Proposals/Obsolete Proposals/Attribute Increase

Attribute increases

Author: BTAxis (talk, contrib)

This article describes mechanics for the increase of a soldier's attributes.

A soldier will, in the course of the game, gain "experience" in a number of fields (as many as there are attributes). The soldier will gain experience in any one field based on the things that he or she did in combat and on time spent in a training facility. Experience only ever goes up, never down.

How experience should be gained is a tricky business. I will attempt to come up with methods that are fair and that make sense, but this issue is very much open for debate. Please use the talk page to discuss this.

• Strength increases when the soldier carries and uses heavy equipment. Heavy weapons will affect strength experience, and to a lesser degree assault and explosives as well. Moving around in heavy armour also affects strength experience. The heavier the armour, the faster the experience value rises.
• Speed increases when the soldier uses TUs. TUs spent on Reaction Fire count less heavily than TUs spent on actively firing and moving.
• Accuracy increases when the soldier uses a weapon. All weapons increase accuracy, but sniper weapons do so fastest, followed by assault.
• Mind increases when the soldier damages or kills enemies, as well as when the soldier uses support equipment like medikits.
• Close increases when the soldier uses close combat weapons.
• Heavy increases when the soldier uses heavy weapons.
• Assault increases when the soldier uses assault weapons.
• Sniper increases when the soldier uses sniper rifles.
• Explosive increases when the soldier uses explosives.
• Health increases a little bit whenever any other experience value rises. Health also rises when the soldier is being healed in a hospital.

All of the above will increase when the soldier is training at a PHALANX base, but training yields much smaller gains than real combat experience.

With this basic mechanic in place, we can go about actually increasing the soldier's attributes. Every once in a while (for example, every 24 game hours), the soldier's attributes are updated as follows:

attribute = basic_value + experience^0.5

Where basic_value is the value the soldier got at generation time (see Actor Generation). The power used in this example is subject to tweaking.

The net effect of this is that soldiers will initially improve quickly, but their rate of improvement will reduce over time. However, there is no real limit to their capacity to grow (other than basic datatype overflow limits, of course). It also means that a soldier who got a poor score at an attribute when he was generated will have great difficulty reaching an outstanding value for that attribute, while a soldier who got a good score right off the bat will have a clear advantage.

Let's assume that a soldier should, in the course of 100 missions, be able to get a stat up by 50 points if he's not neglecting that stat.
With a power of 0.5 (the square root), we get 50^(1/0.5) = 2500 points of experience to be gained in those 100 missions, making for 25 points per mission. So after one mission, the soldier will have 25^0.5 = 5 points extra for his stat. After 100, he will have 50. If the soldier trains really hard and earns double the baseline amount of experience points, he will gain 5000^0.5 = 70.7 points for the stat, which isn't all that big an improvement over 50.

Moving the power closer to 1 will make the soldier improve less quickly at the start compared to the later stages, but he will reach higher values than the baseline 50 with more ease. Conversely, moving the power closer to 0 will make the soldier improve quite rapidly in his first few weeks, but almost not at all once he becomes a veteran.

Myself, I think a power of 0.6 with an experience gain of 6 per mission (at ideal rates) would work well.