Then a little while later I wrote an article on balancing your experience. I listed how you could analyze your skills and their relationship to key attributes and determine if it were best to raise the skills directly or the attributes. Then of course SplitPea v4 comes out with a neat little 'Calculate Stat Goals' button which does exactly that: you put in your stat goals and it tells you how much of it you should get through raising your attributes.

Sheesh. What can I write about so to keep SplitPea v5 from stealing my thunder? Power-leveling the Vagabond? Broken Cooking?

EXPERIENCE TRENDS
* * * * * * * * *
Actually SplitPea v4 has a very nifty little set of text files included with the install. The text files that drive the experience calculations for the character management system. These five files (level, primary, secondary, trained, and specialized) are
finally a good jumping off point for some research I have been longing to do.

I originally bought the strat guide because it had these charts in it. Bogus. They are plain wrong. Its easy to see that. They did not match what I was getting and its not surprising because the thing was published way beta. I later pulled down some lists from CoD back in the day. They were incomplete and fell way short of what I wanted to see. I wanted numbers for +100, +150, +200. I wanted to test some theories. I even tried making my own lists, noting the experience cost of the first 75 points of a trained skill as I raised Item right after learning it at L26 with the 250,000XP I was saving. Hehe, that seemed like so much at the time. Now I get 250,000 for logging on after Rach's been hunting Umbris.

One of the things I did with these early numbers was to plot curves. I was always concerned that my curves did not look like anything. They had a weird flat part in the middle that always made me question whether the data were accurate.

Well now that we finally have experience charts that look to be very accurate, its time to take a look at some pictures. Eventually I'll make the graphs look pretty and post them, but for now let me report what I find to be a surprising result.

The experience curve is not even. The curve has been tweaked to make it easier between +20 and +60, especially between +30 and +50. After that it slowly gets harder until about +120 where it seems to level off.

[NOTE: When I say plus-twenty, I mean that an attribute is raised twenty points above its starting value or that a secondary attribute or skill has been raised twenty points above its computed base. Thus a Coordination of 100 having started at 80 is +20. And a Bow skill of 120 with a Coordination of 100 is +70 (Bow = Coord/2).]

Here is a chart showing the cost in XP to raise a specialized skill 10 points and that amount as a percentage of the cost to raise the previous 10 points.

Cost to raise specialized skill ten points
Span XP % of previous 10
10 to 20 1,778 -
20 to 30 3,234 182%
30 to 40 5,432 168%
40 to 50 9,217 170%
50 to 60 16,388 178%
60 to 70 30,784 188%
70 to 80 60,597 197%
80 to 90 123,315 204%
90 to 100 256,255 208%
100 to 110 539,052 210%
110 to 120 1,141,657 212%
120 to 130 2,426,768 213%
130 to 140 5,168,398 213%
140 to 150 11,018,381 213%
150 to 160 23,501,860 213%

This is stunning to me. I would have guessed that it was a lot more even than this. Trained skills are no different.

Cost to raise trained skill ten points
Span XP % of previous 10
10 to 20 4,444
20 to 30 8,084 182%
30 to 40 13,580 168%
40 to 50 23,044 170%
50 to 60 40,970 178%
60 to 70 76,958 188%
70 to 80 151,494 197%
80 to 90 308,288 203%
90 to 100 640,637 208%
100 to 110 1,347,629 210%
110 to 120 2,854,144 212%
120 to 130 6,066,918 213%
130 to 140 12,920,997 213%
140 to 150 27,545,951 213%
150 to 160 58,754,651 213%

I could show you the primary and secondary, but the trends are no different. The numbers are slightly different and its an interesting exercise, but not necessary to get the full picture.

To see it differently in a way that is easier to relate to, take the amount of XP required to raise a stat one point. This chart shows

Cost to raise trained skill after having raised it this many points From XP % from of previous cost
10 310
20 625 202%
30 1,097 176%
40 1,796 164%
50 3,091 172%
60 5,651 183%
70 10,888 193%
80 21,837 201%
90 44,977 206%
100 94,131 209%
110 198,804 211%
120 421,961 212%
130 897,969 213%
140 1,913,586 213%
150 4,080,777 213%
160 8,705,533 213%
170 18,574,951 213%
180 39,636,950 213%
190 84,584,929 213%
200 180,507,736 213%

What you can see here is that where you would expect the cost of raising your trained skill to +41 would be more than 2K XP, it is in fact less than 1800. As I said above, this same fact holds true for all four skill areas: primary, secondary, specialized, and trained.

Now the reasons for this become evident when you look at what would have happened if they had simply locked it in at 213%, look at what you would get.

Trained Actual Curve Theoretical Curve (213%)
10 310 310
20 625 202% 660 213%
30 1,097 176% 1,406 213%
40 1,796 164% 2,996 213%
50 3,091 172% 6,381 213%
60 5,651 183% 13,591 213%
70 10,888 193% 28,949 213%
80 21,837 201% 61,662 213%
90 44,977 206% 131,340 213%
100 94,131 209% 279,755 213%
110 198,804 211% 595,879 213%
120 421,961 212% 1,269,221 213%
130 897,969 213% 2,703,441 213%
140 1,913,586 213% 5,758,330 213%
150 4,080,777 213% 12,265,243 213%
160 8,705,533 213% 26,124,967 213%
170 18,574,951 213% 55,646,179 213%
180 39,636,950 213% 118,526,361 213%
190 84,584,929 213% 252,461,150 213%
200 180,507,736 213% 537,742,249 213%

That is just ridiculous. If we think its hard to raise stats, just be glad we don't have this model in place. And also, just for fun, here is what it would be if instead a more reasonable straight x2 curve were plotted.

Trained Actual Curve Theoretical Curve #2 (x2)
10 310 310
20 625 202% 620 200%
30 1,097 176% 1,240 200%
40 1,796 164% 2,480 200%
50 3,091 172% 4,960 200%
60 5,651 183% 9,920 200%
70 10,888 193% 19,840 200%
80 21,837 201% 39,680 200%
90 44,977 206% 79,360 200%
100 94,131 209% 158,720 200%
110 198,804 211% 317,440 200%
120 421,961 212% 634,880 200%
130 897,969 213% 1,269,760 200%
140 1,913,586 213% 2,539,520 200%
150 4,080,777 213% 5,079,040 200%
160 8,705,533 213% 10,158,080 200%
170 18,574,951 213% 20,316,160 200%
180 39,636,950 213% 40,632,320 200%
190 84,584,929 213% 81,264,640 200%
200 180,507,736 213% 162,529,280 200%

Now this would have some merit, but clearly Turbine decided they wanted to encourage newbies and make it a little bit harder for veterans. Thus they tweaked the curve to give us what we have today.

One other thing that I absolutely must mention is the relationship between primary and secondary XP requirements, a fact that I pointed out in my "balance your XP" article previously mentioned. Now that I see the numbers, I cannot state strongly enough the following theorem:

-----------------------------------------
Khali's First Theorem of Character Development:
-----------------------------------------
Raise Health and Stamina in the same proportion as Endurance.

Doing so will always keep you balanced. I discovered this by always trying to raise either Endurance or Health/Stam depending on which would give better results. I found through experience that balance always required put one point in each. Now by looking at all the XP costs, I can see it is no coincidence. The way to "balance" your Endurance would be to raise it until it costs more than (Health/2 + Stamina),
which, if Health and Stamina are raised the same amount, would reduce to <cost to raise primary> = <cost to raise secondary>*3/2. A quick analysis of the Primary and Secondary XP costs shows that cost of raising Primary attributes is almost exactly 150% of Secondary attributes. So never again worry about how to balance your Endurance/Health/Stamina. Just raise them all evenly.

CONCLUSIONS
* * * * * *
What can we conclude from these numbers? Is any of this relevant? I think so. I think it offers some real justification to why it feels like characters run out of gas in the upper twenties, why they don't seem to get more powerful as quickly. In part it has to do with the creatures you can fight, but in part it is because your XP doesn't go as far. The XP curve has been tweaked to make it much easier to raise a stat
from +20 to +60.

Basically, sometime in the late teens or early twenties, your major stats will start to creep up to levels where its starting to cost you more and more each point. By the upper twenties and low thirties you've probably raised everything you care about out of this "tweaked" range and so basically everything becomes expensive. But then at that point, at least from a attributes/stats point of view, things stabilize and don't continue to get harder and I think that also agrees with our experience.

Finally, take a look at your Endurance/Health/Stamina. Figure out what your starting End was (if you don't know, use SplitPea) and see how much you've raised all three. I'd be very interested in hearing from people out there who are currently imbalanced (say Endurance is +80, Health +60, and Stam +40) and who are happy with their setup.

-Chris (Khali), part time numbers geek