enough, that's very ok), trade? (do the NPCs have the ability to sell loot? should at least imrprove a bit their Trade), Steward, Medicine, Engineering (slight increase during sieges).

Anyone having more information about this?
Thanks in advance

 

[black_bulldog]

Unless it's been changed the pace weapon skills level depends on how much damage you do, which is why riding levels skills so much faster.
Riding and athletics level up during combat and on the world map. Imho leadership levels pathetically slow if you aren't leading armies. It's a big bugbear of mine. Rougery levels with things like attacking villages, caravans, prisoner escapes, and recruiting bandits but outside of prisoner escapes it's ludicrously slow. Trade only levels by selling stuff at a higher price than was bought at and again the pace is just way too slow. Yes companions can level trading too. Medicine and Engineering are stupidly slow to level. I use to level my medicine by shooting troops with blunt bolts or arrows at the end of battles, but that doesn't work anymore so you have to just send it low level troops to get massacred which is an even worse mechanic. I doubt Taleworlds will ever make any adjustments to skill leveling pace because if they were going to they would've done it a long time ago so they could get feedback and make adjustments.

 

[Zerosaiko]

Some of these have been improved recently, thankfully.

Dunno about Riding or Athletics, but in the 1.8.0 hotfix they added some more:

Leadership raising from when your non-bandit units get XP, even if they're maxed out.
Roguery raising from when your bandit units get XP, even if they're maxed out
Medicine now raises based on the tier of the troop, and Doctor's Oath helps raise it too so you can actually get it from taking enemies out instead of throwing your troops into a meatgrinder.
Scouting also gives XP based on moving quickly now, based on the size of the party.

Though grinding NPCs in general still feels like an exercise in misery in my opinion.