Or, heck, I'll just crosspost it myself:
1. On increasing the divisors, this is something that I could see doing... but it makes me nervous. The reason is that I'm concerned that a lot of smaller ships might round down to essentially nothing. It may be that we need to have exp penalty multipliers for certain types of ships, as an alternative, or cap the EXP from any given ship at some amount.
But, paired with that, increasing the thresholds for when you level up could also be in the cards. I'd like to make sure that the divisors aren't so high that all the small ships round down to 1 or close, so that there's some differentiation in what you get from them. And the really large ships probably shouldn't be giving as much as they do, and then it should just flat out take more EXP to gain or something.
I didn't do any real case studies with this, and the EXP generation code I wrote months ago, so I don't remember how much I took into account on there. But that was the reasoning behind it.
2. In terms of splitting the EXP between flagships on a planet, I'm also not sure if I'm thrilled about that or not. I could go either way, but here's my reasoning.
At the moment, whichever fleet's ship kills the target gets the EXP, whether its flagship is on the planet or not. This is something I did on purpose, to hopefully reward players using effective ships against targets. The more successful a fleet is, the more likely it is to be the thing that absorbs the EXP from the target. So one easy way to eyeball which of your fleets is doing the best job is to look at which ones are getting more EXP, if you are fleetballing.
THAT said, for non-combat fleets, like the engineering-focused ones or the economic command station... how are they really supposed to get substantial EXP, ever, in that model? So maybe the other fleets that are present on the planet should get some portion of it, but the majority goes to the ship's fleet that does the kill?
So if there are 6 fleets on a planet, and fleet 2 does the kill, then take the resulting EXP and give half of that to fleet 2, and divide the other half evenly among the other 5 fleets? Thinking forward, maybe make that cross-player, so if we're in multiplayer and fleetballing that way, it's divided out to other players also.
3. Beyond that, if having a bunch of fleets all on one planet is generating equal EXP, even if it is divided out in whatever fashion, then the best strategy is still to fleetball. I feel like we maybe just stumbled upon a really good case of where we can start putting in severe penalties for EXP gained when there are more than x fleets. Basically something like for every fleet beyond the second one, it's multiplied by 90%, or something even more harsh. If you have 10 fleets on there, we have it set up so that it's such a harsh multiplier that you're getting like 10% of the gains, spread among all of those 10 fleets as described in #2, and so it's clearly sapping your ability to level up.
This in fact argues for the divisor to stay high enough that even small ships are ideally giving maybe 20 EXP, and bigger ships are giving something that is still substantial but not SO out of bounds. In FACT... I'm kind of thinking that maybe the amount of EXP granted should be something that we define explicitly rather than calculating.
4. On the subject of crippled flagships... bear in mind it's the fleet itself that is gaining the EXP, not the flagship itself. So being crippled (or outright missing) isn't normally disqualifying of gaining EXP. Missing in the sense of a planetary fleet whose command station is missing but the turrets still kicked butt after that.
BUT, maybe we should make it so that whatever portion would go to a fleet with a missing or crippled centerpiece still gets allocated to that fleet, but then doesn't actually get granted. Or... maybe it doesn't get allocated to it unless its the killing fleet? Otherwise it gets ignored for "fleets on this planet?" But that actually could be abused, so I'd rather be more harsh.
-----------------------------------------------------------
5. Okay, so, having typed all this out, here's what I'm thinking maybe to do:
a. I'll make it so that all the EXP values for ships are defined manually in xml, and we can just set them to the sorts of values we want.
b. Based on those numbers that then arrive, maybe someone doesn't mind running some basic projections (or tests) to see where we should put the level-up gates (as per my notes on the feel I'm looking for in the release notes, which we're not hitting). Those xml values just get increased, then.
c. All human fleets on a planet, crippled or no, are allocated EXP starting from now on. The killing fleet, if we know which one it is, gets 50%. The rest get the other 50% divided among them.
d. The total EXP that is going to be divided out gets hit with a multiplier that we'll just hardcode for the number of fleets, and above something like 10 it's just 1% or something. And since we're making these numbers by hand, I'm okay with these rounding down to zero sometimes. "No soup for you! Too many fleets!"
e. On the fleet tooltip, it can say what sort of penalty there is from having too many fleets concentrated there. So it's something that advanced or intermediate players will see, quickly, but it's not something that everyone will be having shoved in their face constantly like we used to do with the "ark on an enemy planet and causing something bad" type warnings.
f. When fleets with crippled or missing centerpieces are supposed to be given EXP for whatever reason, it just throws it away instead.
And... I think that's it? I can take care of all of that, although I'd love it if Puffin and/or others can work on item b. But before I go making a bunch of changes, I wanted to run this by you both.
