Fleet experiance, how is it earned.

[capnq]

How do you get race experience, and what does it do? Does it have any effect at all?

From the Frequently Asked Questions For Newbies:

5.7.8 Racial experience has no meaning, a theory has it that it's a feature that isn't implemented.

Establishing new colonies is one thing that earns racial experience points; I'm not sure what else does. The only thing racial experience seems to affect is the description of your race's Age.

[PvK]

Drones also give a lot less than 1 ship experience per kill, but they do seem to give some. I don't think shooting down seekers gives very much experience, if any.

[PvK]

Race experience is earned for all sorts of things, as I recall. Colonization, building things, fighting, etc. It's mainly supposed to give an indication to human opponents of how long their opponent has been playing using the same empire, assuming the player keep using the same .EMP file in multiple games.

Originally, it was intended to give a small bonus to this or that, as well, but I don't think it does currently. It would be sort of interesting, but a bit unfair since players with deranged priorities could auto-run their EMP files through thousands of turns just to get a bonus...

PvK

[Fyron]

Originally posted by PvK:
Race experience is earned for all sorts of things, as I recall. Colonization, building things, fighting, etc. It's mainly supposed to give an indication to human opponents of how long their opponent has been playing using the same empire, assuming the player keep using the same .EMP file in multiple games.

Originally, it was intended to give a small bonus to this or that, as well, but I don't think it does currently. It would be sort of interesting, but a bit unfair since players with deranged priorities could auto-run their EMP files through thousands of turns just to get a bonus...

PvK

I wouldn't call myself deranged, but I made a mod to get to god-like age for the Vorlon empire file I used in several PBW games. You get ship tonnage / 10 experience for each ship you build. Make a 50,000 kT ship size, and you can get any experience level you want with only 100 or so turns.

[geoschmo]

According to the history.txt file experience gained for destroying fighters is at a lower rate than that for ships. Perhaps ssekers are included in that. If so it could make it very difficult to figure out how much experience is gained from X number of ships being destroyed.

Geoschmo

[Krsqk]

"I don't think shooting down seekers gives very much experience, if any."
I set a fleet up to run out of supplies shortly into a battle against a bunch of missile boats. Main weapons wouldn't fire, but PDC did. They started with 0% exp, and the fleet had 50% legendary when the battle ended. No ship had more than 10% exp, though.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by Krsqk:

It took 41 ships killed to get fleet experience up to 1%.

It took 40 of the same cruisers to get to fleet experience 1% (ship experience 40%).

It took 47 of the same cruisers to get to fleet experience 1% (ship experience ranged from 0% to 4%).

A battle between the 19 fleet (reconstituted with 0% fleet experience) and a group of 80 cruisers generated 2% fleet experience (combat turns extended to 999).

In other words, the answer is that fleet experience does not rely on tonnage, damage, fleet count, ship experience, or any other rational explanation. Rather, it is a random function triggered by unexplained cosmic phenomena.

To my eyes, it looks like the ratio is about 40 cruisers per point of fleet experience, regardless of fleet size. There's obviously some variability, perhaps based on number of battles required (rounding errors per battle?). All of which explains a lot.

It's also possible, (based on someone else's post about gaining 50 points of fleet experience for killing only seekers) that it's N kills per point, N (maybe) being different for each type of kill (seeker, fighter, satellite, drone, ship, base). I have no idea if glassing planets or destroying weapon platforms grants experience to either fleets or ships.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
"I don't think shooting down seekers gives very much experience, if any."
I set a fleet up to run out of supplies shortly into a battle against a bunch of missile boats. Main weapons wouldn't fire, but PDC did. They started with 0% exp, and the fleet had 50% legendary when the battle ended. No ship had more than 10% exp, though.

Which Version of the game was this? Sounds like a potential cheat of annoying importance.

PvK

[Krsqk]

It was Gold v1.78. I modded combat turns to run to 255; this was on full tech start (for ease of testing). IIRC, it was something like 20 mostly-PDC LCs against ~35-40 missile CRs.