First Post: Introduction and test

[Monkay]

Hello everyone, my very first post on this forum. I learned about rougelikes not long ago, and I seemed to pick them up very quickly, but by far my favourite RL is Angband. I have been playing it for a few months and am still not exactly good at it, but I still enjoy it. I also enjoy FAAngband.
Looking forward to gaining experience from these forums and taking more steps to killing old Morgie!

My first Question: How does the experience system work, I understand the base XP required to advance to the next level depends on your race and class, but what I don't get is how much XP you gain from monsters. When you go up a level does the XP received from slaying monsters go down by half or something?

Thanks =)

[RCIX]

I don't know the formula, but if you (l)ook at a monster, then (r)ecall details about it, it will have somewhere in the description "Killing a monster of this type is worth X experience points for a level Y Z" (where X is the amount, Y is your current level, and Z is your race/class).

[Magnate]

I don't know the formula, but if you (l)ook at a monster, then (r)ecall details about it, it will have somewhere in the description "Killing a monster of this type is worth X experience points for a level Y Z" (where X is the amount, Y is your current level, and Z is your race/class).

The monster has a base xp value, which is then divided by your character level. So yes, when you rise from level 1 to level 2, all monsters are suddenly worth half as much xp as they were. But when you rise from level 10 to level 11 the drop is only 10%.

[relic]

Hello

Unless something has changed recently, it works like this:

Each monster has an experience number, lets call it E, and also a dungeon level (DL). And your character has a character level CL. When you kill a monster, the experience you get is

E*DL/CL

Hope I got that right.

The consequence of that formula is of course that as your CL increases, you get less and less exp. for killing a specific monster. This encourages people to go deeper in the dungeon in order to raise their CL.

[Derakon]

To clarify: it doesn't matter on what dungeon level you kill the monster; you'll get the same experience regardless. It matters what dungeon level the monster is native to. As I discovered once while playing the uber-broken versions of Sangband back in the day, if you change e.g. Black Ogres so their native depth (around 800', level 18) becomes 50' (level 1), they give 1/18th the normal experience.

[Monkay]

Ok I get it know, so basically its the base XP gained from killing a monster divided by clvl, thanks

[Nick]

I also enjoy FAAngband.

Awesome. Feel free to criticise it

Also, consider playing in the competition (see the tab at the top of the page).

[fph]

A question, since the matter was brought up: why does the XP formula scale like that with the CL?
I can imagine tweaking the values thing so that either the XP needed to get from level n to level n+1 increases, or that the XP obtained by killing a monster decreases with the CL, but having both things change at the same time seems a useless complication. Clearly one of the two "multipliers" can be removed by rescaling the other.

[Derakon]

It seems clear that we'd want to have some kind of worse-than-exponential increase in the number of weak monsters you have to kill to gain each successive level. The current system does that, while also having the following desirable characteristics:

* You can get meaningfully massive experience rewards for killing monsters you aren't supposed to be able to handle yet.
* Experience numbers remain somewhere in the grounds of reason.

Worse-than-exponential requirements when experience rewards don't decrease with CL would probably mean that level 50 would require billions or trillions of experience, with high-level monsters giving out similarly heady rewards. Currently it's extremely rare for you to get more than 100k experience from a single kill. Honestly I'd like to compress this even more, since characters end up with millions of experience points in the end and that seems a bit silly. It's purely aesthetics though, I grant.

[fph]

I see, that's a fair point. Experience values with a number of digits comparable to Zimbabwean currency look a bit silly indeed.

[LostTemplar]

It's purely aesthetics though, I grant.

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

[ghengiz]

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

good idea!

[Derakon]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

[ghengiz]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

lost templar specifically proposed to use the fractional level in char dumps.
During a game, it makes sense to just leave the display of the amount of experience as it is now, so the player can see immediatly how much experience s/he gains...

edit: of course, if doing the difference of the experience points after and before the kill is too much hassle, there is always the 'l'ook command

[LostTemplar]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

Something like this or maybe remove it form description. I propose to hide experience from player.